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New Cold War

Africa Does Not Want To Be A Breeding Ground For The New Cold War

November 4, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
On 17 October, the head of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), US Marine Corps General Michael Langley visited Morocco. Langley met with senior Moroccan military leaders, including Inspector General of the Moroccan Armed Forces Belkhir El Farouk. Since 2004, AFRICOM has held its ‘largest and premier annual exercise’, African Lion, partly on Moroccan soil. This past June, ten countries participated in the African Lion 2022, with observers from Israel (for the first time) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Langley’s visit is part of a broader US push onto the African continent, which we documented in our dossier no. 42 (July 2021), Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, a joint publication with The Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group.

DOJ Is Pursuing A New Crime: Researching While Chinese

November 3, 2022 Eugene Puryear and Rania Khalek, BreakThrough News. , , ,
The US charges against Chinese officials for allegedly tampering with a Huawei investigation were just the tip of the iceberg. The US has also arrested and/or deported scores of Chinese nationals who are scientists, academics, and professionals in recent years. Peace activist K.J. Noh, also a scholar on the geopolitics of Asia & an organizer with Pivot to Peace, explains the alarming trend.

EU Admits New Cold War Is Not ‘Democracy Vs. Autocracy’

October 28, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , ,
The European Union’s top foreign-policy official, Josep Borrell, admitted that the new cold war that the West is waging on China and Russia is not a conflict of “democracies vs. authoritarians.” “On our side, there are a lot of authoritarian regimes,” the EU’s de facto foreign minister conceded. Borrell’s comments directly contradicted those of US President Joe Biden, who claimed in his first State of the Union address in March that the new cold war is a “battle between democracy and autocracies.” The top EU diplomat instead recognized that the new cold war is a struggle in which economic “systems are in rivalry,” and that most of the Global South “do not want to be forced to take sides in this geopolitical competition,” because “they feel that the global system does not deliver,” and “because they blame us.”

Pakistan Coup Regime Bans Imran Khan, Dissidents Killed

October 27, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , , ,
After Prime Minister Imran Khan was overthrown in a US-backed soft coup, Pakistan’s unelected “imported government” has banned the country’s most popular politician from office, sparking huge protests. Pakistani scholar Junaid S. Ahmad spoke with Multipolarista editor Ben Norton about the army chief’s friendly trip to Washington and US efforts to pressure Pakistan to weaken ties with China, arm Ukraine in its war with Russia, and recognize apartheid Israel. Ahmad also addressed the growing political violence and assassination of dissident journalist Arshad Sharif, a prominent critic of the coup regime who had been reporting on its corruption. Fearing for his life, Sharif fled to Kenya, where he was shot in the head on October 23. Ahmad said Pakistan is “caught” in the middle of Washington’s new cold war on China.

US Waging ‘Unilateral’ Economic And Tech War To Halt China’s Rise

October 25, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , , ,
The US government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted. The Joe Biden administration took the extraordinarily aggressive action this October of blocking China from importing most semiconductors, machines to create chips, and supercomputer parts. A former Pentagon official acknowledged that this was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, amounting to a “form of economic containment.” He said this in an article in Foreign Policy, the magazine of the DC political class, titled “Biden Is Now All-In on Taking Out China.” Jon Bateman, an ex analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who served in several important policy roles in the Pentagon, wrote that US officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “strong-armed others into compliance.”

EU Confesses ‘Our Prosperity Was Based On China And Russia’

October 20, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , , , , , , ,
The West’s economic prosperity following the end of the first cold war in 1991 was built on a neoliberal capitalist economic model that was only made possible due to the extraction of wealth from China and Russia, the European Union’s top foreign-policy official, Josep Borrell, has confessed. “Our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market,” Borrell said. China provided the US and EU with a massive market, low-paid labor, and cheap consumer goods. And after the Soviet Union was overthrown, mass privatizations in Russia and steps at integrating it into the West helped Europe secure huge amounts of inexpensive energy. But the significant rise in workers’ living standards in China, as well as the proxy war in Ukraine and the EU’s corresponding pledge to boycott Russian gas and oil, have greatly increased the cost of living and doing business in Europe, making its products uncompetitive in global markets.

EU Says Europe Is ‘Garden’ Superior To Rest Of World’s Barbaric ‘Jungle’

October 17, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , ,
The European Union’s top foreign-policy official showed how the colonialist mentality is still very much alive on the continent. EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell said “Europe is a garden,” which is “beautiful” and superior to the vast majority of the countries on Earth. On the other hand, he claimed, “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” Borrell argued that “the world needs Europe,” because it is a “beacon” that must civilize the rest of the world. The enlightened Western “gardeners have to go to the jungle,” he insisted, because if the supposed barbarians are not tamed, “the rest of the world will invade us.” Borrell delivered this overtly racist rant at the inauguration of the European Diplomatic Academy in Brussels on October 13.

Oppose The Taiwan Policy Act Of 2022

October 14, 2022 Pivot to Peace, Popular Resistance. , , ,
On September 14, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022. For the past half-century the US policy towards China is the One China Policy whereby the US recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the only legitimate government of China, and that Taiwan is part of China. If enacted as law, the landmark act would mark a radical shift away from the US One China policy that forms the bedrock of relations with Beijing since the 1980s. It will also upset the post WWII order set up by the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations that returned Taiwan to China, irrespective of the form of government of China. The US will, by this law, stick out as the only major country of the world that recognizes Taiwan as a nation independent of the People’s Republic of China.

Manufacturing Consent For The Containment Of China

October 12, 2022 Carlos Martinez, Friends of Socialist China. , , ,
The Western media is waging a systematic and ferocious propaganda war against China. In the court of Western public opinion, China stands accused of an array of terrifying crimes: conducting a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang; wiping out democracy in Hong Kong; militarising the South China Sea; attempting to impose colonial control over Taiwan; carrying out a land grab in Africa; preventing Tibetans and Inner Mongolians from speaking their languages; spying on the good peoples of the democratic world; and more. Australian scholar Roland Boer has characterised these accusations as “atrocity propaganda – an old anti-communist and indeed anti-anyone-who-does-not-toe-the-Western-line approach that tries to manufacture a certain image for popular consumption.”

The Most Dangerous Situation That Humanity Has Ever Faced

October 7, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock has measured the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe, namely to warn the world against the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who attend to this clock, originally set the device at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight being, essentially, the end of the world. The farthest that the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when it was set at 17 minutes from midnight. The closest to midnight that the clock has been is now. Since 2020, the clock has sat at ‘doom’s doorstep’ – 100 seconds from midnight. The motivation for this alarming setting was the unilateral withdrawal by the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019.

The US Gets Ready For War In Taiwan

September 27, 2022 Kenny Coyle, Friends of Socialist China. , , ,
On Sunday 18 September, US President Joe Biden told the US news programme 60 Minutes that the US military would go to war in Taiwan should Chinese forces land on the island chain to enforce its sovereignty. While China has never ruled out the last-resort use of military force, it has always insisted on its preference for peaceful reunification. Biden’s most recent comments repeat previous statements, including one made in Japan, Taiwan’s former colonial occupying power, in May. They are, however, the first since US house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s journey to Taipei in August which resulted in China holding major military exercises after her visit. Pelosi’s meeting with the political leadership of Taiwan certainly enraged China and inflamed tension in the area. This was no diplomatic faux pas; it was the whole point of her trip.

Back Door Proliferation

September 24, 2022 Binoy Kampmark, Counterpunch. , , ,
In Vienna, China’s permanent mission to the United Nations has been rather exercised of late. Members of the mission have been particularly irate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Rafael Grossi, who addressed the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 12. Grossi was building on a confidential report by the IAEA which had been circulated the previous week concerning the role of nuclear propulsion technology for submarines to be supplied to Australia under the AUKUS security pact. When the AUKUS announcement was made in September last year, its significance shook security establishments in the Indo-Pacific. It was also no less remarkable, and troubling, for signalling the transfer of otherwise rationed nuclear technology to a third country.

87% Of World Doesn’t Support West’s New Cold War On Russia

September 23, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , ,
Two former US diplomats have acknowledged that the vast majority of the global population does not support the West’s new cold war on Russia. In a Newsweek op-ed titled “Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine,” ex diplomats Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell wrote: While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87 percent of the world’s population has declined to follow us. Economic sanctions have united our adversaries in shared resistance. Less predictably, the outbreak of Cold War II, has also led countries that were once partners or non-aligned to become increasingly multi-aligned. They acknowledged that new multilateral institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS are growing, and offer new opportunities for countries in the Global South.

War Is Not The Answer To Deep Planetary Insecurity

September 16, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
Grave news comes to us from the United Nations (UN). The latest Human Development Report (2021–22) records that for the first time in thirty-two years, the Human Development Index has registered a second consecutive year of decline. The previous five years of gains in areas such as health and education have been negated by this reversal. ‘Billions of people face the greatest cost-of-living crisis in a generation’, says the report. ‘Billions already grapple with food insecurity, owing largely to inequalities in wealth and power that determine entitlements to food. A global food crisis will hit them hardest’. While the UN report points to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as the immediate sources of this distress, an earlier report on human security notes that ‘more than 6 in 7 people worldwide perceived feeling moderately or very insecure just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic’.

Imperialism And Taiwan

September 12, 2022 Graham Harrington, Friends of Socialist China. , , ,
The recent visit of the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan has sharply increased the prospect of war in the region. The Chinese government and people strongly believe Taiwan to be their territory; and the no. 3 official in the US government visiting Taiwan is a clear provocation. Taiwan was invaded by Dutch colonists in 1624, only to be repulsed in 1662 by the Chinese national hero Zheng Chenggong. Taiwan became a full province in Qing Dynasty China in 1885. Ten years later the then Qing government lost Taiwan in a war with imperialist Japan. The Japanese were sold weapons by the United States with which to do this.
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