Skip to content

US Hegemony

Seymour Hersh: My Meeting With Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf

During the first year of the Obama administration, I spent months in the summer and fall of 2009 reporting about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal from here in Washington; from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital; from New Delhi, the Indian capital; and from London, where Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan as well a former army chief was living in exile. The story I eventually published in the New Yorker was edited slightly in accordance with a White House request that I did not contest.  The issues then and today are the same: Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation. So is India, its rival, an on-and-off ally of both Russia and America that rarely, if ever, discusses its own nuclear capability.

Force-Marching The Europeans

Am I the only American to travel overseas and feel embarrassed by the conduct of the diplomats Washington sends abroad to speak for our republic? It is pretty strange to find yourself, an ordinary citizen, apologizing for the intrusive, cajoling, bullying, badgering and otherwise crude utterances of this or that ambassador in this or that nation. But such is the state of things as the late-phase imperium fields its elbows-out undiplomats—a term I borrow from the Swiss, who suffer one as we speak. Scott Miller, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Bern for a little more than a year, is indeed a doozy in this line.

New Defence Review Further Enslaves Australia To US War Agendas

The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted. Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Entertainment’s despicable Red Alert war-with-China propaganda series, has a new propaganda piece out titled “Defence review pulls no punches: China the biggest threat we face“.

Whither Multipolarity In A Changing World Order

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci presciently observed: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This period that we live in is arguably shaped by three elements: two moribund (the implosion of the USSR and the centrality of US imperialism) and one vital (the promise of multipolarity). The camp associated with the US is consolidating at the same time that a countervailing multipolar tendency is emerging. Major changes are reshaping the world order, I contend, but the outcome is not yet clear.

The Need For A New US Foreign Policy

U.S. foreign policy is based on an inherent contradiction and fatal flaw. The aim of U.S. foreign policy is a U.S.-dominated world, in which the U.S. writes the global trade and financial rules, controls advanced technologies, maintains militarily supremacy and dominates all potential competitors. Unless U.S. foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly World War III. The inherent contradiction in U.S. foreign policy is that it conflicts with the U.N. Charter, which commits the U.S. (and all other U.N. member states) to a global system based on U.N. institutions in which no single country dominates.

Macron Says Europe Shouldn’t Follow The United States On China

French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that Europe should not follow the US and risk a confrontation with China over Taiwan as he was returning to France from a visit to Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a conversation with POLITICO, Macron discussed his desire for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” and to become a “third superpower,” which he said wouldn’t be able to happen if Europe is involved in a conflict over Taiwan. He said Europe faces a “great risk” if it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.”

How The Global South Has Risen In The Face Of US Sabotage

Ajamu Baraka is a former U.S. Green Party vice-presidential candidate, a longstanding political activist, and a spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace. He joins Lee Camp this week for an interview with “Behind the Headlines.” China’s rise, U.S. meddling worldwide, international resistance to Western domination, and much more are covered in the hour. “It would be unbelievable just a few years ago to see that the Chinese are able to broker an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, that countries in Latin America would actually openly criticize U.S. policies,” Baraka said, discussing signs that global power is shifting away from U.S. hegemony.

Reviving Regionalism In The Age Of US Decline

A new dossier produced by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research in collaboration with the Center for International Policy Research (CIPR) in Cuba examines the realities and potential of these competing visions for a world order. New regional arrangements have emerged that have sought to create new modalities for trade, as well as other forms of financial and political exchanges, that are not bound by the “Washington Consensus and the IMF-Wall Street- Dollar Complex.” A key part of these developments has been the emergence of China as a trade and development partner for many countries in the Global South.

China And Russia Pledge ‘Changes Not Seen In 100 Years’

China’s President Xi Jinping traveled to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin on March 20. While in Moscow, Xi said, “Right now there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving these changes together”. Putin replied, “I agree”. The two leaders discussed plans to deepen economic integration. Both took aim at the hegemony of the US dollar, in particular. “It is important that our national currencies are increasingly used in bilateral trade”, Putin said on March 21. “We should continue promoting settlements in national currencies, and expand the reciprocal presence of financial and banking structures in our countries’ markets”.

China’s Iran-Saudi Peace Deal Is Big Blow To Petrodollar

China surprised the world on March 10, announcing that it had successfully sponsored peace talks between rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Four days of secret negotiations in Beijing led to a historic agreement in which the two West Asian nations normalized relations, following seven tense years without any official diplomatic ties. Iraq had previously hosted peace talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but these were sabotaged in January 2020 when US President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to assassinate top Iranian official Qasem Soleimani, who had been involved in the negotiations.

A Deadly Contradiction: The Root Of The US- China Conflict

China’ overwhelming objective is clearly economic development, a policy to which it has hewed closely and which it declares for its future. That is no surprise; it is the dream of every developing nation. It is “The Chinese Dream.” If such goals were no more than words on paper, there would be no problem.  But China is succeeding as is widely acknowledged now.  Its economy surpassed the U.S. in terms of GDP (PPP) in November of 2014 according to the IMF and is growing faster.  Over 700 million have been brought out of poverty, with extreme poverty eliminated in 2020. The middle class now comprises over 400 million people.  The retail market is enormous and the ecommerce market by far the world’s largest.  China is the world’s largest manufacturer and trader.

World Police: Washington Seeks To Imprison Foreign Businesspeople

The United States uses economic sanctions as a weapon against states that choose a development path independent of US global domination. Sanctions can take the form of blocking a nation’s financial and trade transactions, not allowing financial institutions to process them. The US can also freeze the assets of another country. Washington employs sanctions as a tool to destabilize governments that refuse to kow-tow to it. Sanctions are a weapon of war on civilians. Richard Nixon made this clear when, with Chile’s 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende, the US president ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”

The US Can’t Control The World

As this columnist has pointed out, Joe Biden’s foreign policy differs little from that of his predecessor Donald Trump. The imperatives of the United States hegemon require treating the rest of the world as either willing vassals or as sworn enemies. Any nation that threatens economic supremacy or the ability to thwart foreign policy directives is labeled an adversary and faces an onslaught of governmental and corporate media attacks. This dynamic remains unchanged and the Biden administration has only worsened an already bad situation. The troubles start at the top with the president himself. When asked by George Stephanopoulos in an ABC news interview if Vladimir Putin is “a killer” Biden answered in the affirmative.

New Global Alliance Defends UN Charter

A new alliance  called the “Groups of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations” has formed in a clear act of resistance to the unilateral and aggressive policies of the United States and its junior partners. Representatives of the alliance reside fully in the Global South. Nations spearheading the initiative include the DPRK, Iran, Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Bolivia, Cambodia, Cuba, Eritrea, Laos, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines, Syria, Venezuela, and Palestine in addition to the largest of the developing countries, Russia and China.

‘US Leadership’ – And Other Euphemisms For War

Joe Biden doesn’t become president for a month and a half, but already sections of the corporate media are calling on him to use US power to dominate the world. Typically these calls are couched in benign-sounding euphemisms. For instance, CNBC (11/21/20) ran an article headlined, “How Biden Can Restore US Global Leadership After Trump’s Retreat From International Institutions,” which of course presumes that America ought to be planetary chief, despite the vast majority of those who live on Earth not being consulted. Fred Kaplan of Slate (11/12/20) asserted that Biden’s “main goal is to restore American leadership in a world that’s keen to follow it.”
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.