A new ‘Cold War’ on a deadly hot planet?
China and the US must cut war-like posturing and face a world in desperate danger
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch/Common Dreams
Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.
But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out at Wikipedia.) Admittedly, unlike John F. Kennedy, Joe Biden has not actually spoken about bearing “the burden of a long, twilight struggle.” Still, the actions of his foreign policy crew — in spirit, like the president, distinctly old Cold Warriors — have helped make the very idea that we’re in a new version of just such a conflict part of everyday media chatter.
And yet, let’s stop and think about just what planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.
These days, despite an all too “hot” war in Ukraine in which the U.S. has, at least indirectly, faced off against the crew that replaced those Soviet cold warriors of yore, the new Cold War references are largely aimed at this country’s increasingly tense, ever more militarized relationship with China. Its focus is both the island of Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia. Worse yet, both countries seem driven to intensify that struggle.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Joe Biden made a symbolic and much-publicized stop in Vietnam (yes, Vietnam!) while returning from the September G20 summit meeting in India. There, he insisted that he didn’t “want to contain China” or halt its rise. He also demanded that it play by “the rules of the game” (and you know just whose rules and game that was). In the process, he functionally publicized his administration’s ongoing attempt to create an anti-China coalition extending from Japan and South Korea (only recently absorbed into a far deeper military relationship with this country), all the way to, yes, India itself.
And (yes, as well!) the Biden administration has upped military aid to Japan, Taiwan (including $85 million previously meant for Egypt), Australia (including a promise to supply it with its own nuclear attack submarines), and beyond. In the process, it’s also been reinforcing the American military position in the Pacific from Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines to — yes again — Australia. Meanwhile, one four-star American general has even quite publicly predicted that a war between the U.S. and China is likely to break out by 2025, while urging his commanders to prepare for “the China fight”! Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has called China the “leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security” and the Biden foreign policy team has been hard at work encircling — the Cold War phrase would have been “containing” — China, both diplomatically and militarily.
On the Chinese side, that country’s military has been similarly ramping up its air and naval activities around and ever closer to the island of Taiwan in an ominous fashion, even as it increases its military presence in places like the South China Sea (as has the U.S.). Oh, and just in case you hadn’t noticed, with a helping hand from Russia, Beijing is also putting more money and effort into expanding its already sizable nuclear arsenal.
Yes, this latest version of a Cold War is (to my mind at least) already a little too hot to handle. And yet, despite that reality, it couldn’t be more inappropriate to use the term “new Cold War” right now on a globe where a previously unimagined version of a hot war is staring us all, including most distinctly the United States and China, in the face.
As a start, keep in mind that the two great powers facing off so ominously against each other have long faced off no less ominously against the planet itself. After all, the United States remains the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, while China is the greatest of the present moment (with the U.S. still in second place and Americans individually responsible for significantly more emissions than their Chinese counterparts). The results have been telling in both countries…………………………………………………………… more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/01/21/a-new-cold-war-on-a-deadly-hot-planet/
Chalk River, or low-level nuclear governance.
Monique Pauzé, The author is a Bloc Québécois MP (Repentigny) and Environment critic., January 18, 2024
A few days ago, after several “rounds of work and consultation” that began in 2016, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) ruled in favor of the Chalk River Near Surface Waste Management Facility (NSWMF) project. Opposition to this open-air radioactive dump is undeniable: a multitude of aboriginal communities, citizen groups, scientists and over a hundred cities and municipalities spread around the Ottawa River, including Ottawa, Montreal and Gatineau.
To contextualize the issues surrounding this project, and to grasp the extent to which the authorization given is highly reprehensible, if not absurd, I believe it is pertinent to address it in the light of a study by the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Environment, specifically on Canada’s governance of radioactive waste. Held in 2022 and concluding with a report submitted to federal elected officials, the study is absolutely relevant today.
To begin with, we remind you that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made suggestions and recommendations to the CNSC in 2019, during the peer review conducted by the Integrated Regulatory Review Service mission. As a result, we had confirmation, despite the government’s expressed pride, that Canada was not beyond reproach in this area, and this justified the attention of federal elected officials.
Many decried it: the essential principle of keeping radioactive waste away from sources of drinking water is not respected, and in many respects the project is at odds with the recommendations and guidelines of the IAEA, as well as with the five principles agreed and adopted by the leaders of 133 First Nations in Ontario.
There is an absence of consideration for the possible hazards associated with the project’s location and underground, hazards that attract less attention than the risks of contamination of watercourses, tributaries of the river, from which potentially millions of people draw their drinking water.
Legitimate opposition
In addition, Chalk River is located at the junction of geological fractures and in the western Quebec earthquake zone, a seismic belt that spans the Ottawa Valley, the Laurentians and parts of eastern Ontario. The volume of various radioactive wastes that will be buried in the open pit is substantial. Witnesses and experts have raised the issue of the lack of clarity in identifying the substances that will be introduced into the mound.
Opposition to the project is absolutely legitimate.
Several witnesses to this study accurately addressed the physical characteristics of Canadian radioactive waste, highlighting the redefinition of what constitutes intermediate-level radioactive waste, hidden in a CNSC “proof regulation” adopted in June 2020. William Turner, retired from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a resident of Deep River, provided the committee with a detailed fact sheet on this issue.
Gilles Provost, a science journalist and witness to the study, wrote in Le Devoir on June 13 of the same year: “[…] we come up against a scientific absurdity: in physics, the activity of a radioactive product is its decay rate. The faster it decays, the higher its activity. This means that a radioactive product with [higher] activity according to physics would now be low-level waste according to the new definition decreed by the CNSC!”
This new definition has concrete effects, since the Chalk River SRWMF is designed to receive only low-level waste. The result? Waste considered to be medium-level by physical science will end up in the mound, since it is now considered to be low-level.
For the Aboriginal communities of Kebaowek and Kitigan Zibi, the process chosen by the CNSC constitutes a failure in its duty to consult properly.
In addition to the disturbing comments made or sent by their representatives during the parliamentary committee study in 2022 about the “coercive” nature of the consultative approach, the aboriginal communities are rightly relying on Article 29.2 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that no decision on nuclear waste storage, small modular reactors, transport or decommissioning can be taken without free, prior and informed consent.
“[…] We could explain it to you, but you wouldn’t understand it anyway. We’ll give you all the information and you won’t understand it.” This excerpt from the testimony of Reg Niganobe, Chief of the Grand Council of the Anishinabe Nation and a witness to the 2022 study, is shocking: when a representative of the sector expresses himself in this way, I think the climate they want to create is incredibly unhealthy and contemptuous. Non-native groups have also been subjected to this type of “approach” in similar processes. Their submissions to the committee study attest to this.
If there is indeed a political will to consider the communities most directly affected by these issues, then they must be given the consideration they deserve.
Reconciliation? Participatory consultations? Transparent processes and compliance with IAEA standards? The CNSC reports to Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, and the mobilization against Chalk River will continue. The federal government had better change its mind… It has the authority to do so.
US urges discussions with China on practical nuclear risk reduction steps
Reuters, January 19, 2024
WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) – The United States does not expect formal nuclear arms-control negotiations with China anytime soon, but does want to see a start of discussions on practical risk-reduction measures, a senior White House official said on Thursday.
Pranay Vaddi, the senior White House official for arms control and non proliferation, told a Washington think tank it had been important to have initial arms-control talks in November with China, but stressed the need for them to involve key Chinese decision makers or influencers on the country’s nuclear posture………………………..
The U.S. and China held their first talks on nuclear arms control in nearly five years on Nov. 6, amid growing U.S. concerns about China’s nuclear build up, but the meeting produced no specific results…………………………………………..
The U.S. and China held two days of military talks in Washington last week, their latest engagement since agreeing to resume military-to-military ties.
In its annual report on the Chinese military in October, the Pentagon said China has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads and will probably have over 1,000 warheads by 2030.
The U.S. has a stockpile of about 3,700 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 1,419 strategic nuclear warheads were deployed.
Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Sandra Maler, https://www.reuters.com/world/us-urges-discussions-with-china-practical-nuclear-risk-reduction-steps-2024-01-18/
United Against Nuclear Iran: The Shadowy, Intelligence-Linked Group Driving the US Towards War With Iran
United Against Nuclear Iran, a secretive neoconservative organization with close links to the CIA and the Mossad, is trying to escalate the Israeli assault on Gaza into an Iraq-level U.S. Attack on Iran.
By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News
Most of the world has watched the Israeli assault on Gaza in horror. As tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced, tens of millions of people around the world have poured onto the streets to demand an end to the violence. But a few select others have taken to the pages of our most influential media to demand an escalation of the violence and that the United States help Israel strike not just Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon but Iran as well.
“I might have once favored a cease-fire with Hamas, but not now,” wrote Bush-era diplomat Dennis Ross in The New York Times, explaining that “if Hamas is perceived as winning, it will validate the group’s ideology of rejection, give leverage and momentum to Iran and its collaborators and put [our] own governments on the defensive.”
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 assault, arch-neoconservative official John Bolton was invited on CNN, where he claimed that what we witnessed was really an “Iranian attack on Israel using Hamas as a surrogate” and that the U.S. must immediately respond. When asked whether he had any evidence, given the implications of what he was saying, he shrugged and replied, “This is not a court of law.”
On December 28, Bolton doubled down on his hawkish stance, writing in the pages of Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran” – a position he has held for at least a decade.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Saudi state-funded broadcaster Iran International, senior Bush official Mark Wallace bellowed that, “This is Iran’s work. Iran will suffer at the hands of retribution and will suffer the consequences of supporting this terror group and its horrific attack on Israel.” Wallace continued:
No civilized country wants further conflict. But the Iranians are forcing the civilized world’s hand. And you will see a dramatic response soon as the United States, Israel, and our allies begin to position assets around the world in preparation.”
If there was any doubt as to what sort of “dramatic response” Wallace wanted to see, he added a message to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: “I look forward to seeing you hanged from the end of one of your own ropes.”
Iran was recently the victim of a deadly terrorist attack. As mourners commemorated the U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani, two bombs exploded, killing 91 and injuring hundreds more. In this context, it was understandable why Iranian officials pointed the finger at the U.S. and Israel.
WARMONGERS, INC
What these individuals all have in common is that they are board members of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a shadowy but influential organization dedicated to pushing the West toward a military confrontation with the Islamic Republic.
Founded in 2008, the group is led by neoconservative hawks and has close ties to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence. It does not divulge where it receives its copious funding. However, it is known that right-wing Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson was a source. There is strong circumstantial evidence that Gulf dictatorships may also be bankrolling the group, although UANI has strongly denied this. In 2019, Iran designated UANI as a terrorist organization.
When asked by MintPress what he made of UANI’s recent statements, Eli Clifton, one of the few investigative journalists to have covered the group, said, “It’s very consistent with the positions and advocacy that the organization has taken since its inception.” Adding,
United Against Nuclear Iran does not miss an opportunity to try to bring the United States closer to a military conflict with Iran. And on the other side of the equation, they also have worked very hard to oppose efforts to de-escalate the U.S.-Iran relationship.”
UANI’s board is a who’s who of high state, military and intelligence officials from around the Western world. Among its more notable members include:………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
In addition, notable former board members include ex-CIA Director R. James Woolsey; head of Mossad between 2002 and 2011, Meir Dagan; and one-time chief of British spy agency MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove.For 15 years, UANI has organized conferences, published reports, and lobbied politicians and governments, all with one goal: pushing a neoconservative line on Iran. “UANI are a force multiplier. They provide at least the veneer of an intellectual infrastructure for the Iran hawk movement. They did not invent being hawkish on Iran, but they sure made it a heck of a lot easier,” Ben Freeman, Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy Program at the Quincy Institute, told MintPress.
CONFLICTS AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
For such a large, well-financed, and influential organization filled with senior officials, United Against Nuclear Iran keeps its funding sources very quiet. However, in 2015, Clifton was able to obtain a UANI donor list for the 2013 financial year. By far and away, the largest funders were billionaire New York-based investor Thomas Kaplan and multibillionaire Israeli-American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
PUTTING IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS
One of United Against Nuclear Iran’s primary activities, Iranian political commenter Ali Alizadeh told MintPress, is to create a worldwide “culture of fear and anxiety for investing in Iran.” The group attempts to persuade businesses to divest from the Islamic Republic and sign their certification pledge, which reads as follows:…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
INTELLIGENCE CONNECTIONS
That UANI is headed by so many state, military and intelligence leaders begs the question: to what extent is this really a non-governmental organization? “That is one of the dirty secrets of think tanks: they are very often holding tanks for government officials,” Freeman said, adding:
The Trump folks all had to leave office when Biden won, so a lot of them ended up in think tanks for a while, four years, let’s say. And if Trump wins again, they will bounce back into government. And the same is true of Democratic administrations, too.”
he U.S. government also clearly has a longstanding policy of outsourcing much of its work to “private” groups in order to avoid further scrutiny. Many of the CIA’s most controversial activities, for example, have been farmed out to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a technically non-governmental organization funded entirely by Washington and staffed with ex-state officials. In recent years, the NED has funneled millions of dollars to protest leaders in Hong Kong, organized an attempted color revolution in Cuba, organized anti-government rock concerts in Venezuela, and propped up dozens of media organizations in Ukraine………………………………………………………………………………………….
UANI’s funders certainly also have extensive connections to Israel. Kaplan is the son-in-law of Israeli billionaire Leon Recanati and is said to be close with Prime Ministers Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid. He has also employed a number of Israeli officials at his businesses. An example of this is Olivia Blechner, who, in 2007, left her role as the Director of Academic Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in New York to become Executive Vice-President of Investor Relations and Research at Kaplan’s Electrum Group – a rather perplexing career move……………………………………………………………
A NETWORK OF REGIME CHANGE GROUPS
While United Against Nuclear Iran is already a notable enough organization, it is actually merely part of a large group of shadowy non-governmental groups working to cause unrest and, ultimately, regime change in Iran. These groups all share overlapping goals, funders and key individuals…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In short, then, there exists a network of American NGOs with the mission statements of helping Iran, opposing Iran, preserving Iran, and bombing Iran, all staffed by largely the same ex-U.S. government officials……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A LESSON FROM HISTORY
The history of Iran has been intimately intertwined with the United States since at least 1953 when Washington orchestrated a successful coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The slaughter in Gaza has been horrifying enough. More than 22,000 people have been killed in the Israeli invasion, and a further 1.9 million displaced. Israel is also simultaneously bombing the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. The U.S. is facilitating this, sending billions of dollars in weaponry, pledging iron-clad political support to Israel, silencing critics of its actions, and vetoing United Nations resolutions.
But United Against Nuclear Iran is eager to escalate the situation to a vastly greater level, urging Washington to attack a well-armed country of nearly 90 million people, erroneously claiming that Iran is behind every Hamas or Hezbollah action. ………………………………………………………………………
IF UANI gets its way, a conflict with Iran might spark a Third World War. And yet they are receiving virtually no pushback to their ultra-hawkish pronouncements, largely because they operate in the shadows and receive virtually no public scrutiny. It is, therefore, imperative for all those who value peace to quickly change that and expose the organization for what it is. https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/16/united-against-nuclear-iran-the-shadowy-intelligence-linked-group-driving-the-us-towards-war-with-iran/
Biden administration finalizes a $1.1 billion aid package for California’s last nuclear power plant
LOS ANGELES (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday finalized approval of $1.1 billion to help keep California’s last operating nuclear power plant running.
The funding is a financial pillar in the plan to keep the Diablo Canyon Power Plant producing electricity to at least 2030 — five years beyond its planned closing.
Terms of the aid package were not released by the Energy Department.
In 2016, plant operator Pacific Gas & Electric, environmental groups and plant worker unions reached an agreement to close the four-decade-old reactors by 2025. But the Legislature voided the deal in 2022 at the urging of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said the power is needed to ward off blackouts as climate change stresses the energy system.
California is the birthplace of the modern environmental movement and for decades has had a fraught relationship with nuclear power. Environmentalists argued California has adequate power without the reactors and that their continued operation could hinder development of new sources of clean energy. They also warn that long-delayed testing on one of the reactors poses a safety risk that could result in an accident, a claim disputed by PG&E……………………… https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/biden-administration-finalizes-a-1-1-billion-aid-package-for-california-s-last-nuclear-power-plant-101705536723552.html
The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Winner (Not You)
The best route to preventing a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to revive Washington’s “One China” policy that calls for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s status and for the U.S. to forswear support for that island’s formal independence. In other words, diplomacy, rather than increasing the Pentagon budget to “win” such a war, would be the way to go.
SCHEERPOST, By William D. Hartung / TomDispatch, 17 Jan 24
2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country’s indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there’s a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex.
In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in “national defense” spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time this year.
Meanwhile, the administration’s $100-billion-plus emergency military aid package that failed to pass Congress last month is likely to slip by in some form this year, while the House and Senate are almost guaranteed to add tens of billions more for “national defense” projects in specific states and districts, as happened in two of the last three years.
Of course, before the money actually starts flowing, Congress needs to pass an appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2024, clearing the way for that money to be spent. As of this writing, the House and Senate had indeed agreed to a tentative deal to sign onto the $886 billion that was authorized in December. A trillion-dollar version of such funding could be just around the corner. (If past practice is any guide, more than half of that sum could go directly to corporations, large and small.)
A trillion dollars is a hard figure to process. In the 1960s, when the federal budget was a fraction of what it is now, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Whether he did or not, that quote neatly captures how congressional attitudes toward federal spending have changed. After all, today, a billion dollars is less than a rounding error at the Pentagon. The department’s budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War and over twice what it was when President Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by what he called “the military-industrial complex.”
To offer just a few comparisons: annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin’s contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government’s entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Overall, more than half of the discretionary budget Congress approves every year — basically everything the federal government spends other than on mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security — goes to the Pentagon.
It would, I suppose, be one thing if such huge expenditures were truly needed to protect the country or make the world a safer place. However, they have more to do with pork-barrel politics and a misguided “cover the globe” military strategy than a careful consideration of what might be needed for actual “defense.”
Congressional Follies
The road to an $886-billion military budget authorization began early last year with a debt-ceiling deal negotiated by President Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That rolled back domestic spending levels, while preserving the administration’s proposal for the Pentagon intact. McCarthy, since ousted as speaker, had been pressed by members of the right-wing “Freedom Caucus” and their fellow travelers for just such spending cuts. (He had little choice but to agree, since that group proved to be his margin of victory in a speaker’s race that ran to 15 ballots.)……………………………………………………………………………………
Threat Inflation and the “Arsenal of Democracy”
Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the strategic rationales put forward for the flood of new Pentagon outlays don’t faintly hold up to scrutiny. First and foremost in the Pentagon’s argument for virtually unlimited access to the Treasury is the alleged military threat posed by China. But as Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, that country’s military strategy is “inherently defensive”:
“[T]he investments being made [by China] are not suited for foreign adventurism but are instead designed to use relatively low-cost weapons to defend against massively expensive American weapons. The nation’s primary military strategy is to keep foreign powers, and especially the United States, as far away from its shores as possible in a policy the Chinese government calls ‘active defense.’”
The greatest point of potential conflict between the U.S. and China is, of course, Taiwan. But a war over that island would come at a staggering cost for all concerned and might even escalate into a nuclear confrontation. A series of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that, while the United States could indeed “win” a war defending Taiwan from a Chinese amphibious assault, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. “The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers,” it reported. “Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years.” And a nuclear confrontation between China and the United States, which CSIS didn’t include in its assessment, would be a first-class catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.
The best route to preventing a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to revive Washington’s “One China” policy that calls for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s status and for the U.S. to forswear support for that island’s formal independence. In other words, diplomacy, rather than increasing the Pentagon budget to “win” such a war, would be the way to go.
The second major driver of higher Pentagon budgets is allegedly the strain on this country’s arms manufacturing base caused by supplying tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine, including artillery shells and missiles that are running short in American stockpiles. The answer, according to the Pentagon and the arms industry, is to further supersize this country’s already humongous military-industrial complex to produce enough weaponry to supply Ukraine (and now Israel, too), while acquiring sufficient weapons systems for a future war with China.
There are two problems with such arguments. First, supplying Ukraine doesn’t justify a permanent expansion of the U.S. arms industry. In fact, such aid to Kyiv needs to be accompanied by a now-missing diplomatic strategy designed to head off an even longer, ever more grinding war.
Second, the kinds of weapons needed for a war with China would, for the most part, be different from those relevant to a land war in Ukraine, so weaponry sent to Ukraine would have little relevance to readiness for a potential war with China (which Washington should, in any case, be working to prevent, not preparing for).
The Disastrous Costs of a Militarized Foreign Policy
Before investing ever more tax dollars in building an ever-expanding garrison state, the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated. Just buying ever more bombs, missiles, drones, and next-generation artificial intelligence-driven weaponry is not, in fact, a strategy, though it is a boon to the military-industrial complex and an invitation to a destabilizing new arms race.
Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seems inclined to seriously consider an approach that would emphasize investing in diplomatic and economic tools over force or the threat of force. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
A serious national conversation is needed on what a genuine defense strategy would look like, rather than one based on fantasies of global military dominance. Otherwise, the overly militarized approach to foreign and economic policy that has become the essence of Washington budget-making could be extended endlessly and disastrously into the future, something this country literally can’t afford to let happen.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/17/the-military-industrial-complex-is-the-winner-not-you/
When Yemen Does It It’s Terrorism, When The US Does It It’s “The Rules-Based Order”
That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up a blockade to try and stop an active genocide, that’s terrorism, but when the US empire imposes a blockade to secure its geostrategic interests in the middle east, why that’s just the rules-based international order in action.
What this shows us is that the “rules-based international order” the US and its allies claim to uphold is not based on rules at all; it’s based on power, which is the ability to control and impose your will on other people. The “rules” apply only to the enemies of the empire because they are not rules at all: they are narratives used to justify efforts to bend the global population to its will.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JAN 18, 2024
The Biden administration has officially re-designated Ansarallah — the dominant force in Yemen also known as the Houthis — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity.
The White House claims the designation is an appropriate response to the group’s attacks on US military vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, saying those attacks “fit the textbook definition of terrorism.” Ansarallah claims its actions “adhere to the provisions of Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” since it is only enforcing a blockade geared toward ceasing the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza.
One of the most heinous acts committed by the Trump administration was its designation of Ansarallah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT), both of which imposed sanctions that critics warned would plunge Yemen’s aid-dependent population into even greater levels of starvation than they were already experiencing by restricting the aid that would be allowed in. One of the Biden administration’s only decent foreign policy decisions has been the reversal of that sadistic move, and now that reversal is being partially rolled back, though thankfully only with the SDGT listing and not the more deadly and consequential FTO designation.
In a new article for Antiwar about this latest development, Dave Decamp explains that as much as the Biden White House goes to great lengths insisting that it’s going to issue exemptions to ensure that its sanctions don’t harm the already struggling Yemeni people, “history has shown that sanctions scare away international companies and banks from doing business with the targeted nations or entities and cause shortages of medicine, food, and other basic goods.” DeCamp also notes that US and British airstrikes on Yemen have already forced some aid groups to suspend services to the country.
So the US empire is going to be imposing sanctions on a nation that’s still trying to recover from the devastation caused by the US-backed Saudi blockade that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths between 2015 and 2022. All in response to the de facto government of that very same country imposing its own blockade with the goal of preventing a genocide.
That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up a blockade to try and stop an active genocide, that’s terrorism, but when the US empire imposes a blockade to secure its geostrategic interests in the middle east, why that’s just the rules-based international order in action…………………………………..
What this shows us is that the “rules-based international order” the US and its allies claim to uphold is not based on rules at all; it’s based on power, which is the ability to control and impose your will on other people. The “rules” apply only to the enemies of the empire because they are not rules at all: they are narratives used to justify efforts to bend the global population to its will……… https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-yemen-does-it-its-terrorism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=140790707&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email
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Senate Kills Sanders Resolution Requiring Biden to Report on Israeli Human Rights Conduct in Gaza
Lawmakers from both parties overwhelmingly thwarted an effort by the progressive Vermont senator to bring some accountability to how U.S.-supplied weapons are being used by Israeli forces.
BRETT WILKINS, Jan 16, 2024, ore https://www.commondreams.org/news/sanders-resolution-gaza
The United States Senate on Tuesday evening voted overwhelmingly to table a resolution by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have required the Biden administration to promptly report on Israel’s human rights practices during its war on Gaza, which is currently the subject of an International Criminal Court genocide case.
Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has drawn progressive ire by opposing a Gaza cease-fire—had attempted to force a floor vote on his privileged resolution, which is based on Section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act. However, upper chamber lawmakers voted 72-11 to preemptively torpedo the measure.
The senators who voted against tabling the measure were: Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Sanders.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to understand that he does not get a blank check from the United States Congress,” said Warren. “We have a responsibility to stand up now and say that given how Netanyahu and his right-wing war Cabinet have prosecuted this war, we have serious questions that we are obligated to ask before we go further in our support.”
Heinrich said on social media following the vote that “as we continue to stand by Israel’s right to defend itself, we must remain steadfast in our commitment to protecting innocent civilians.”
“That means ensuring our weapons are used only in accordance with U.S. law, international humanitarian law, and the law of armed conflict,” he added.
The Foreign Assistance Act, passed during the Kennedy administration, empowers Congress to “request information on a particular country’s human rights practices and to alter or terminate U.S. security assistance to that country in light of the information received.”
Sanders’ resolution would have forced the Biden administration to provide a report on Israeli rights violations within 30 days, after which time congressional lawmakers could consider suspending aid.
The U.S. has provided Israel with more than $150 billion in military aid since its founding in 1948—largely through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arabs—and currently gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual armed assistance. President Joe Biden responded to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 by requesting an additional $14.3 billion from Congress while also bypassing lawmakers to fast-track “emergency” armed aid to the key Middle East ally.
“Whether we like it or not, the United States is complicit in the nightmare that millions of Palestinians are now experiencing,” Sanders said on the Senate floor prior to the vote.
“It should not be controversial to ask how U.S. weapons are used,” he said earlier Tuesday. “We should all want this information. If you believe the war has been indiscriminate, as I do, then we must ask this question. If you believe Israel has done nothing wrong, then this information should support that belief.”
Tuesday’s vote came amid Israel’s relentless bombing and ground invasion of Gaza, which has killed at least 24,285 Palestinians—most of them women, children, and elders—while wounding more than 61,100 others and leaving over 7,000 more missing since October 7. More than 85% of Gaza’s population has been forcibly displaced, and doctors and United Nations officials said Tuesday that children are now starving to death in the besieged enclave.
Why Joe Biden Is a Foreign Policy Failure
the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has an iron grip on American foreign policy. As I’ve recently described, foreign policy has become an insider racket, with the MIC in control of the White House, Pentagon, State Department, the Armed Services Committees of the Congress, and of course the CIA, all in a tight embrace with the major arms contractors. Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine.
Biden’s 2024 military budget breaks all records, reaching at least $1.5 trillion in outlays for the Pentagon, CIA, homeland security, non-Pentagon nuclear arms programs, subsidized foreign weapons sales, other military-linked outlays, and interest payments on past war-related debts. On top of this mountain of military spending, Biden is seeking an additional $50 billion in “emergency supplemental funding” for America’s “defense industrial base” to keep shipping munitions to Ukraine and Israel.
America foreign policy is rudderless, with a president whose only foreign policy recipe is war.
Jan 15, 2024, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/biden-foreign-policy-failure
Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine; alas, Biden doesn’t even try.
When it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States has two essential roles. The first is to rein in the military-industrial complex, or MIC, which is always pushing for war. The second is to rein in U.S. allies that expect the U.S. to go to war on their behalf. A few savvy presidents succeed, but most fail. Joe Biden is certainly a failure.
One of the savviest presidents was Dwight Eisenhower. In late 1956, he confronted two simultaneous crises. The first was a disastrously misguided war launched by the United Kingdom, France, and Israel to overthrow the Egyptian government and retake control of the Suez Canal following its nationalization by Egypt. Eisenhower forced the allies to stop their brazen and illegal attack, including through a U.S.-sponsored United Nations General Assembly resolution. The second crisis was the Hungarian Uprising against Soviet domination of Hungary. While Eisenhower sympathized with the uprising, he wisely kept the U.S. out of Hungary and thereby avoided a dangerous military showdown with the Soviet Union.
Eisenhower’s historic farewell address to the American people in January 1961 alerted the public to the growing power of the MIC:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Even Eisenhower did not fully rein in the military-industrial complex, especially the Central Intelligence Agency. No president has done so entirely. The CIA was created in 1947 with two distinct roles. The first and valid one was as an intelligence agency. The second and disastrous one was as a covert army for the president. In the latter capacity, the CIA has led one calamitous failure after another from Eisenhower’s time till now, including coups, assassinations, and stage-managed “color revolutions,” all of which have produced endless havoc and destruction.
Following Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy brilliantly resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, narrowly avoiding nuclear Armageddon by facing down his own war-mongering advisers to reach a peaceful solution with the Soviet Union. The following year he successfully negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, over Pentagon objections, and then won Senate ratification, thereby pulling the U.S. and Soviet Union back from the brink of war. Many believe that Kennedy’s peace initiatives led to his assassination at the hands of rogue CIA officials. Biden has joined the long line of presidents that have kept classified or redacted thousands of documents that would shed more light on the assassination.
Sixty years onward, the MIC has an iron grip on American foreign policy. As I’ve recently described, foreign policy has become an insider racket, with the MIC in control of the White House, Pentagon, State Department, the Armed Services Committees of the Congress, and of course the CIA, all in a tight embrace with the major arms contractors. Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine.
Alas, Biden doesn’t even try. Throughout his long political career, Biden has been supported by the MIC and has in turn enthusiastically supported wars of choice, massive arms sales, CIA-backed coups, and NATO enlargement.
Biden’s 2024 military budget breaks all records, reaching at least $1.5 trillion in outlays for the Pentagon, CIA, homeland security, non-Pentagon nuclear arms programs, subsidized foreign weapons sales, other military-linked outlays, and interest payments on past war-related debts. On top of this mountain of military spending, Biden is seeking an additional $50 billion in “emergency supplemental funding” for America’s “defense industrial base” to keep shipping munitions to Ukraine and Israel.
Biden doesn’t have any realistic plans for Ukraine, and even rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022 that would have ended the conflict based on Ukrainian neutrality by ending Ukraine’s futile bid to join NATO (futile because Russia will never accept it). Ukraine is big business for the MIC—tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of arms contracts, manufacturing facilities across the U.S,, the opportunity to develop and test new weapons systems—so Biden keeps the war going despite the destruction of Ukraine on the battlefield, and the tragic and needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The MIC, and hence Biden, continue to shun negotiations, even though direct U.S.-Russia negotiations regarding NATO and other security issues (such as U.S. missile placements in Eastern Europe) could end the war.
In Israel, Biden’s failure is even more on display. Israel is led by an extremist government that reviles the two-state solution, according to which Israelis and Palestinians should live side by side in two sovereign peaceful and secure states, or indeed any solution that grants Palestinians their political rights. The two-state solution is deeply embedded in international law, including U.N. Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and supposedly in U.S. foreign policy. The Arab and Islamic leaders are committed to normalizing and securing safe relations with Israel in the context of the two-state solution.
Yet Israel is led by violent zealots who make the messianic claim that God has given Israel all the land of today’s Palestine, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These zealots therefore insist on political domination over the millions of Palestinians in their midst, or their annihilation or expulsion. Netanyahu and his colleagues don’t even hide their genocidal intentions, though most foreign observers don’t fully understand the biblical references that the Israeli leaders invoke to justify their ongoing mass slaughter of the Palestinian people.
Israel now faces highly credible charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice in a case brought by South Africa. The documentary record presented by South Africa and others is as clear as it is chilling. Israeli politics is not the politics of pragmatism and certainly not the politics of peace. It is the politics of biblical apocalypse.Biden nonetheless provides Israel with the munitions to carry out its massive war crimes. Instead of acting like Eisenhower and pressing Israel to end its slaughter in contravention of international law including the Genocide Convention, Biden continues to ship munitions, even bypassing congressional review to the maximum extent he can. The result is U.S. diplomatic isolation from the rest of the world, and the growing involvement of the U.S. military in a war that is rapidly and all-too-predictably expanding across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. In the recent U.N. General Assembly vote backing political self-determination for the people of Palestine, the U.S. and Israel stood alone save two votes: Micronesia (bound by compact to vote with the U.S.) and Nauru (population 12,000).
America foreign policy is rudderless, with a president whose only foreign policy recipe is war. With the U.S. already up to its neck in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Biden also intends to ship more arms to Taiwan despite China’s strident objections that the U.S. is thereby violating long-standing U.S. commitments to the One-China policy, including the commitment made 42 years ago in the U.S.-PRC Joint Communique that the U.S. government “does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan.” Eisenhower’s dire prophecy has been confirmed. The military-industrial complex threatens our liberty, our democracy, and our very survival.
Biden, Israel’s accomplice in Gaza, pretends to be a bystander
Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.
While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.
AARON MATÉ, Substack, JAN 16, 2024
On October 15th, President Biden took umbrage at a suggestion that his administration could not back both the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza at the same time.
“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation… in the history of the world,” Biden told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”
Three months and well over 20,000 defenseless Palestinians slain later, the self-declared leader of the most powerful nation in the history of world now claims to be a helpless bystander.
According to four US officials, Biden is “increasingly frustrated” and “losing his patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected “most of the administration’s recent requests related to the war in Gaza,” Axios reports. “The situation sucks and we are stuck,” one official complained. “The president’s patience is running out.” Another official fumes that “there is immense frustration” in the Oval Office. According to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen: “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger. They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
Van Hollen is correct that the administration is getting slapped in the face by Israel. But he omits that Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.
As Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon explained last month, any US demand of Israel’s military is perfunctory. “They didn’t agree to a ground invasion — we invaded,” Danon said. “They didn’t agree to [attacking] Al-Shifa hospital — we ignored their request. They wanted a pause without hostages — we didn’t accept that. We have no American ultimatum. There is no deadline from the US.”
The US not only imposes no conditions on its support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, but has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons for it. After all, this administration professes to have “no red lines” when it comes to Israeli aggression, and is fronted by a president who has declared that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.
While Biden and his aides now pretend to have their hands tied, their instrumental role is undeniable. “Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future,” former US diplomat Patrick Theros writes. “A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.”
“If you want to use your leverage, use your leverage,” former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy says of Biden’s stance. “You’ve chosen to give Israel a blank check.”
That choice continues. In meetings with Israeli officials on Nov. 30th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed his counterparts that they had “weeks, not months” to “wrap up combat operations at the current level of intensity,” US officials later told the New York Times. Upon a return visit to Israel this week, Blinken again touted his push for what he called “the phased transition of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” That “transition” to a “lower-intensity phase,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday, “is coming here very, very soon.”
But away from the news cameras, the posture changes. A senior US official now explains to the Washington Post that it’s in fact “pointless to urge them [the Israelis] to change.” Accordingly, “Washington’s priority has now shifted to tolerating Israel’s high-intensity operation throughout January, while insisting instead that it downgrade the tempo in February.”
In other words, the US has decided to tolerate Israel’s genocidal tempo in Gaza as normal. From Washington’s point of view, saving thousands of Palestinian lives from murder at the hands of US-supplied weaponry would be pointless.
Biden is so committed to continuing the Gaza slaughter that he has even expanded the war zone to Yemen. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden said of the hostages. By refusing to acknowledge them, Biden is affirming via omission that he believes the exact opposite — and in fact infinitely worse — for Gaza’s two million Palestinian hostages. After 100 days of genocide, the people of Gaza are fated to endure continued atrocities as a direct result of US policy, no matter the Biden team’s ongoing effort to pretend otherwise.
https://www.aaronmate.net/p/biden-israels-accomplice-in-gaza?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=100118&post_id=140693425&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&utm_medium=email
US Offers Up To $500MM for Advanced Nuclear Fuel Production
by Jov Onsat, Rigzone Staff, Monday, January 15, 2024
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is offering contracts worth up to $500 million in total for the production of a uranium fuel for smaller nuclear reactors, as it announced a breakthrough in an enrichment project
The request for proposals is for the enrichment of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). Currently this fuel is produced only in Russia and the US but only the former makes it at a commercial scale, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The United Kingdom government earlier this month announced funding to enable domestic HALEU production.
“Currently, HALEU is not commercially available from U.S.-based suppliers, and boosting domestic supply could spur the development and deployment of advanced reactors in the United States”, the DOE noted in a press release announcing the funding offer……………………………………………………
Each contractor is assured of a minimum order value of $2 million. They must conduct enrichment and storage activities in the continental US and comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, the DOE said. Proposals are until March 8.
The $500 million offer includes a DOE request announced November for services to deconvert the uranium enriched through this funding into metal, oxide and other forms to be used as fuel for advanced reactor https://www.rigzone.com/news/us_offers_up_to_500mm_for_advanced_nuclear_fuel_production-15-jan-2024-175378-article/
B1 Federal Employees to Stage Walk Out Over Biden’s Support for Gaza Slaughter
Federal employees from nearly two dozen US government agencies will walk off their jobs on Tuesday in protest of President Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, Al-Monitor reported on Friday.
by Dave DeCamp January 14, 2024 https://news.antiwar.com/2024/01/14/federal-employees-to-stage-walk-out-over-bidens-support-for-gaza-slaughter/
Federal employees from nearly two dozen US government agencies will walk off their jobs on Tuesday in protest of President Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, Al-Monitor reported on Friday.
The Biden administration has faced significant internal dissent over the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, which has killed nearly 24,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Officials from across government agencies have signed letters protesting the US support for Israel, but a walkout will be the most dramatic step yet, besides the two resignations from administration officials.
Dozens of US officials are organizing the walkout as a group calling itself Feds United for Peace. They expect hundreds of other federal employees to join them on Tuesday.
Al-Monitor obtained a list of some of the agencies where employees are expected to participate in the protest, which includes the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Agency, the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, and more.
In light of the Al-Monitor Report, House Republicans are calling for any employees who participate in the protest to be fired. “Any government worker who walks off the job to protest US support for our ally Israel is ignoring their responsibility and abusing the trust of taxpayers,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), according to Axios. “They deserve to be fired.”
President Biden is also facing dissent from within his re-election campaign as his backing of Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians is hurting his chances of winning another term. Seventeen Biden campaign staffers said in a letter protesting his support for Israel that they’ve seen “volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever, because of this conflict.”
$25 billion for refurbishment of Darlingon and Bruce reactors
Two Canadian nuclear refurbishment projects are in the top five of the largest public sector infrastructure projects currently under development in Canada, according to a newly published annual ranking. The annual Top100 Projects report, published by ReNew Canada magazine, features the 100 largest public sector infrastructure projects currently under development in the country ranked based on their confirmed project cost. Bruce Power’s refurbishment project is in third place with a project cost of CAD13 billion (USD9.7 billion), with Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington nuclear refurbishment in fourth place, at a cost of CAD12.8 billion.
Source: World Nuclear News, 15 January 2024
What Does ‘Rules-Based International Order’ Mean When US Can Bomb Yemen at Will?
NORMAN SOLOMON, Jan 12, 2024, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/rules-based-order-yemen
What US foreign policy shamelessly amounts to is this: ‘We make the rules so we get to break the rules.”
Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action—taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed—rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.
On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”
In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.
But that would require genuine diplomacy—not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)
Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”
But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.
The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that—several weeks into the slaughter—he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”
There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”
After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
1 This Month
23 April – WEBINAR – Why new nuclear reactors are the wrong tools for decarbonization Thursday, April 23 • 1 AM – 2 AM AEST
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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