The rise and fall of Sweden’s nuclear disarmament advocacy

In the 2020s,…. it is Sweden and Finland that have arguably become the biggest advocates of US nuclear weapons.

By Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom | December 29, 2024,  https://thebulletin.org/2024/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-swedens-nuclear-disarmament-advocacy/

In the nine months since joining NATO, Sweden has not wasted any time integrating itself tightly into the transatlantic alliance. On September 16, Sweden doubled down on its commitment to a nuclear weapons-based military alliance when Sweden and Finland agreed that Sweden would lead a new NATO defense base to be established in northern Finland.

While Denmark and Norway currently do not want to host nuclear weapons on their own soil, NATO’s new entrants have both signaled an openness to doing so. In June, the Swedish parliament ratified a Defense Cooperation Agreement granting the United States access to 17 Swedish military bases, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson did not rule out hosting nuclear weapons during wartime. Meanwhile, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb has advocated for a legislative change to allow the transportation of nuclear weapons.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, it is clear that this was not an inevitable outcome. Sweden was once a nuclear aspirant with an advanced weapons program, but just a few decades ago, Stockholm and Helsinki sought to keep nuclear weapons out of northern Europe. In the depths of the Cold War, Stockholm proved willing and capable of advancing ambitious, albeit inconsistent, goals when it came to nuclear weapons in Europe. Sweden’s history suggests that disarmament ideas—such as a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone—were never completely written off, even if they are difficult to imagine in Europe today.

Pursuing Nordic disarmament. Calls for the establishment of a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ) did not originate in Sweden but rather in neighboring Finland. Though Swedish Foreign Minister Östen Undén had, in 1961, already proposed the idea in a general manner, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen formally proposed it in 1963.

Earlier that year, Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito had expressed his support for a Balkan NWFZ, which Kekkonen saw as strengthening the case for a Nordic zone. In an address on May 28, 1963, Kekkonen argued that the Nordic countries already constituted a de facto NWFZ, with no country officially pursuing or possessing any nuclear weapons.

While the Swedish government was officially supportive of nuclear disarmament and the creation of a Nordic zone, it was suspicious of Kekkonen’s proposal. Though Finns were more eager to join NATO than Swedes in 2022, during the Cold War Finland was in a delicate position and more likely to consider Moscow’s views than its Scandinavian neighbors were, due to its proximity to the Soviet Union. Initially, Sweden saw Kekkonen’s effort as a Soviet initiative, much to the surprise of Finnish civil servants. Swedish suspicions were not wholly unfounded; a year earlier, the Soviet ambassador to Finland visited the Finnish president’s residence and recommended such an undertaking. Though Sweden was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, its leadership wished to preserve the freedom to acquire them later.

By the late 1970s, Swedish disarmament efforts became more wide-ranging. In November 1978, Swedish Foreign Minister (and future UN weapons inspector as well as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency) Hans Blix aimed to widen the scope of the proposed NWFZ by including the Baltic Sea. In January 1983, the Swedish government even went so far as to propose that the zone also include the border between the Western and socialist states, extending 150 kilometers on each side of the border.

While the suggestion of incorporating the Baltic Sea was rejected at the time, the Soviets accepted the idea of a buffer zone and even suggested that it be wider, in the range of 250 to 300 kilometers on each side. In the United States, however, the idea went nowhere. Joseph Nye, who served as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology from 1977 to 1979, later noted that there wasn’t much discussion of a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone. Fast forward a few decades, and the proposal is now beyond dead.

While Sweden had been supportive of a NWFZ in general, its support was inconsistent, especially in the 1980s. . For example, in June 1983, Prime Minister Olof Palme told the North Atlantic Assembly that adjacent areas (such as the Baltic Sea) should be included, but by December of that year, in a speech in Finland, Palme failed to mention that as a requirement. Similarly, in November 1983, Swedish Foreign Minister Lennart Bodström said that a zone could be created through a joint declaration by four Nordic countries accompanied by a pledge from outside powers not to use nuclear weapons against the Nordic states, only to revise this in December by requiring the denuclearization of the Baltic region as well. Support for a NWFZ was partially informed by extra-Nordic conduct, such as the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom and West Germany in 1983.

The Soviet perspective. Though Swedish military concerns during the Cold War, such as the initial call for nuclear weapons, were primarily shaped by the potential threat from the East, advocacy for nuclear disarmament contributed to what can be described as a generally friendly relationship between Stockholm and Moscow, especially when compared with contemporary East-West ties.

The prospect for nuclear disarmament in Sweden’s adjacent areas improved throughout the 1980s, with the United States and the Soviet Union negotiating and ultimately signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Whereas Moscow had previously rejected the proposal for the creation of a Baltic Sea NWFZ, it reversed itself by 1990. Early that year, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze sent a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Sten Andersson, calling for the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free Baltic Sea. In his letter Shevardnadze expressed his belief that “an agreement on this issue would be able to be worked out at a conference between diplomatic and military experts from the aforementioned states.”

The failure to establish such a NWFZ in the Baltic Sea region was likely outside Sweden’s control. According to Thomas Graham Jr., a senior diplomat who was part of the American delegation in every major nonproliferation and international arms control negotiation between 1970 and 1997, “America never thought it was very likely such a [Nordic Nuclear Weapon-Free] Zone would be negotiated,” which would have been a practical precondition before the establishment of a Baltic Sea NWFZ. Graham identified Norway as a hindrance, arguing that “[t]hough Norway is nuclear weapon-free it would not go against NATO on this.”

In the 2020s, however, it is Sweden and Finland that have arguably become the biggest advocates of US nuclear weapons.

Swedish marginalization. The middle of the Cold War was arguably the period during which Sweden had its most prominent role in advancing international nuclear arms control. However, by the 1980s the country was increasingly marginalized when it came to the reduction of global nuclear stockpiles. This was not a product of Sweden’s own doing but was due to the emergence of increasingly successful US-Soviet negotiations and treaties. The bilateral nature of the relationship between the two superpowers had the unintended effect of minimizing any potential influence that the Swedes could have.

According to Graham, “in the SALT/START negotiations on strategic arms between the United States and the Soviet Union, Sweden was simply not relevant.” The cause for this was the very factor that sparked Sweden’s interest in nuclear disarmament in the first place, namely its neutrality. “It was not a party to the negotiations nor an ally of one of the negotiating parties.”

This marginalization stands in contrast to international conferences within the framework of the United Nations, where American diplomats viewed Sweden as a disarmament activist state. Therefore, it is not surprising that Swedish officials made common cause with the Non-Aligned Movement of developing countries that existed outside the US-Soviet rivalry, despite not being a formal member of the organization. Swedish relevance depended on its ability to exert influence over other non-nuclear states, even after the Cold War ended.

The multilateral nature of the UN Conference of the Committee on Disarmament enhanced Swedish relevance. One way Sweden exerted its influence was by advocating for procedural reforms to improve the Conference’s effectiveness. Calls for the abolition of the co-chairmanship governing the Conference effectively aligned Sweden with countries such as Yugoslavia, Mexico, and Romania. Lennart Eckerberg, who led Sweden’s disarmament delegation in Geneva, remarked that “[t]he Swedish delegation, for one, favors several such [procedural] changes” and that this “is, of course, not primarily a procedural question but a political one.”

Swedish marginalization was not exclusively a result of the Soviet-American talks but also of the two Cold War camps. This was true of NATO more so than the Warsaw Pact, with the latter tending to be more supportive of Swedish disarmament efforts. Just a few months before the signing of SALT I, Eckerberg expressed his lack of hope that NATO members would push for a nuclear test ban ahead of a scheduled visit by the Swedish foreign minister to Moscow. In contrast to Western states, Eastern bloc states tended to sympathize with the Swedish position.

Fluctuating influence. Due to its small size, Sweden struggled to stay relevant. It did not have the diplomatic assets or clout that larger countries, especially the two superpowers, possessed. In a report to the foreign ministry, Swedish diplomat Gustaf Hamilton noted in a 1976 report while serving in Geneva as part of the delegation to the Conference on Disarmament: “A weakness in Sweden’s conduct is that we do not have sufficient personnel resources to produce working papers and proposals and don’t always have time in advance to ensure support for us among interested delegations. We lack, in other words, the capacity to plan long-term due to the personnel situation.”

This concern was ever-present throughout the Cold War, with Swedish officials forced to balance resources in a manner that optimized both Swedish contribution and overall effectiveness. This explains, in part, why there was a consistent preference for multilateral approaches, as opposed to lobbying individual countries in purely bilateral ways. It also explains Sweden’s focus on approaches such as the development of seismological counterproliferation technology.

As a frontier state between East and West, Sweden was able to use its geopolitical relevance to promote not only disarmament but also a broader program of tension reduction. But with Sweden now formally a member of NATO, the political will to play a role similar to the one Sweden played in the Cold War is largely absent and hard to muster in the absence of formal neutrality. Nevertheless, the country’s history suggests that ideas like nuclear weapon-free zones, which today are impossible to imagine in Europe, were once salient.

December 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment

AI bigwigs want to go all-in on nuclear. They also happen to be behind nuclear companies

By Clare Duffy, CNN, December 24, 2024 

Sam Altman is the chairman of a company that promises a brighter future for humankind.

No, it’s not OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company he co-founded and now runs as CEO.

It’s a company called Oklo, and it’s developing the kind of nuclear power technology that many tech leaders — including Altman himself — say they will need to fuel future artificial intelligence advancements.

The proliferation of electricity-hungry data centers to power our digital lives – and increasingly, the AI technology that tech giants say is the future – now means that energy demand could soon outstrip supply. And that would be a problem for tech companies who are angling for their AI technology to revolutionize almost everything about the way we live and work.

But while tech leaders have pointed to nuclear energy as essential to a climate friendly future, some industry experts wonder how much their investments will truly benefit the wider public, rather than just protecting their own businesses’ ability to operate.

“I think the tech companies are looking out for their own interests, and whether those nuclear vendors are able to sell additional nuclear power plants for the public is another question,” said Sharon Squassoni, a research professor at George Washington University who’s studied nuclear energy and policy.

t’s clear that more energy will need to come from somewhere. Electricity demand from US data centers has grown 50% since 2020 and now accounts for 4% of the country’s energy consumption; that figure could grow to 9% by 2030, UBS analysts said in a research note earlier this month. And overall power demand in the United States is expected to grow 13% to 15% a year until 2030, potentially turning electricity “into a much scarcer resource,” according to JPMorgan analysts.

The electricity needs of data centers have also threatened to upend tech giants’ sustainability promises.

Tech giants have pointed to the benefit of nuclear energy’s reliability versus other renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind. Microsoft in September secured a deal to reopen a reactor on Three Mile Island, the site of a 1979 partial meltdown in Pennsylvania, aiming to revive a different reactor by 2028 to power its AI ambitions. Amazon and Meta have also begun working to lock in deals to secure future nuclear power for their data centers.

“Data centers operate 24/7 and they need a stable supply of electricity. They can’t shut down because the wind is not blowing or the sun is down,” said Anna Erickson, a professor at Georgia Tech who studies nuclear engineering.

Oklo isn’t Altman’s only nuclear energy investment. The OpenAI CEO has also invested in Helion Energy, a nuclear startup that’s using a different kind of technology from Oklo. Facebook co-founder and now Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril, have also invested in Helion Energy.

And Altman isn’t the only tech leader trying to cash in on the push toward nuclear.

Separately, TerraPower, which is backed and chaired by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is in the early phases of building a new nuclear reactor in Wyoming. Google joined a $250 million funding round for nuclear startup TAE Technologies in 2022, and Amazon anchored a $500 million financing round for nuclear startup X-energy in October. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also invested in Canadian nuclear startup General Fusion.

As of August, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril, owned 5.3% of Oklo’s shares, and the billionaire tech investor has reportedly backed other nuclear startups. Tech investor Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest also invested in Oklo earlier this year. (President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Chris Wright, chief executive of the fracking company Liberty Energy, also serves on Oklo’s board.)

The push for nuclear

Already, lawmakers are lining up to support expanding nuclear power. President Joe Biden in July signed into law the Advance Act, a bill designed to make it easier, cheaper and faster to permit and build new nuclear reactors that received bipartisan support. And during this year’s COP28 climate talks, the United States joined more than 20 other countries in pledging to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

Some experts see the tech industry’s investment as crucial for pushing forward an expensive but clean energy source that could help combat climate change.

“Let’s face it, these guys who are doing AI right now, they’re the ones with the money, right?” Erickson said.

Megan Wilson, chief strategy officer at General Fusion, told CNN that “as we look at the interest by tech companies… in nuclear power, what we’re seeing is really a symptom of the broad recognition that we need clean, baseload power that is free of both carbon dioxide and methane emissions, that’s reliable and affordable.”

Although General Fusion is still in the process of proving its technology works, Wilson added that fusion is expected to be an even safer option than fission, because it is combining atoms rather than separating them, and therefore is “very hard to start and very easy to stop.”

In the future, the company expects its power plants “will have a radiation profile very similar to that of a hospital that uses medical isotopes or has a cancer treatment ward,” Wilson said.

But some experts have raised concerns about heavy investments in nuclear by the leaders of an industry known for pushing back against regulations that could slow it down, even when it is intended to improve safety.

“The problem here is that you have these Silicon Valley giants who have the clout, who have the power, to get a lot of what they want … and the industry’s attitude, first and foremost, is fight any regulation that would interfere with their plans,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“I am very concerned that the safety and security rules that are really essential for protecting the public could take a real beating,” Lyman said.

Oklo and TerraPower did not respond to requests for comment………………………………………………………….. more https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/24/tech/nuclear-energy-ai-leaders/index.html

December 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment

Syria Today, Iran Tomorrow, and Inevitably China

New Eastern Outlook, Brian Berletic, December 19, 2024,  https://journal-neo.su/2024/12/19/syria-today-iran-tomorrow-and-inevitably-china/ 

The collapse of the Syrian government in mid-December 2024 represents a pivotal moment for U.S. geopolitical strategies in the Middle East and beyond.

This event aligns with longstanding objectives, including the subsequently planned disarming, division, and destruction of Iran and the toppling of the Iranian government, the possible eviction of Russian military bases in Syria, and the use of US-sponsored terrorist organizations utilized in overrunning Syria to export terrorism to other targeted nations both in the region and far abroad including both Russia and China.

Syria’s Collapse Was Long Sought After 

The US has repeatedly attempted to undermine and overthrow the government of Syria since at least as early as the 1980s. This most recent attempt began preparations as early as 2007 as revealed in a New Yorker article published that year titled, “The Redirection.”
Written by legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, the article admitted:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al-Qaeda*.

Also that year, the US State Department had already been training, equipping, and funding opposition groups to return to their nations across the Arab World and overthrow their respective governments as part of what would later be referred to as the “Arab Spring,” the New York Times would reveal in a 2011 article titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.”

Following the initial protests of the 2011 “Arab Spring,” US-sponsored regime change quickly and deliberately turned violent before transforming into a multitude of armed conflicts – some of which involved overt US military intervention, including in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

By 2012, a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report about US-sponsored regime change in Syria specifically, published by Judicial Watch, admitted that the so-called “Syrian” opposition consisted of Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qaeda*. The report admitted that, “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” and that “if the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality,” and that “this is exactly what the supporting power of the opposition [the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey] want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” 

It is very clear that the “Salafist principality” referred to the so-called “Islamic State.” While the West posed as intervening in Syria to eliminate the “Islamic State,” it was actually supporting and using it precisely to “isolate the Syrian regime,” just as the US DIA report noted.

Through a combination of sanctions, US-Israeli military strikes, US and Turkish military occupation including of Syria’s oil and wheat fields, Syria was slowly hollowed out and, as of December 2024, with Russia and Iran overextended elsewhere, finally toppled.

Next Target: Iran 

Most obviously, just as with the US-engineered overthrow of Libya in 2011, Syria will persist as a failed and divided state the US and its regional proxies used to export terrorism across the region toward what remains of Iran’s asymmetrical military power including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iranian-backed militias across Iraq.

Syria can now also be used as a staging ground for attacks on Iran itself, including via the use of Syria’s now unprotected airspace.

One crucial obstacle eliminated with the collapse of Syria’s government was the destruction of its military hardware, including a formidable integrated air defense network. Even as US-Turkish-backed terrorists advanced on Damascus, US-armed Israeli warplanes carried out 100s of airstrikes across the country, both eliminating the abandoned air defense systems themselves and a long list of targets those air defenses had long prevented Israel from striking.

The Times of Israel itself, in an article titled, “IDF sees chance for strikes on Iran nuke sites after knocking out Syria air defenses,” connected Israel’s targeting and destruction of Syrian air defenses with plans to then carry out direct strikes on Iran.

………………………………….now the Israeli air force “can operate freely across the country’s skies,” and will likely do so both as part of shaping chaos inside Syria itself as well as amid future strikes on Iran.

Far from simply exploiting recent, unexpected developments, the elimination of Syria as an ally of Iran was a long-standing prerequisite required and planned for before moving on to toppling Iran itself.

Such plans were published by US government and arms industry-funded Brookings Institution in its 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran,” noting specifically:

Israel may be more willing to bear the risks of Iranian retaliation and international opprobrium than the United States is, but it is not invulnerable and may request certain commitments from the United States before it is ready to strike. For instance, the Israelis may want to hold off until they have a peace deal with Syria in hand (assuming that Jerusalem believes that one is within reach), which would help them mitigate blowback from Hizballah and potentially Hamas. Consequently, they might want Washington to push hard in mediating between Jerusalem and Damascus.

Obviously, Israel’s recent war on Hezbollah and US-sponsored regime change in Syria has fulfilled this prerequisite – regime change achieved in Syria using many of the other methods listed in the 2009 Brookings paper focused on Iran including “supporting a popular uprising,” supporting [armed] minority and opposition groups,“airstrikes,” and “invasion.”  In fact, such methods are used over and over again against all nations targeted by the US for coercion and eventually regime change.

US-Sponsored Terrorism Targets China and “Chinese Projects/Embassies”

In addition to targeting Iranian-backed militias, Iranian-friendly governments, and Iran itself, the US has utilized terrorist organizations now in Syria against other adversaries abroad, including China. Many signs now indicate the US could redirect these terrorist organizations back toward China once again.

This includes the so-called, “Turkestan Islamic Party” (TIP) also known as the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM).

What is particularly troubling about TIP/ETIM is the fact that the US disingenuously removed it from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list in 2020 specifically to provide it with wider and more overt support. DW in its article titled, “US removes China-condemned group from terror list,” would claim TIP/ETIM was removed as a terrorist organization by the US government, “because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist.” 

This is demonstrably untrue considering the US Department of Defense admitted to having carried out airstrikes against the group in Afghanistan only 2 years prior to its delisting, NBC News would report.

Now, the organization the US government claimed no longer exists, is in Syria and reported comprising an entire military unit alongside Hayat Tahrir al-Sham* (HTS), aiding in the recent overthrow of the Syrian government. HTS* is listed by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, while TIP/ETIM is listed as a terrorist organization by the UN and even Washington’s close ally, the UK.

The London Telegraph in a December 13, 2024 article titled, “Uyghur fighters in Syria vow to come for China next,” claims “a Uyghur militant group that helped to topple Bashar-al Assad has vowed to take the fight to China.” 

A US-backed terrorist organization fresh from overthrowing a US-targeted nation in the Middle East now vows to target China next. The ability to do so is only possible with continued US government backing including training, weapons, and logistics via regional proxies including Türkiye, who prepared and incorporated the militants in the invasion force that toppled Syria’s government.

Short of fighting in China itself, the Telegraph in an accompanying video would note, “can TIP take the fight to China, home to the world’s largest military with 2 million active troops? It’s easier said than done. Still, TIP could target Chinese projects or embassies abroad.” 

The US already backs violent terrorism attacking Chinese projects and embassies abroad, including in Baluchistan, Pakistan and Myanmar. An army of well-trained, well-armed experienced terrorists fresh from the battlefield in Syria are poised to significantly escalate what is already a US war on China by proxy along the length of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and ultimately aimed at China itself.

It should be noted that TIP/ETIM and affiliated extremists carried out years of deadly terrorism within China’s western region of Xinjiang. The BBC in a 2014 article titled, “Why is there tension between China and the Uighurs?,” proudly listed the rampant violence Beijing at the time struggled to contain. When Chinese anti-terrorism efforts finally began to work, the BBC along with the rest of the Western media omitted any mention of separatist violence and depicted Chinese efforts to uproot extremism as “human rights abuses,” “coerced labor,” and even “genocide.”

No evidence exists of any systemic abuses, including either “coerced labor” or “genocide.” Even US government-funded organizations tasked with producing reports claiming to document such abuses bury admissions of a lack of evidence in the reports themselves.

One 2020 report titled, “Coercive Labor in Xinjiang: Labor Transfer and the Mobilization of Ethnic Minorities to Pick Cotton,” written by Adrian Zenz, a member of the US government-funded “Victims of Communism Memorial Fund,” admitted in its conclusion that, “in a system where the transition between securitization and poverty alleviation is seamless, and where the threat of extralegal internment looms large, it is impossible to define where coercion ends and where local consent may begin.” 

Far from an exception, virtually all reports on the subject stem from either Adrian Zenz himself or reports published by US government-funded organizations including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) or US NED-funded fronts like the World Uyghur Congress, Uyghur Human Rights Project, Campaign for Uyghurs, and the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database Project.

While these organizations pose as “human rights” advocates, their websites overtly refer to China’s Xinjiang region as “East Turkestan*” (sometimes spelled East Turkistan), claiming it is “occupied” by China, and openly seek separatism from China as one of their central objectives – objectives underwritten by generous funding by the US government.

In other words, the US is backing deadly violence, political movements promoting separatism, and fronts attempting to depict the Chinese government’s reaction to all of the above as “human rights abuses,” which in turn is used to justify otherwise indefensible sanctions applied to Chinese companies attempting to do business anywhere the collective West exerts influence.

Defending Against Washington’s Superweapon 

While many are tempted to treat conflicts around the globe in isolation, the truth is the United States is pursuing a long-standing global policy of eliminating all rivals through persuasion, coercion, sanctions, US-sponsored sedition, terrorism, and military confrontation – by proxy and directly.

The fall of Syria and other nations like it contribute toward a more dangerous world where larger and more stable nations may be targeted, undermined, and toppled next.

The chaos that has followed US regime change in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Ukraine, and now Syria this 21st century is just a small fraction of the instability, death, destruction, and destitution the entire globe faces should Washington continue prevailing in its geopolitical pursuits.

Among the most effective and so far unanswered weapons the United States government wields is its dominion over global information space and its global-spanning network of political interference and capture, centered around the National Endowment for Democracy and adjacent government and corporate-funded foundations.

Russian and Chinese military and economic power continues to rise, and both nations have successfully protected their respective information spaces. However, the US continues unopposed undermining nations along both Russia and China’s peripheries, successfully politically capturing nations and transforming them into political and even military battering rams against both targeted nations.

While China may have successfully uprooted US-sponsored extremism in Xinjiang, the US continues arming, backing, and promoting these same extremists out of China’s reach in recently decimated Syria. Through Washington’s control over information space outside of China, these terrorists are being presented as “freedom fighters” in much the same way the US has presented HTS despite being listed by the US State Department as actual terrorists.

Russia and China aid partner nations in the defense of their traditional national security domains – air, land, and sea – but have failed to export their own domestic success in securing a 21st century national security domain – information space. Should Russia and China succeed in doing this, Washington will be denied one of its last and most effective weapons used to sustain its global hegemony, making multipolarism inevitable rather than a mere possibility.

*-banned in Russia

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

December 24, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment