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Write an article about: Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, Michael Hudson, Middle East, oil, Saudi Arabia, West Asia

A geopolitical analysis of why the United States so strongly supports Israel: Economist Michael Hudson discusses with journalist Ben Norton. Why does the United States so strongly support Israel? Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to explore the reasons why Israel is such an important part of U.S. foreign policy and Washington’s attempt to dominate not only the region of the Middle East, but the entire world. Israel is an extension of U.S. geopolitical power in one of the most critically important regions of the world. In fact, it was current U.S. President Joe Biden, back in 1986, when he was a senator, who famously said that, if Israel didn’t exist, the United States would have to invent it: If we look at the Middle East, I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel. I am with my colleagues who are on the floor of the Foreign Relations Committee, and we worry at length about NATO; and we worry about the eastern flank of NATO, Greece and Turkey, and how important it is. They pale by comparison… They pale by comparison in terms of the benefit that accrues to the United States of America. It goes without saying that the so-called Middle East, or a better term is West Asia, has some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas, and the entire world’s economic infrastructure relies heavily on fossil fuels. The planet is gradually moving toward new energy sources, which is needed to fight climate change, but fossil fuels are still absolutely critical to the global economy. And Washington’s goal has been to make sure that it can maintain steady prices in global oil and gas markets. But this is about something much bigger than just oil and gas. The U.S. military’s stated policy since the 1990s, since the end of the Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union, is to try to maintain control over every region of the world. This was stated clearly in 1992 in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. The U.S. National Security Council wrote: [The United States’] goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated, nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security. Then, in 2004, the U.S. government published its National Military Strategy, in which Washington stressed that its goal was “Full Spectrum Dominance – the ability to control any situation or defeat any adversary across the range of military operations”. Historically, when it came to West Asia, the U.S. relied on a so-called “twin pillar” strategy. The west pillar was Saudi Arabia, and the east pillar was Iran. Until the 1979 revolution, Iran was governed by a shah, a dictatorial monarch who was backed by the United States and served U.S. interests in the region. However, following the 1979 revolution, the U.S. lost one of the pillars of its twin pillar strategy, and Israel became increasingly important for the United States to maintain control over this crucially strategic region. Many of the world’s top oil and gas producers are located in West Asia. Furthermore, some of the most important trading routes on Earth go through this region. It would be difficult to overstate how important Egypt’s Suez Canal is. It connects trade transiting from West Asia going into Europe, from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. Around 30% of all of the world’s shipping containers pass through the Suez Canal. That represents around 12% of the total global trade of all goods. Then, directly south of the Suez Canal, where the Red Sea enters the Arabian Sea, there is a crucial geostrategic choke point known as the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off the coast of Yemen. There, more than 6 million barrels of oil pass through every single day. Historically, the United States has tried to dominate this region in order to maintain control of energy supplies and ensure these global trade routes that the globalized capitalist system is built on. As U.S. influence in the region has weakened in an increasingly multipolar world, Israel has become even more important for the United States to try to exercise hegemony in the region. One can see this clearly in the discussions over oil prices in OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has essentially been expanded to OPEC+ to include Russia. Today, Saudi Arabia and Washington’s archenemy, Russia, play a key role in determining global oil prices. Historically, Saudi Arabia was a loyal U.S. proxy, but Riyadh has increasingly pursued a more non-aligned foreign policy. And a very big reason for that is that China is now the biggest trading partner of many of the countries in the region. For a decade, China has been the largest importer of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, whereas U.S. oil imports peaked in 2005. Due to massive expansion of production and the shale boom in the 2010s, the United States established itself as one of the top three oil producers on Earth, reducing its need for crude from Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, through its global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is moving the center of world trade back to Asia. And the “road” in BRI is a reference to the New Silk Road. Can you guess which region is crucial in the New Silk Road and the BRI? Of course, it’s the Middle East – or, again, a better name is West Asia, and that term actually much better explains the geostrategic importance of this region, because it connects Asia to Europe. This explains why the United States has been so desperate to try to challenge the Belt and Road with its own attempts to build new trade routes. In particular, the U.S. seeks to make a trade route going from India into the Persian Gulf, and then up through Israel. So in all of these projects, Israel plays an important role, as an extension of U.S. imperial power in one of the most important regions of the world. That is why Biden said back in 1986 that if Israel didn’t exist, the U.S. would have to invent it. That is also why Biden repeated this in a White House meeting with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog on October 27, 2022: We’re also going to discuss the ironclad commitment – and this is, I’ll say this 5000 times in my career – the ironclad commitment the United States has to Israel, based on our principles, our ideas, our values; they’re the same values. And I have often said, Mr. President [Herzog], if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one. And even as recently as October 18, 2023, Biden again repeated the same thing in a speech he made in Israel: “I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it”. In that speech in 2023, Biden traveled to Israel in order to support the country as it was carrying out a brutal bombing campaign in Gaza, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians as part of what legal experts around the world have referred to as a “textbook case of genocide”. Top United Nations experts have warned that the Palestinian people are in danger of genocide by Israel. And the United States has steadfastly been supporting Israel, because, as Joe Biden said, Israel is an extension of U.S. imperial power in West Asia, and if it didn’t exist, Washington would have to invent it. Below follows a transcript of the interview that Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton conducted with economist Michael Hudson, author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. BEN NORTON: Michael, thanks for joining me today. We are speaking on November 9, and the latest death toll in the war in Gaza is that Israel has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. The United Nations has referred to Gaza as a “graveyard for children”. More than 4,000 children have been killed. About 40% of the casualties are children. And the United States has continued to support Israel, not only diplomatically and politically, not only by, for instance, vetoing resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that call for a ceasefire, but furthermore, the U.S. has been sending billions of dollars to Israel. Not only the $3.8 billion that the U.S. always gives to Israel every year in military aid, but additionally, tens of billions of dollars more. So I am wondering if you could provide your analysis of why you think the U.S. is investing so many resources in supporting Israel while it is clearly committing war crimes. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, certainly it is supporting Israel, but it’s not supporting Israel because this is an altruistic act. To the United States, Israel is its landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East. And from the very time there was talk of creating an Israel, it was always that Israel was going to be an outpost, first of England, then of Russia, then of the United States in the Near East. And I can give you an anecdote. Netanyahu’s main national security advisor for the last few years has been Uzi Arad. I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ‘76. And I worked very closely with Uzi there. Uzi and I made two trips to Korea and Japan to talk about international finance. So we had a good chance to get to know each other. And on one trip, we stopped over from New York to San Francisco. And in San Francisco, there was a party or a gathering for people to meet us. And one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you. Well, I could see Uzi feeling, tightening up and getting very embarrassed and didn’t really have anything to say. But the United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base, not Israel. So of course, it wants to secure this military base. But when England first passed the act saying there should be in Israel the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies. When Israel was formed in the United Nations, the first country to recognize it was Stalin and Russia, who thought that Russians were going to have a major influence over Israel. And then after that, of course, when Truman came in, the military immediately saw that America was replacing England as the chief of the Near East. And that was even after the fight, the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. So from the United States, it’s not Israel’s wagging the American tail, just the opposite. You mentioned that America is supporting Israel. I don’t think America is supporting Israel at all, nor do most Israelis, nor do most Democrats. America is supporting Netanyahu. It’s supporting Likud, not Israel. The majority of Israelis, certainly the non-religious Israelis, the core population of Israel since its founding, is opposing Likud and its policies. And so what really is happening is that to the United States, Netanyahu is the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine. And the advantage of having such an unpleasant, opportunist, and corrupt person as Netanyahu, who is under indictment for his bribery and corruption, is precisely that all of the attention now of the whole world that is so appalled by the attacks going on in Gaza, they’re not blaming the United States. They’re blaming Israel. They’re blaming Netanyahu and Israel for it, when it’s the United States that has been sending plane load after plane load of bombs, of guns. There are 22,000 machine guns, automatic guns, that are banned for sale in the United States that America is sending for the settlers to use on the West Bank. So there’s a pretense of good cop, bad cop. You have Mr. Blinken telling Netanyahu, when you bomb hospitals, make sure you do it according to the rules of war. And when you kill 100,000 Gaza children, make sure it’s all legal and in the war. And when you talk about ethnic cleansing and driving a population out, make sure that it’s all done legal. Well, of course, it’s not the rules of war, and there are war crimes being committed, but the United States is pretending to tell Netanyahu and the Israeli government, use smaller bombs. Be more gentle when you bomb the children in the hospital, when actually this is all for show. The United States is trying to say, well, we’re only there to give help to an ally. The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf. Why are they there? President Biden and Congress say we are not going to have American troops fighting Hamas in Gaza. We’re not going to get involved. Well, if the troops are not going to get involved, why are they there? Well, we know what the American planes are doing. Yesterday, they bombed yet another airport and a fuel depot in Syria. They’re bombing Syria. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran. Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran. When it talks about Hezbollah, and is there going to be an intervention from Lebanon against northern Israel, they say Hezbollah are the Iranian puppets. Any time they talk about any Near Eastern leader, it’s really that all these leaders are puppets of Iran, just like in Ukraine and Central Europe, they talk about Hungary and other countries as all being puppets of Putin in Russia. Their focus, really – America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. Well, it hasn’t worked. Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead Nasrallah to finally say, okay, we can’t take it anymore. We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazians and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in. And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran. What we’re seeing in Gaza and the West Bank today is only the catalyst, the trigger for the fact that the neocons say we are never going to have a better chance than we have right now to conquer Iran. So this is the point for the showdown, that if America is to control Near Eastern oil, and by controlling Near Eastern oil, by bringing it under the US control, it can control the energy imports of much of the world. And therefore, this gives American diplomats the power to cut off oil and gas and to sanction any country that tries to go multipolar, any country that tries to resist US unipolar control. BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, I think you’re really hitting such an important point, which is how this is one of the most geostrategic regions of the world, especially when it comes to hydrocarbons. The entire global economy is still very heavily reliant on oil and gas, and especially considering the US is not part of OPEC, and especially now considering that OPEC has really expanded essentially to OPEC+ and now includes Russia. That means that Saudi Arabia and Russia essentially can help control global oil prices. And we’ve seen this really, in fact, in the United States in the past few years with the rise of consumer price inflation. We saw that the Biden administration was concerned about gas prices, in particular in the lead up to the midterm elections. And the Biden administration has been releasing a lot of oil from the strategic oil reserves of the United States. And we can also see these kinds of statements in particular when we go back and look at the Bush administration. There are numerous people involved in the Bush administration and the so-called “War on Terror” who openly talked about how important it was for Washington to dominate this region. And I’m really thinking of, in 2007, when the top US general and NATO commander Wesley Clark famously disclosed that the Bush administration had made plans to overthrow seven countries in five years. And those were countries in North Africa and West Asia. Specifically, he revealed in an interview with journalist Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that Washington’s plans were to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran: WESLEY CLARK: About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me. And one of the generals called me and he said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second”. I said, “Well, you’re too busy”. He said, “No, no”. He says, “We’ve made the decision; we’re going to war with Iraq”. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq, why?” He said, “I don’t know”. He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do”. So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no”. He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They’ve just made the decision to go to war with Iraq”. He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments”. And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail”. So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that”. He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, “I just got this down from upstairs”, meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office today, and he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran”. I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir”. I said, “Well, don’t show it to me”. And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” And he said, “Sorry, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!” AMY GOODMAN: I’m sorry, what did you say his name was? (laughs) WESLEY CLARK: I’m not going to give you his name. (laughs) AMY GOODMAN: So go through the countries again. WESLEY CLARK: Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and then back to Iran. BEN NORTON: And since then, we of course saw the U.S. war on Iraq. We of course saw the proxy war in Syria that still goes on in many ways. The U.S. is occupying one-third of Syrian territory, including the oil rich areas. And Trump himself, President Donald Trump, boasted in a 2020 interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he was leaving U.S. troops in Syria to take the oil: DONALD TRUMP: And then they say, “He left troops in Syria”. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. LAURA INGRAHAM: We’re not taking the oil. We’re not taking it. DONALD TRUMP: Well, maybe we will, maybe we won’t. LAURA INGRAHAM: They’re protecting the facilities. DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know, maybe we should take it. But we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil. So they say, “He left troops in Syria”. No, I got rid of all of them, other than we’re protecting the oil; we have the oil. BEN NORTON: We also saw the U.S. impose sanctions on Lebanon, which contributed to hyperinflation and the destruction of the Lebanese economy. And that was largely because Hezbollah is part of the government, and the U.S. has been pressuring the Lebanese government to create a new government without Hezbollah. We also saw, of course, that NATO destroyed the Libyan state in 2011. Somalia also has a failed state. And Sudan was divided in no small part thanks to the U.S. and Israel supporting South Sudan’s separatist movement on ethno-religious lines, using religious sectarianism. So if you look at the list of countries that Wesley Clark named in 2006, the seven countries in five years, again, that was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran; the only country that really has been able to maintain state stability, that has not been completely devastated by the United States, is Iran. Of course, it took longer than five years, but the U.S. was pretty successful. And of course Israel has played an important role in this U.S. goal to destabilize those governments in the region. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, let’s look and see how this was done. Remember after America was attacked on 9/11, there was a meeting at the White House, and everybody knew that the pilots were Saudi Arabians, and they knew that some of the pilots had been staying at the Saudi embassy in Los Angeles, I think, in the United States. But after 9/11, there was a cabinet meeting, and Rumsfeld said to the people there, look and find any link you can get to Iraq, forget Saudi Arabia, no problem, Iraq is the key. And he directed them to find it, and 9/11 became the excuse for attacking not Saudi Arabia, but Iraq, and going right on with it. Well, you needed a similar crisis in Libya. They said in Libya, there was some, I think, fundamentalists in the suburbs of one of the [cities], not the capital city, that were causing problems. And so you have to “protect” the innocent people from [Muammar Gadhafi], and you go in and grab all of their gold reserves, all of their money, and you take over the oil on behalf of France’s oil monopoly. Well, this is the role of the fighting in Gaza today. Netanyahu’s fight against Gaza is being used as the excuse for America moving its warships there, its submarines, and bombing, along with Israel, the Syrian airport so that the Syrians are not able to move weapons or any kind of military support either to Lebanon, to the west, or Iran, to the east. So it’s obvious that all of what we’re seeing is somehow to soften up public opinion for the fact that, well, just like we had to invade Iraq because of 9/11, we have to now finally fight and take out the oil refineries of Iran and their scientific institutes and any laboratories where they may be doing atomic research. And Iran realizes this. Last week, the Iranian press TV said that their defense minister says that if there’s any attack on Iran, whether by Israel or by anyone else, the U.S. and its foreign bases are going to be hit hard. Iran, Russia, China have all looked at the Gaza situation not as if it’s an Israeli action, but as if it’s the U.S. action. They all see exactly that it’s all about Iran, and the American press only says when it talks about Gaza or Hamas or Hezbollah or any other group, it’s always the Iranian tool so-and-so. They’re demonizing Iran in the same way that the neocons have demonized Russia to prepare for America declaring an undeclared war against Iran. And they may even declare war. Last night, on [November] 8, the Republicans had their presidential debate without Trump, and Nikki Haley said, you know, we’ve got to fight Iran, we’ve got to conquer it. And DeSantis of Florida said, yes, kill them all. He didn’t say who the them was. Was it Hamas? Was it everybody who lives in Gaza? Was it all of the Arabs in the Middle East? And we’re really seeing something very much like the Crusades here. It’s a real fight for who is going to control energy, because, again, the key, if you can control the world’s flow of energy, you can do to the whole world what the United States did to Germany last year by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. You can grind its industry to a halt, its chemical industry, its steelmaking industry, any of its energy-intensive industries, if countries do not agree to U.S. unipolar control. That’s why it wants to control these areas. Well, the wildcard here is Saudi Arabia. Well, in two days, I think you’re going to have the Iranian president visit Saudi Arabia, and we’re going to see what’s going to happen. But Saudi Arabia finds that while its role is key, Saudi Arabia could simply say we’re not going to export more oil until America pulls out of the Near East. But then all of Saudi Arabia’s monetary savings are invested in the U.S. The United States is holding the world hostage, not only by controlling its oil and gas and energy, but by controlling its finance. It’s like you have your money in a mafia bank or in Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency mutual fund. They can do whatever they want with it. So I think what would happen is it’s very unlikely that Saudi Arabia is ostensibly going to visibly break with the United States because the U.S. would hold it hostage. But I think what it would do would be what has been talked about ever since the 1960s, when similar problems came with Iran. And Iran’s ace in the hole has always been the ability to sink a ship in the Hormuz Strait, where the oil goes through a very narrow little strait, where if you sink a tanker there or a warship, it’s going to block all of the sea trade with Saudi Arabia. And that would certainly, number one, take Saudi Arabia off the hook for saying, we can’t help it. Of course, we’d love to export oil, but we can’t because the shipping lanes are all blocked because you, America, attacked Iran and they defended themselves by sinking the ship. So you can’t send your aircraft carriers and submarines to attack Iran. That’s very understandable. But the United States is causing a world crisis. Well, obviously, the United States knows that that’s going to happen because it’s been discussed literally for 50 years. Since I was at the Hudson Institute working on national security, it was being discussed what to do when Iran sinks the ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Well, the United States figures, okay, oil prices are going to go up. And if Iran fights back in this way, we then will have the power to do to the world what we did to Germany in 2022 when we cut off its oil. But in this case, we don’t take the blame. We’ll say, oh, we didn’t block the Saudi and Arab oil trade. It was that Iran that blocked it, and that’s why we’re going to bomb Iran, assuming that they can. So that, I think, is the contingency plan. And just as America had a contingency plan just like that, waiting for an opportunity, like 9-11, they needed a trigger, and Netanyahu has provided the trigger. And that’s why the United States has been backing Netanyahu. And of course, Iran says, well, we have the ability to really wipe out Israel. And in Congress, General Miley and the others have all said, well, we know that Iran could wipe out Israel. That’s why we have to attack Iran. But in attacking Iran, you send its missiles off to Israel, and again, Israel will end up being the Near Eastern equivalent of Ukraine. And that sort of is the plan, and I think a lot of Israelis see this, and they’re the ones who are worried and are opposing Netanyahu and trying to prevent him from triggering a whole set of military exchanges that Israel won’t be able to resist. And even though Iran, I’m sure they can bomb some places in Iran, but now that you have Russia, China, all supporting Iran through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, you’re having the lines being drawn very, very clearly. So it seems that this scenario is inevitable because Mearsheimer pointed out that it’s impossible to have a negotiated solution or settlement between Israel and Palestine. He said you can’t have a two-state solution because the Palestinian state is going to be like an Indian reservation in America, all sort of cut apart and isolated, not really a state. And you can’t have a single state because a single state is a theocratic state. It’s like, again, it’s like the United States in the Wild West in the 19th century. And I think the way to put it in perspective is to realize that what we’re seeing today in the attempt to split the world is very much like, excuse me, very much like what happened in the 12th and 13th century with the Crusades. BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, you raise a lot of very important points there. And I know you want to talk further about the Crusades and the historical analogy. And I think you made a really good point about the US empire standing in as the new Crusaders. But before you move away from the more contemporary political discussion, I wanted to highlight two very important points that you stressed. One is not only the hydrocarbon reserves in the Middle East, which are so important for the world economy and in the US attempt to maintain control over oil and gas supplies and in particular energy costs. There’s also an election coming up in 2024, and the US is concerned about gas prices and inflation. And of course, energy inputs are a key factor in inflation. But furthermore, this region is strategic because of trade routes. Of course, the Suez Canal, according to looking at data here from the World Economic Forum, 30% of the world’s shipping container volume transits through the Suez Canal and 12% of all global trade consists of goods that pass through the Suez Canal. And we saw this in 2021 when there was this big media scandal when a US ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. And this, of course, also came at the time when the world was coming out of the pandemic and there were all these supply chain shocks. So we can see how sensitive the global economy is to even small issues in the global supply chain. And when you talk about shipping routes, we’re not only talking about the Suez Canal, we’re also talking about in the Red Sea toward the south. You also have the Bab al-Mandab. This is a very important strait off of the coast of Yemen. And in the war in Yemen, starting in 2014 and 2015, a lot of the fighting back by the U.S. in this war was in the south, off of the Bab al-Mandab, because this is such an important strait where every single day millions of barrels of oil flow through this strait. And this also reminded me, Michael, you were talking about the historical context. And if you go back to 1956, Israel invaded Egypt. And why was that? Israel invaded Egypt because Egypt’s leftist president, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. And at that moment, what was very interesting is that the U.K. and France were strongly supporting Israel in this war against Egypt because they were concerned also about Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez. At that moment, the U.S. wasn’t as deeply pro-Israel as it later became. Of course, in 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel attacked the neighboring Arab states and occupied part of Egypt, the Sinai, and then also what became Gaza. Israel occupied the Golan Heights of Syria, which remain illegally occupied Syrian territory today. And Israel occupied the West Bank, what we call the West Bank today. But another important detail about that is, after the 1967 war, Israel increasingly became much more of a U.S. ally. Whereas the first generation of Israeli leaders were much more, many of them were European, whereas the later generations of Israelis have been really American. I mean, someone like Netanyahu, he is an American. Netanyahu was raised in the United States. He went to high school in Philadelphia. He went to high school with Reggie Jackson, by the way. He spent his most formative years in the U.S. He went to college at MIT. He then worked in Boston, and he worked with many Republicans that he became friends with, like Mitt Romney, like Donald Trump. And then when he went back to Israel, he was sent to the U.S. to be a diplomat in the United States. So the new generation of Israeli leaders is much more American, essentially. And another detail you mentioned about Iran is so important, because, up until the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Iran of the Shah, the U.S.-backed monarchy, was such an important ally in the region. And in fact, Saudi Arabia and Iran were famously referred to as the twin pillars. Saudi Arabia was the west pillar and Iran was the east pillar. The U.S. used to try to dominate this region, of course, with the support of Israel as well. Well, with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the U.S. lost that crucial east pillar, which meant that Israel became even more important from the perspective of the U.S. imperialism to maintain control over this region. So I just wanted to mention those details of the strategic importance of the trade routes, like the Bab al-Mandab Strait, like the Suez Canal, and also the fact that the Iranian Revolution fundamentally shifted U.S. policy in the region and made Israel even more important from the perspective of U.S. imperialism. And now we’re in a moment where, as you mentioned, the U.S. is even losing control over Saudi Arabia. So it’s losing both of its pillars, which is, again, why Washington is so desperate in propping up Israel, despite the fact that the entire region is completely against these settler-colonialist policies and these ethnic cleansing policies that Israel is carrying out right now, as the entire world is watching. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to U.S. diplomats, what you call the support of Israel is really the support of the U.S.’ ability to militarily control the rest of the Near East. It’s all about oil. America is not giving all this money to Israel because it loves Israel, but because Israel is the military base from which the United States can attack Syria, Iraq, and Iran and Lebanon. So it’s a military base. And of course, it can frame this in terms of pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish policy, but this is only for the public relations view of the State Department. If American strategy is based on energy in the Near East, then Israel is only a means to this end. It’s not the end itself. And that’s why the United States needed to have an aggressive Israeli government. You can look at Netanyahu as being, in a way, a U.S. puppet, very much like Zelensky. Their positions are identical in their reliance on the United States against the majority of their own people. So you keep talking about America’s support of Israel. It’s not supporting Israel at all. It rejects the majority of Israelis. It supports the Israeli military, not the Israeli society or the culture, have nothing to do with Judaism at all. This is pure military politics, and that’s how I’ve always heard it discussed among the military and national security people. So you want to be careful not to be taken in by the cover story. There’s one other means of control, I think, that we should mention, and that is, you’ve had in the last month or so all sorts of statements by the United States that as soon as Russia conquers the Ukraine and solidifies its control, it’s going to bring up claims against war crimes, crimes against humanity, against Russia. America is trying to use the crooked court system. The International Criminal Court is a branch of the Pentagon in the State Department, and it’s the kangaroo court. The idea is that somehow the kangaroo court can give America judgments against Putin as they’ve declared him to be arrested anywhere he goes of people who respect the kangaroo court, and they can have all sorts of sanctions against Russian property elsewhere. Well, look at how on earth are they going to justify these claims of war crimes against Russia if in the view of what’s happening between Israel and Gaza right now, and in fact, the arms and the bombs that are being used against Gaza are U.S. bombs, U.S. arms. The U.S. is fueling it all. How on earth can the United States not accuse itself of war crimes on the basis of what it’s trying to accuse Russia of? Part of the splitting of the world that you’re going to see, whether or not the United States can actually bomb Iran, is going to be a whole setup of parallel courts and an isolation, not only of the United States, but as Europe is coming in. Basically, there’s a fight for who is going to control the world right now, and that’s why I mentioned the Crusades. I want to say I’ve been writing a history of the evolution of financial policy. I’ve done two volumes already, one on the Bronze Age Near East, …and forgive them their debts, and the other on classical antiquity, The Collapse of Antiquity. I’m now working on the third volume, which covers the Crusades to World War I. It’s really all about an attempt by Rome, that had hardly any economic power at all, to take over all of the five Christian bishoprics that were made. Constantinople was really the new Rome. That was the head of Orthodox Christianity. The emperor of Constantinople was really the emperor over the whole Christian world. It was followed by Antioch, Alexandria, and finally Jerusalem. The Crusades really began, before they attacked the Near East it began in the 11th century. And Rome was finally being attacked by the Norman armies that were coming in and grabbing parts of France and had moved into Italy. So the papacy made a deal with the Norman warlords, and it said, “We will give you the divine right to rule, we will recognize you as the Christian king, and we will excommunicate all of your enemies, but you have to pledge feudal fealty, loyalty to us, and you have to let us appoint your bishops and control the churches, which control most of your land, and you have to pay us tribute”. The papacy all during the 10th century was controlled by a small group of aristocratic families around Rome that treated the papacy just as they treat the local political mayor of a city or the local administrators. The church was just sort of run by a family. It had nothing to do with Christian religion at all. It was just, this is the church property, and one of our relatives, we’re always going to have as the pope. Well, the popes didn’t have any troops in the late 11th century, and so they got the troops by making a deal with the Normans, and they decided, okay, we’re going to have an ideal, we’re going to mount the Crusades, and we’re going to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”, the Muslims. Well, the problem is that Jerusalem didn’t need a rescue, because all throughout the medieval world, throughout Islam, no matter what the religion of the governing classes was, there was a religious tolerance, and that continued for hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire. There was only one group that was intolerant, and that was the Romans, that said, “We have to control all of Christianity, in order to prevent these aristocratic Italian families from taking over again”. And so they mounted the Crusades, nominally against Jerusalem, but they ended up sacking Constantinople, and two centuries later, by 1291, the Christians lost in Acre. The whole Crusade against the Near East failed. I think you can see the parallel that I’m going to be drawing. So most of the Crusades were not fought against Islam, because Islam was too strong. The Crusades were fought against other Christians. And the fight of Roman Christianity was against the original Christianity for itself, as it existed over the last 10 centuries. Well, you’re having something like that today. Just as Rome appointed the Normans as feudal rulers, William the Conqueror in Sicily, the U.S. appoints Zelensky, supports Netanyahu, supports client oligarchs in Russia, supports Latin American dictators. So you have a U.S. view of the world that is not only unipolar, but in order to have unipolar U.S. control of the world, the U.S. has to be in charge of treating any foreign state, any foreign president as a feudal serf, basically, that they owe feudal loyalty to the United States’ sponsors. And just as you had the Inquisition formed in the 12th century, really, to enforce this obedience to Rome as opposed to independent southern France, and independent Italy, and Arab science in Spain, you have today the U.S. using the National Endowment for Democracy, and all of the organizations controlled by Victoria Nuland with her cookies, to support things. Well, you’re having the whole strategy of the Roman takeover, how it was going to take over other countries, how it was going to prevent other countries from becoming independent of Rome, is almost sentence for sentence what you get in American national security reports, how to control other countries. And that’s really the fight that we’re seeing there. And against that, you’re finding the fight of other countries, the global majority. But in this case, whereas Constantinople was looted in 1204 and sort of destroyed by the Fourth Crusade, Russia, and China, and Iran and the other countries have not been looted. The only thing that the United States can do right now is it’s setting up this military plan to attack Iran. What is the role going to be of, for instance, India? The attack on Iran and on oil is at the same time an attack on the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, the whole attempt to control transportation, not only oil, but transportation by the global majority for each other’s mutual growth, mutual gain, mutual trade. And the United States is trying to have an alternative plan for all of this that would run from India, essentially largely through Israel, and making a cut right across Gaza, which is one of the big problems that are being discussed now, to the Israeli control of Gaza, which would control its offshore oil and gas. So you’re having the wild cards in the U.S. plan, India, Saudi Arabia, what will it do, and Turkey, because Turkey also has an interest in this oil and gas. And if the Islamic countries decide that they’re really under attack, and this attack by the Christian West against Islam is really a fight to the death, then Turkey will join with Saudi Arabia and with all of the other countries, the Shiites, and the Sunnis, and the Alawites will join together and say, what we have in common is the Islamic religion. That is really going to be essentially the extension of America’s fight against China and Russia. So what we’re seeing, I’m going to try to summarize now, what we’re really seeing is having fought Russia to the last Ukrainian, and threatening to fight Iran to the last Israeli. The United States is trying to send arms to Taiwan to say, wouldn’t you like to fight to the last Taiwanese against China? And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world. It’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control. That’s how Rome used the Norman armies to conquer southern Italy, England, and Yugoslavia. Israel, and what is in the news over the whole attacks in Gaza, is only the opening stage, the trigger for this war, just as the shooting in Sarajevo started World War I in Serbia started everything. BEN NORTON: Well, you raised so many interesting points, Michael, and I think your analysis is very fresh and unique and very insightful. I wish we had more time to go into some of these topics, but we’ve already been speaking for about an hour. So I think we’re going to wrap up here. But I do want to thank you, Michael, for joining us. And of course, we’ll be back very soon for more analysis. For people who are interested, I actually have interviewed Michael. I did an interview recently on classical antiquity, and Rome and Greece. And he has also written about the history of debt up through the creation of Christianity in his book And Forgive Them Their Debts. And now he is working on this political, economic, materialist history of the Crusades. MICHAEL HUDSON: I didn’t realize when I began the book in the 1980s, drafting it, I didn’t realize how critical the Roman papacy was, and how similar it was to the State Department, and CIA, and the blob today in its plans for world conquest. BEN NORTON: Well, I’m sure in the future we will have many opportunities to discuss that research. Of course, for people who want to get more of Michael’s very important analysis, you should check out the show that he co-hosts here with friend of the show, Radhika Desai, and that is Geopolitical Economy Hour. If you go to our website, geopoliticaleconomy.com, or if you go to our YouTube channel, you can find a playlist with all of the different episodes of Geopolitical Economy Hour. So thanks again, Michael, and we’ll definitely have you back very soon. MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be here. Thank you.

Write an article about: Only 4 of 55 African leaders attend Zelensky call, showing neutrality on Ukraine and Russia. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

African Union, food, Russia, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, wheat

France and Germany pressured African Union leaders for months to join a brief Zoom call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. 51 of 55 African heads of state (93%) boycotted the meeting, showing clear neutrality over the Western proxy war with Russia. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) Western governments have tried to rally the nations of Africa to join their war on Russia. But the vast majority of the continent has ignored their pressure campaign. For months, Ukraine attempted to organize a video conference between the African Union and Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky. France and Germany put heavy pressure on African governments to attend the Zoom call, which was held on June 20. The conference ended up being a total failure, however. The heads of state of just four of the 55 members of the African Union joined the meeting. In other words, 93% of the leaders of the African continent did not attend the video conference with Zelensky. This was a clear sign of Africa’s overwhelming neutrality in the proxy war between the West and Russia. France’s major newspaper Le Monde described Zelensky’s video call as “an address that the African Union (AU) has delayed for as long as possible and has been keen to keep discreet, almost secret.” Ukraine had tried to organize the conference since April, but the AU had repeatedly pushed it back. Le Monde noted that “the organization of the simple video message illustrates the tense relationships between Mr. Zelensky and the leaders of the continent,” who are “sticking to a neutral position.” Citing an internal source, The Africa Report identified the very few African heads of state who attended the call as Senegal’s President Macky Sall, Côte d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara, and the Republic of the Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso. Also at the video conference was Mohamed al-Menfi, the leader of the Libyan Presidential Council, which is recognized by some countries as a legitimate government, although this is disputed by many nations, and Libya has remained territorially divided since a 2011 NATO war destroyed the central state. At the meeting with Zelensky, these three or four heads of state were joined by Moussa Faki, a politician from Chad who serves as chair of the African Union, and some lower level diplomats of other countries. The African Union apparently tried to keep the conference as quiet as possible. It did not post anything about the call on its official website. It did not tweet about the meeting either. The only official recognition of the call came from Faki, in a lone tweet, in which he cautiously “reiterated the AU position of the urgent need for dialogue to end the conflict to allow peace to return to the Region and to restore global stability.” Ukrainian president @ZelenskyyUa addressed the @_AfricanUnion Assembly today. We reiterated the AU position of the urgent need for dialogue to end the conflict to allow peace to return to the Region and to restore global stability. pic.twitter.com/1RaIIp2UbC — Moussa Faki Mahamat (@AUC_MoussaFaki) June 20, 2022 The United States and European Union frequently claim that they are acting on behalf of the “international community,” but events like this demonstrate that when Washington and Brussels say international community, they actually just mean the roughly 15% of the global population in the West and their loyal allies in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. Multipolarista detailed in a report in March how the vast majority of the world’s population, which resides in the Global South, has remained neutral over the Western proxy war in Ukraine. Countries with some of the largest populations on Earth, such as China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Mexico, and Vietnam, have remained neutral. Many more nations in the Global South, such as South Africa, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Eritrea, have openly blamed NATO and the United States for causing the war in Ukraine. Global South nations representing the majority of the world's population have either blamed US/NATO for the Ukraine war or are neutral, including:-China-India-Pakistan-Brazil-Ethiopia-Bangladesh-Congo-Iran-South Africa-Mexico-Tanzania-Vietnamhttps://t.co/rZZtsExxio — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2022 Establishment British newspaper The Guardian, which is closely linked to UK intelligence agencies, published an article in March reluctantly acknowledging that many African countries “remember Moscow’s support for liberation from colonial rule, and a strong anti-imperialist feeling remains.” The report noted that a significant number of African leaders are “calling for peace but blaming Nato’s eastward expansion for the war, complaining of western ‘double standards’ and resisting all calls to criticise Russia.” It conceded that nations like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique, “are still ruled by parties that were supported by Moscow during their struggles for liberation from colonial or white supremacist rule.” Russia today also has important trade relations with Africa. As one of the world’s top producers of wheat, Russia is a significant source of food for the continent. While food insecurity is an endemic problem in formerly colonized nations in Africa that were ravaged by centuries of Western imperialism, the United States has threatened to make this crisis even worse. The New York Times reported that the US government is pressuring food-insecure countries in Africa not to buy Russian wheat.

Write an article about: China forgives 23 loans for 17 African countries, expands ‘win-win’ trade and infrastructure projects. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

África, African Union, China, debt, Wang Yi

China is forgiving 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries, after already cancelling $3.4 billion and restructuring $15 billion of debt from 2000-2019. Beijing pledged more infrastructure projects and offered favorable trade deals in a “win-win” model of “mutually beneficial cooperation.” The Chinese government has announced that it is forgiving 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations, while pledging to deepen its collaboration with the continent. This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructuring of around $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. While Beijing has a repeated history of forgiving loans like this, Western governments have made baseless, politically motivated accusations that China uses “debt-trap diplomacy” in the Global South. The United States has turned Africa into a battleground in its new cold war on China and Russia. And Washington has weaponized dubious claims of Chinese “debt traps” to try to demonize Beijing for its substantial infrastructure projects on the continent. For its part, China has pushed back against the US new cold war. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a meeting with leaders from various African countries and the African Union on August 18. In the conference, Wang condemned the West’s “zero-sum Cold War mentality.” He instead proposed a model based on “multi-party cooperation” with Africa that brings “win-win results” for all sides. “What Africa would welcome is mutually beneficial cooperation for the greater well-being of the people, not major-country rivalry for geopolitical gains,” he said. Wang revealed that Beijing will support the African Union in its efforts to join the G20. The foreign minister also announced that “China will waive the 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries that had matured by the end of 2021.” ☑️ China will waive 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries that matured by the end of 2021. ☑️ China is prepared to rechannel its $10bn SDR in IMF to Africa. ☑️ China has decided to provide new food assistance to 17 African countries in need this year. — Chinese Mission to UN (@Chinamission2un) August 18, 2022 Beijing pledged to strengthen trade with Africa, and has made agreements with 12 countries on the continent to remove tariffs for 98% of the products they export to China, increasing the competitiveness of African goods. Wang said Beijing will continue to provide food, economic, and military aid to Africa, while offering assistance in the fight against covid-19. Emphasizing the importance of “development cooperation,” China offered billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure projects as “a strong boost to Africa’s industrialization process.” Africa plays an important role in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure project aimed at interconnecting the Global South and moving the center of the world economy back east. “In the face of the various forms of hegemonic and bullying practices, China and Africa have stood with each other shoulder to shoulder,” Wang stressed, calling to “safeguard international fairness and justice.” State Councilor & FM Wang Yi chaired the Coordinators’ Meeting on the Implementation of the Follow-up Actions of the 8th #FOCAC Ministerial Conference. As Wang Yi stated, China is making every effort to deliver its commitments to Africa despite external difficulties. pic.twitter.com/1C0rr0xq7Z — Chinese Mission to UN (@Chinamission2un) August 18, 2022 China’s comments and promises to deepen “mutually beneficial cooperation” with Africa could hardly have been any more different from those made by top US diplomats. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, visited Uganda and Ghana in the first week of August. There, she threatened the continent, telling African nations they cannot do trade with Russia, or they will be violating Western sanctions. Thomas-Greenfield warned in Uganda, “As for sanctions that we have on Russia – for example, oil sanctions – if a country decides to engage with Russia where there are sanctions, then they are breaking those sanctions; they’re breaking our sanctions and in some cases they’re breaking UN sanctions with other countries, and we caution countries not to break those sanctions because then, if they do, they stand the chance of having actions taken against them for breaking those sanctions.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken subsequently visited South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda from August 7 to 11, as part of a trip aimed at weakening Africa’s relations with China and Russia. The latter statement was made in Uganda and, lo and behold, it dictated Uganda’s choices. They are not buying cheap Russian fuel, despite a cost-of-living crisis, to avoid being sanctioned by the US. https://t.co/zUxb67JEHc — Eugene Puryear (@EugenePuryear) August 9, 2022 One of Washington’s most powerful weapons in its information war on China is its evidence-free accusations that Beijing is supposedly trapping African nations in debt. Yet as Multipolarista previously reported in an analysis of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, Western governments, financial institutions, banks, and vulture funds are responsible for the vast majority of debt that Global South countries are trapped in. The UK government’s own state media outlet BBC investigated allegations of “debt trap diplomacy” in Sri Lanka and reluctantly concluded that they are false. “The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC reporter Ben Chu said in a dispatch. Sri Lanka owes 81% of its external debt to US and European financial institutions and Western allies Japan and India. China owns just 10%. But Washington blames imaginary "Chinese debt traps" for the nation's crisis, as it negotiates a 17th IMF bailout.https://t.co/Tk49cuLvNS — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 11, 2022 Similarly, mainstream academics at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School acknowledged in Washington’s establishment magazine The Atlantic that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.” Scholar Deborah Brautigam wrote that the US government-sponsored narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.” “Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” she added. Brautigam found that, between 2000 and 2019, China cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced around $15 billion of debt in Africa, renegotiating at least 26 individual loans. This past debt forgiveness is in addition to the 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries that Beijing has announced it will pardon.

Write an article about: US/France threaten intervention in resource-rich Niger: Fears of war in West Africa. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, Burkina Faso, Caracazo, Carlos Andrés Pérez, ECOWAS, France, Gamal Abdel Nasser, gold, Hugo Chávez, Ibrahim Traoré, Libya, Mali, Muammar Gadhafi, NATO, Niger, nuclear energy, oil, Peru, Thomas Sankara, uranium, Venezuela, West Africa

The US and France have threatened intervention to re-install a pro-Western regime in Niger, which produces uranium needed for nuclear energy, has untapped oil reserves, and hosts strategic US drone bases and French troops. This follows coups led by nationalist, anti-colonial military officers in West Africa. The US and France have threatened foreign intervention to re-install a pro-Western regime in Niger. Niger is a major producer of gold and uranium, the latter of which is needed for European nuclear energy. The country has significant oil reserves to which foreign corporations have wanted access. It also hosts large US drone bases. These Western threats follow coups led by nationalist, anti-colonial military officers in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, whose governments have warned that intervention would be considered an act of war, and could thus set off a regional conflict. West Africa is rich in natural resources. It is also very strategic for the United States and France. Almost all of West Africa was colonized by France, which committed brutal atrocities in the region. Still today, France maintains neocolonial policies, effectively controlling West African economies by forcing them to use the CFA franc as their national currency. Senegalese development economist Ndongo Samba Sylla described the CFA franc as “a colonial currency, born of France’s need to foster economic integration among the colonies under its administration, and thus control their resources, economic structures and political systems”. Paris dictates the monetary policies and even holds much of the foreign exchange reserves of numerous West African nations, including Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. The CFA franc is a “a barrier to industrialisation and structural transformation” in these countries, explained Sylla, who characterized it as a “neocolonial device that continues to destroy any prospect of economic development in user nations”. The United States has one of its largest and most important drone bases in Niger: the Air Base 201, which cost $110 million to build, and an additional $20-30 million per year to maintain – in one of the poorest countries on Earth. Niger is geostrategically important for the Pentagon’s Africa strategy. It is located in the middle of the Sahel, a region with a lot of US and French military activity, where thousands of troops are stationed on a regular basis. Washington uses its drone bases in Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, to project military dominance in North and West Africa, in coordination with the forces that US Africa Command, or AFRICOM, has deployed across the continent. If Washington loses its ally in Niger, the new nationalist military government may try to close the foreign military bases and kick out the roughly 1000 US soldiers in the country. Niger’s historically subordinate relationship with the Western powers has not brought the Nigerien people any prosperity. The country is a major producer of gold, but more than 40% of Nigeriens live in extreme poverty. Niger is also one of the world’s largest producers of uranium. This radioactive material is crucial for nuclear energy in Europe, especially in France, where roughly one-third of electricity comes from nuclear power. Less known is that Niger also has sizeable oil reserves. The market intelligence firm S&P Global Commodity Insights warned that the July coup in Niger “could jeopardize the African country’s plans to become a significant oil producer and exporter”. It described Niger as a “key Western ally and security partner and one of the world’s biggest uranium producers”, adding that the “country is believed to be sitting on a billion barrels of crude reserves, according to the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization”. S&P Global Commodity Insights noted that Niger has been building an oil pipeline with southern neighbor Benin, to transport crude exports out into the Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean. The country “is on the verge of a long-awaited production surge”, and an oil industry executive described the pipeline as a “game changer”. A former State Department official complained to the market intelligence firm that, following coups led by nationalist military officers in Mali and Burkina Faso, “the governments abruptly nationalized the gold mines, pushing industrial giants out”. Soon after the coup in Niger, there were similar reports that the nationalist military government decided to block exports of uranium and gold to the West. The prospect of a foreign military intervention in Niger and potentially other West African nations is truly on the table. It is by no means an empty threat. This is a region where there were very recent examples of Western interventions. In 2013 and 2014, France launched a military intervention in Mali, a neighbor of Niger. In a 2011 regime-change war, NATO – led by the United States, with the support of France, other European nations, and Canada – destroyed the state of Libya, killing the North African nation’s longtime revolutionary leader, Muammar Gadhafi. Still today, a decade later, Libya has no unified central government. The country has been in a state of destructive civil war. Now there is a real possibility that the Western powers that destabilized and devastated Libya could expand this violent chaos to the west and to the south, to the Sahel region. Some of the nationalist military leaders who have taken power in West Africa are invoking the historical legacy of anti-colonial movements. In Niger’s neighbor Burkina Faso, the new president, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism, quoting Che Guevara and allying with the leftist governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba. Traoré is inspired by Burkina Faso’s former Marxist leader Thomas Sankara, a pan-Africanist military officer who launched a popular revolution in the 1980s. Traoré even appointed as his prime minister a former close ally of Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, who he says will oversee a “refoundation of the nation”. Burkina Faso’s new president condemns imperialism, quotes Che Guevara, allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba At the same time, however, these governments are highly unstable, and have risen to power following not just one but a series of coups in recent years. Some of these putsches were led by officers trained by the US or French militaries. Some of the coups have installed pro-Western military governments. But others have been launched by nationalist military officers who oppose French neocolonialism and US imperialism and have asserted more sovereign, independent policies. The leaders of the new government in Niger publicly warned that France is plotting military intervention. Paris is looking “for ways and means to intervene militarily in Niger”, the authorities said, stating that French officials met with the chief of staff of Niger’s national guard “to obtain the necessary political and military authorisation”, The Guardian reported. The British newspaper described Niger’s toppled president, Bazoum, as “an ally of western powers”. Along with Paris, the US State Department is actively coordinating with Bazoum and plotting to put its ally back in power. I spoke to Nigerien President Bazoum today to reiterate that the United States remains committed to the restoration of Niger’s democratically-elected government, and that his and his family’s safety are paramount. — Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) August 3, 2023 To give supposed “multilateral” cover to their plans for intervention, the US and France have been working closely with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Reuters reported that ECOWAS and “West African defence chiefs have drawn up a plan for military action if Niger’s coup is not overturned”. The UK-based news outlet emphasized, “Given its uranium and oil riches and pivotal role in the war with Islamist rebels in the Sahel region, Niger has strategic significance for the United States, China, Europe and Russia”. ECOWAS imposed sanctions on Niger, and the country’s southern neighbor Nigeria has begun establishing a de facto blockade. Niger previously received roughly 70% of its electricity from Nigeria. But the Nigerian government, which is closely allied with the West, has now cut off that power. Foreign intervention may be easier said than done, however, because Niger’s neighbors have come to its defense. The governments in Burkina Faso and Mali released a joint statement stating that “any military intervention against Niger would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali”. The West African nations warned that the “disastrous consequences of a military intervention in Niger … could destabilise the entire region”, France 24 reported. Burkina Faso and Mali also condemned the “illegal, illegitimate and inhumane sanctions” that Western governments have imposed “against the people and authorities of Niger”. Niger’s pro-Western leader Mohamed Bazoum with French President Emmanuel Macron in February 2023 In late July 2023, when Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown, the United States and France immediately sprung into action, condemning his ouster and demanding that the pro-Western leader be reinstated. Many African activists highlighted the overwhelming hypocrisy of this response and of Western rhetoric about promoting “democracy”. In the past century, the US and European powers have legitimized, supported, and even organized dozens of coups across the Global South, in order to advance their economic and geopolitical interests. There are myriad examples of democratically elected governments led by anti-colonial leaders who were overthrown and in some cases killed by the Western powers. One of the most well-known historical episodes was that of Patrice Lumumba, the founder of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Congo had been a Belgian colony. Under brutal King Leopold II, Belgium committed genocide there, killing off half of the Congolese population. Lumumba helped lead an independence movement against European colonialism, and was democratically elected the DRC’s first prime minister in 1960. US President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba. With help from the spy agency, Belgium sponsored a coup to remove him. The democratically elected Congolese leader was kidnapped and murdered. His body was subsequently dissolved in acid. Just a few teeth were left behind. This is how Western governments treated anti-colonial leaders during the first cold war. They sponsored coups to remove them and subsequently installed and propped up right-wing, pro-imperialist dictatorships that ruled for decades with an iron fist. Patrice Lumumba The Western response to the July 2023 coup in Niger was completely different. Immediately, the French government denounced the new nationalist government led by the military. Emmanuel Macron’s office vowed a strong and swift response, writing, “The President will not tolerate any attack against France and its interests”, specifically emphasizing its business interests in Niger. While sponsoring unelected coup regimes in Pakistan and Peru, the US State Department also quickly released a statement condemning the new military government in Niger. “The United States welcomes and commends the strong leadership of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Heads of State and Government to defend constitutional order in Niger”, it wrote. Referring to Niger’s toppled pro-Western leader, Washington called “for the immediate release of President Mohamed Bazoum and his family and the restoration of all state functions”. The US added that it “welcomes the dispatch of the special representative of the ECOWAS Chair to Niger” and “will remain actively engaged with ECOWAS and West African leaders on next steps to preserve Niger’s hard-earned democracy”. By instrumentalizing ECOWAS to give “multilateral” cover to an intervention in Niger, the US and France are returning to the strategy they employed when they used NATO to wage war on Libya in 2011. At the moment, the Western powers are also doing the same to justify another military intervention in Haiti, re-creating an international alliance ostensibly led by Kenya to occupy the Caribbean nation. One of the principal economic interests that Western powers have in Niger is its uranium. The anti-poverty organization Oxfam published a report in 2013 detailing how France was making a killing profiting off of the uranium in Niger, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. The people of Niger, who are known as Nigeriens (not to be confused with Nigerians from Nigeria), have seen almost no benefits from this uranium extraction. Oxfam cited a Nigerien activist who noted, “In France, one out of every three light bulbs is lit thanks to Nigerien uranium. In Niger, nearly 90% of the population has no access to electricity. This situation cannot continue”. “It is incomprehensible that Niger, the world’s fourth-largest uranium producer and a strategic supplier for Areva and France, is not taking advantage of the revenue from this extraction and remains one of the poorest countries on the planet”, an Oxfam researcher added. The statistics have slightly changed in the decade since that report was published. As of 2023, Niger is the world’s seventh-biggest producer of uranium. But many Western media outlets have noted with fear how important Niger is for European energy stability. “Niger coup sparks concerns about French, EU uranium dependency”, Politico warned. “Niger supplies 15 percent of France’s uranium needs and accounts for a fifth of the EU’s total uranium imports”, the media outlet reported. “In 2021, Niger was the EU’s top uranium supplier, followed by Kazakhstan and Russia”. Politico added that “the coup in Niger could be a challenge for Europe’s uranium needs in the longer term, just as the continent is trying to phase out dependency on Russia, another top supplier of uranium used in European nuclear plants”. Nuclear energy is relatively important in Europe. In 2022, it made up around 10% of EU energy consumption, slightly down from a peak of nearly 14% in 2002. In France, nuclear energy is even more significant. Since the 1980s, nuclear has become one of its top energy sources. By the 2000s, France’s nuclear power exceeded its use of oil, peaking at nearly 40% in 2005. Nuclear still remained strong in 2021, at 36.5% of total energy consumption (compared to 31% for oil). Since the coup in Niger, both France and EU leadership have insisted they will not be affected, stating that they have enough uranium in their reserves to last a few years. But if the nationalist government remains in power in Niger and abides by its alleged pledge to cut off uranium exports, Europe could face economic consequences. This also comes at a complicated moment for Europe, which has pledged to boycott Russian oil exports and reduce imports of Russian gas. Russia is one of the world’s top producers of both oil and gas. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the imposition of harsh Western sanctions, Russia was the EU’s biggest energy partner, and the number one provider of oil and gas to many member states. Some EU officials had proposed increasing nuclear energy production to end the region’s reliance on Russia. But now one of the top providers of the uranium the EU needs for that nuclear energy has seen a coup led by nationalists who oppose Europe’s neocolonial policies. This also comes at a moment in which several countries in Europe are going into recession. Germany, the manufacturing superpower at the heart of the EU, is deindustrializing at breakneck speed, largely because it has lost major sources of the cheap energy that its heavy industry needs. In addition to foreign economic designs on West Africa, the US military has a massive footprint on the region – particularly in Niger, where it operates multiple bases. A 2019 report in PBS noted an increasing US military presence in Africa, revealing that the Pentagon had nearly 800 personnel stationed in Niger. (That figure later rose to roughly 1000.) General Thomas Waldhauser, the commander of US military forces in Africa, described Niger’s pro-Western government as “a good partner in a very, very bad neighborhood”. PBS indicated that the US military was creating a base in Agadez, Niger, which “will be the largest installation Air Force personnel have ever built”. “The U.S. has been operating drone missions out of another base in Niger’s capital since 2013”, the media outlet wrote, adding, “The CIA is also believed to be using another drone base in Northeastern Niger”. Investigative journalist Nick Turse, reporting in 2023, described this US facility in Niger, Air Base 201, as “the linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa and a key part of America’s wide-ranging intelligence, surveillance, and security efforts in the region”. Turse wrote in The Intercept: Built at a price tag of $110 million and maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million each year, AB 201 serves as a Sahelian surveillance hub that’s home to Space Force personnel involved in high-tech satellite communications, Joint Special Operations Air Detachment facilities, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — that scour the surrounding region day and night for terrorist activity. A high-security haven, Air Base 201 sits within a 25-kilometer “base security zone” and is protected by fences, barriers, upgraded air-conditioned guard towers with custom-made firing ports, and military working dogs. What is striking is the neocolonial symbolism of the United States maintaining these high-tech military facilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the majority of the population doesn’t even have access to electricity. US soldiers at Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger in 2019 Before the July 2023 coup, Washington saw the Nigerien government as a key ally in its attempt to isolate China and Russia. Antony Blinken took a historic trip to Niger in March, in the first-ever visit by a US secretary of state. Democracy Now noted that this trip was “part of the Biden administration’s growing competition with China and Russia”. “Niger is one of the last strongholds of U.S. security partnerships in the region”, Brown University researcher Stephanie Savell told the media outlet. Blinken’s visit came just a few months after the State Department’s December 2022 US-Africa Leaders Summit, which brought African heads of state to Washington, DC to meet with Biden. The State Department wrote that the summit was “rooted in this recognition that Africa is a key geopolitical player” – in other words, Washington sees the continent as highly strategic in its new cold war against China and Russia. One of the key weaknesses of the new nationalist governments in West Africa is that they came to power through coups, not popular revolutions. This means they are less stable, and if history is any indicator, could be toppled in subsequent coups. Although most coups in modern history have led to the installation of repressive right-wing regimes, almost always allied with Western imperial interests, there is a historical precedent of some leftist leaders coming to power through coups. One of the most famous revolutionary leaders in the history of Africa, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, helped lead a coup in 1952, as part of the progressive Free Officers Movement, which opposed both monarchism and European colonialism. Nasser was a left-wing nationalist who nationalized many of the economic interests owned by foreign colonial powers, implementing some socialist policies. Nasser also maintained an independent foreign policy, and was a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. Major co-founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (from left to right): India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito The Egyptian leader helped inspire revolutionary anti-colonial and Arab nationalist movements not only in West Asia, but also in North Africa. In 1969, there was another coup led by a left-wing military leader, Muammar Gadhafi, who named his own anti-colonial, anti-monarchist Free Officers Movement after that of Egypt. Like Nasser, Gadhafi implemented socialist policies, using the oil riches in Libya to benefit the people of the country. Gadhafi created robust social programs, drastically expending public investment in healthcare, education, and housing. Under Gadhafi, Libya had the highest living standards out of all of the African continent. Libya’s President Muammar al-Gaddafi (left) with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdal Nasser (right) in 1969 Gadhafi’s Libya likewise supported revolutionary struggles around the world, from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to Irish Republicans resisting the British empire, to indigenous Palestinians fighting against Israeli colonialism. But in 2011, Gadhafi was killed in a NATO war. When extremist Salafi-jihadist rebels sponsored by the West brutally murdered the Libyan leader with a bayonet, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gloated, live on TV, “We came, we saw, he died!” NATO’s 2011 war collapsed the Libyan state. Today, more than a decade later, there is still no unified central government in Libya. The North African nation has been trapped in a brutal civil war. NATO’s destruction of the Libyan government even brought open-air slave markets back to the country. So there is a historical precedent on the African continent of leftist leaders ascending to power through military coups. But if they don’t solidify the government’s authority and legitimacy through a popular revolution, the possibility of them being overthrown in another coup or by a foreign military intervention is very real. In Latin America, there have also been examples of this. In Peru in 1968, for instance, there was a coup led by a revolutionary military leader, Juan Velasco Alvarado. Like Nasser and Gadhafi, he implemented socialist policies, nationalizing key sectors of the economy, including banking, mining, and energy. While promoting workers’ rights and unions, Velasco also made Quechua a national language, providing equality for Indigenous communities that had been marginalized by previous (and future) governments. But Velasco was, too, overthrown in another coup, in 1975, led by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who reversed many of Velasco’s progressive gains. Another well-known example was Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who in 1992 also tried to launch a military coup against the country’s neoliberal president, Carlos Andrés Pérez (known commonly as CAP). During his second presidential term, which began in 1989, Pérez implemented aggressive neoliberal economic reforms, including mass privatizations, cuts to subsidies, and increasing public transportation fares. This led to massive protests. CAP responded to the popular uprising with extreme violence, ordering the military to gun down protesters. Thousands were killed. This neoliberal massacre, known as the Caracazo, radicalized progressive military leaders like Hugo Chávez. In 1992, Chávez and several other left-wing military officers tried to overthrow the CAP regime. They failed, and were imprisoned. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez after being arrested for the failed 1992 coup The attempted coup turned Chávez into a national hero. He was pardoned and released in 1994, then ran for office and won the 1998 presidential elections. However, a briefly successful coup against President Chávez that soon followed in 2002, which was sponsored by the George W. Bush administration, shows how putches are much more often tools of undemocratic right-wing elites. The massive popular support Chávez saw among working-class Venezuelans, who reversed the US-backed 2002 coup, was a turning point for the president. He realized he had to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution, and moved further to the left, toward socialism. The lesson in many of these historical episodes is that, if there is not a popular revolution, like what happened in China in 1949, in Cuba in 1959, or in Nicaragua in 1979; if there is simply a military coup led by a progressive or even socialist revolutionary leader, then the government tends to be much less stable, and it is significantly easier for them to be overthrown. If fact, in the case of Burkina Faso, this is precisely the history. Thomas Sankara came to power in 1983 through a military coup. One of his closest allies in the revolutionary process, Blaise Compaoré, then led another coup against Sankara in 1987. Compaoré killed his longtime friend Sankara, and ruled essentially as a dictator from 1987 until 2014. Compaoré abandoned Sankara’s anti-imperialist and socialist policies, adopting right-wing politics and neoliberal economics, ruling through a series of rigged elections, in close alliance with the US and former colonizer France. Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré with US President George W. Bush in the White House in 2008 This is one of the dangers of the situation now in West Africa. There are nationalist governments that seek true independence and sovereignty, but because they came to power through coups, it established a precedent that a right-wing military officer can use to overthrow the left-wing military officer and impose a conservative pro-Western regime. Moreover, these right-wing military leaders are often able to rule for decades, because they have support from Western governments and corporations. This is precisely what happened during the first cold war. There were a series of right-wing, pro-Western dictatorships across the African continent, which overthrew anti-colonial governments and imposed their own reactionary regimes. Many leftist anti-colonial leaders were toppled in US-sponsored right-wing coups, from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, to Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987. The nationalist governments in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali are very unstable, and the threat of Western-sponsored military intervention could destabilize the countries, fueling more coups, and potentially setting off a regional war. The transparent goal of the United States and France is to re-impose political control over the region, to exploit its plentiful natural resources and geostrategic location. What is happening in West Africa is part of a larger international movement, in which formerly colonized countries across the Global South – in regions of Latin America and Asia as well – are seeking complete decolonization, asserting national control over their resources, labor, and economic and security policies, in pursuit of real development, independence, and sovereignty. But the imperial powers will by no means give up without a fight.

Write an article about: West votes against democracy, human rights, cultural diversity at UN; promotes mercenaries, sanctions. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

democracy, General Assembly, human rights, mercenaries, sanctions, unilateral coercive measures, United Nations

The West voted against the rest of the world on United Nations General Assembly resolutions, opposing democracy, human rights, and cultural diversity, while supporting mercenaries and unilateral coercive measures (sanctions). Western governments frequently claim that their foreign and domestic policies are motivated by “human rights” and “democracy”. They often even lecture their adversaries for purportedly failing to respect these concerns. But on the international stage, Western capitals have shown their commitments to be merely rhetorical, as they have consistently voted against these noble causes and refused to support measures that would tangibly protect them, in flagrant violation of the will of the vast majority of the international community. These stark double standards were on display on November 7 in the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly’s Third Committee, which is devoted to social, humanitarian, and cultural issues. In this three-hour session, the West opposed draft resolutions that called for promoting democracy, human rights, and cultural diversity, while  simultaneously supporting the use of mercenaries and the application of unilateral coercive measures, commonly known as sanctions. The extended West voted against the rest of the world on these issues. Its positions were virtually uniform as a bloc, led by the United States, including Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. In fact, the chair of the General Assembly’s Third Committee is Austria’s representative to the United Nations, Alexander Marschik, and even he could not help but laugh in the session at the constant protestations of the US representative, who dominated the debate, speaking out against nearly every resolution to explain why the world should join with Washington in voting against it. (Marschik could not contain his laughter despite the fact that his own country, Austria, voted along with the US on each resolution.) Geopolitical Economy Report has created maps that illustrate the clear political divide between the West and the rest. In the November 7 session, nations debated a draft that condemned unilateral coercive measures, or sanctions, for violating the human rights of civilians in targeted countries. The resolution passed with 128 votes in favor and 54 against, and no abstentions. The General Assembly’s Third Committee likewise considered a measure that called for the “promotion of a democratic and equitable international order”. The resolution passed with 123 votes in favor and 54 against, plus 7 abstentions (from Armenia, Chile, Costa Rica, Liberia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay). Another resolution sought to promote “human rights and cultural diversity”. The measure passed with 130 votes in favor and 54 against, and no abstentions. The Third Committee deliberated a draft that called for the “promotion of equitable geographical distribution in the membership of the human rights treaty bodies”. The resolution passed with 128 votes in favor and 52 against, and no abstentions. Another measure condemned the “use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination”. The resolution passed with 126 votes in favor and 52 against, plus 6 abstentions (from Kiribati, Liberia, Palau, Mexico, Tonga and Switzerland). The United Nations published a full video of the Third Committee’s session on November 7, in the 48th plenary meeting of the General Assembly’s 78th session.

Write an article about: After Ukraine, US readies ‘transnational kill chain’ for Taiwan proxy war. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, Link 16, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine

Washington approved the dangerous sale of the Link 16 communications system to Taiwan. This is the final link of what the US military calls a “transnational coalition kill chain” against China, and signals a commitment to kinetic war. In many traditions, when you paint or sculpt a Buddha, the eyes are the very last to be painted. It’s only after the eyes have been completed that the sculpture is fully alive and empowered. The United States has approved a $75 million weapons package to Taiwan province, involving the sale of the Link 16 communications system. The acquisition of Link 16 is analogous to “painting the eyes on the Buddha”: a last touch, it makes Taiwan’s military systems and weapons platforms live and far-seeing. It confers deadly powers, or more prosaically, in the words of the US military, it completes Taiwan as the final, lethal link of what the US Naval Institute calls a “transnational coalition kill chain”, for war against China. What exactly is Link 16? It is a key system in the US military communications arsenal. Specifically, it’s the jam-resistant tactical data network for coordinating NATO weapons systems for joint operations in war. If this sale is completed, it signals serious, granular, and single-minded commitment to kinetic war. It would signal that the Biden administration is as serious and unwavering in its desire to provoke and wage large-scale war with China over Taiwan as it was with Russia over Ukraine, which also saw the implementation of this system. More important than any single weapons platform, this system allows the Taiwan/ROC military to integrate and coordinate all its warfighting platforms with US, NATO, Japanese, Korean, Australian militaries in combined arms warfare. Link 16 would be the deadliest piece of technology yet to be transferred, because it allows sea, air, and land forces to be coordinated with others for lethal effect. It permits, for example, strategic nuclear/stealth bombers  (US B-1B Lancers, B-2 Spirits) to coordinate with electronic warfare and surveillance platforms  (EA Growlers, Prowlers, EP-3s), fighters and bombers (F-16,F-22, F-35s) as well as conduct joint arms warfare with US, French, British carrier battle groups, Japanese SDF destroyers, and South Korean Hyun Moo missile destroyers, as well as THAAD and Patriot radars and missile batteries. It also allows coordination with low-earth orbit satellites and other Space Force assets. In other words, Link 16 supplies a brain and nervous system to the various deadly limbs and arms that the Taiwan authorities have been acquiring and preparing on the prompting of the US. It ensures interoperability and US control. It effectively prepares Taiwan to be used as the spear tip and trigger of a multinational war offensive against China. To give a shoe-on-the-other-foot analogy, this would be like China giving separatists in a US territory or state (e.g. Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Texas) not just arms and training – already a belligerent act of war, which the US is currently doing – but connecting insurgent militaries directly to the PLA’s surveillance, reconnaissance, and command/control systems. This coordinates and completes, to borrow the words of the US Naval Institute (USNI), the final link in a “transnational coalition kill chain” for war. The current US doctrine of war against China is based on distributed, dispersed, diffused, network-centric warfare to be conducted along the myriad islands of the archipelagic states encircling China in the Pacific. These are the “island chains” upon which the US has encircled and sown dragon’s teeth: tens of thousands of troops armed with mobile attack platforms and missiles. This is to be coordinated with subsurface warfare, automated/autonomous warfare, and longer-range stand-off weapons and attacks. Powerful think tanks like CSBA, CNAS, CSIS, RAND and the Pentagon have been working out the doctrine, details, logistics, and appropriations for this concept intensively for over a decade while advocating intensely for it. The sale of link 16 to Taiwan realizes and completes a key portion of this, binding the Chinese island as the keystone of this “multinational kill chain”. This doctrine of dispersion is based on a “rock-paper-scissors” concept that networked diffusion “offsets” (Chinese) precision. China’s capacity to defend itself and its littoral perimeter with precision missiles can be undermined with diffuse, distributed attacks from all across the island chains. Note that this diffusion and dispersion of attack platforms across the entire Pacific gives the lie to the claim that this is some inherently deterrent strategy to defend Taiwan island. Diffusion is clearly offensive, designed to overrun and overwhelm defenses: like Ukraine, this is not to deter war, but to enable it. This thus signals that aggressive total war against China is being prepared, in granular, lethal fashion on tactical and operational levels. On the strategic level, currently, at the CFR, CNAS, and other influential think tanks in Washington, the talk is all about “protracted warfare” with China, about pre-positioning systems and munitions for war, about ramping up to an industrial war footing for the inescapable necessity of war with China. This discussion includes preparations for a nuclear first strike on China. The US senses that the clock is running rapidly down on its power. If war is inevitable, then it is anxious to start war sooner rather than later. RAND warned in 2016 that 2025 was the outside window for the US to prevail in war with China. The “Minihan window” also hints at 2025. The “Davidson window” is 2027. The question in Washington regarding war with China is not if, but when–and how. Link 16 makes “how” easier, and brings “when” closer. The current administration has hardline Russophobes who want to continue to bleed Russia out in Ukraine. It wants protracted war with Russia. It firmly believes it can wage ambidextrous, multi-front war. Many US officials also believe that war with Ukraine and war with China are connected. They see Russia and China as a single axis of “revisionist powers” (i.e., official enemies) conspiring against the US to undermine its so-called “rules-based order” (i.e., US hegemony). Furthermore, if the US abandons Ukraine, this could weaken the Taiwan authorities’ resolve and willingness to wage war on behalf of Washington. Earlier in the war, when Russian gains in Ukraine were uncertain, Bi-khim Louise Hsiao (Taiwan’s current vice-president elect) gloated publicly and prominently that Ukraine’s victories were a message to China, as well as proof-of-concept of an effective doctrine for waging and winning war against China. As such, the Taiwan authorities were and are a major supporter of the Ukraine proxy war. But the converse also holds true. Based on the same premise, if the US abandons and loses Ukraine, it sends a clear message to the people on Taiwan island that they will be the next to be used and abandoned; that their US-imposed war and war doctrine (light, distributed, asymmetrical combined arms warfare) for fighting China is a recipe for catastrophic loss. The US plans on using proxies for war against China: Taiwan, Korea, Japan (JAKUS), Philippines, and Australia (AUKUS). Thus it cannot signal too overtly its perfidious, unreliable, and instrumental mindset. Washington has to keep up the pretense. It cannot be seen to overtly lose in or abandon Ukraine. It needs a “decent interval”, or a plausible pretext to cut and run. Still, the US is stretched thin. For example, it is relying on Korean munitions to Ukraine, and South Korea has provided more munitions than all of the EU combined. Moreover, the US is currently at war with itself. The fracturing of its body politic can only be unified with a common war against a common enemy. Russia is not that enemy for the US. China is. The Republicans want war with China now. Eli Ratner and Elbridge Colby have been fretting for years about the need to husband weaponry, arms, and munitions in order to wage war against China. Since the outbreak of Ukraine, Ratner has been working hard to pull India into the US defense industry’s supply chain, and claims to have been successful. South Korea’s considerable military-industrial complex is being pulled into sub-contracting for US war with China. Since many of its major Chaebol corporations got their start as subcontractors for the war in Vietnam (for example, Hyundai was a subcontractor for Halliburton/Brown & Root), the Korean economy is simply reverting back to its corporate-martial roots. South Korea’s economy is currently tanking due to US-forced sanctions on China. Major Korean electronic firms have lost 60 to 80% of their profits due to US-imposed chip sanctions. Under those conditions, military manufacturing and/or subcontracting looks to be the only way forward. In this way, the US is forcing a war economy onto its vassals. Furthermore, US aid to Ukraine benefits its own arms industry. The business of the US is war. Not only do existing US arms companies gain, but also the entire tech industry and supply chain benefits, and is currently re-orienting around this. Much of the US tech industry is seeking to suckle from the government teat, now flowing copiously in preparation for war. On the other hand, the general US economy is not doing well, with massive layoffs, especially in the consumer and business tech sector. The backstop of military Keynesianism, with the integration of think-tank lobbying groups funded by the arms industry with close ties to the administration (such as CNAS, West Exec Advisors, and CSIS) ensure that war is always the closest ready-to-hand resort for tough economic times. The US is simultaneously trying to decouple supply chains, which creates opportunities for US firms (both domestically and subcontracting with US vassals). Automated, AI-enabled warfare will be a key part of this development, as will be dispersed, distributed warfare platforms using proxies such as South Korea and Japan. This fits the existing historical pattern: the history of Western technology shows that technology and machinery have always been developed first for war. Afterwards, they become tools of entertainment and distraction, and later productive tools for general industrial use. This pattern goes back to the earliest machines and inventions of the West: the crane, the pulley, the lever, were all military technologies – machines of war (used in sieges). Later they became machines of illusion and distraction (used as stage machinery in Greek theater). Only much later were they applied for general use – and exploitation – in manufacture and production. This holds true for many other technologies, including: Nuclear power obviously derives from nuclear weapons. AI, too, from its inception, was conceived for automated battle management, especially to enable second strike after human life had been destroyed. An AI war is already in the works, with US sanctions on AI-related chips and computing, along with an algorithmic race to suppress dissent and critique in the information domain. War and business are intricately related in the west, and war is the first lever pulled when the economy stagnates critically or needs a boost. The US needs to abandon its neoconservative fantasies of hegemonic global empire and retreat gently into that good night, for there to be peace. Washington needs to negotiate in good faith with Russia, and begin the process of de-escalating its proxies in Ukraine, as well as in Palestine, and the Pacific. It needs to seek win-win cooperation in a multilateral order based on international law and mutual co-existence, not its own top-down “rules-based order”. It needs to respect the One China principle, end its interference in China’s affairs, and stop preparing and provoking war with China. However, the US ruling class is unwilling to do so. And it has only a few levers left to pull. The military one is the closest and most ready to hand. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. Like a drunk at the bar after the final call – drunk with power – Washington is determined to go out with a fight. That fight could involve a nuclear first strike. Palestine has shown what it will try to get away with: brazen genocide with the whole world watching. The issue is no longer war or peace in Ukraine. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell sees Ukraine as a “unified field” of war with China. He revels in the possibility of a “magnificent symphony of death” in Asia. The coda, of course, will be a deafening fermata of silence across the entire planet. Unless we stop this insane march to war.

Write an article about: BRICS expanding into economic powerhouse: Petrodollar under threat. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Argentina, Bandung Conference, Brazil, BRICS, China, Cuba, Cyril Ramaphosa, Javier Milei, Lula da Silva, Patricia Bullrich, South Africa, Xi Jinping

In its South Africa summit, BRICS invited six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The bloc now represents 37% of global GDP (PPP), 40% of global oil production, and roughly 1/3rd of global gas production, challenging the US petrodollar system. In its summit in Johannesburg, South Africa this August, BRICS invited six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The bloc now represents 37% of global GDP (measured at purchasing power parity, or PPP), as well as 40% of global oil production and roughly 1/3rd of global gas production. The inclusion of top oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have long priced their crude in dollars, is a direct challenge to the US petrodollar system. All of the invited nations have indicated that they will officially join the extended BRICS+ bloc on 1 January 2024. Four of Earth’s top 10 gas producers are now de facto BRICS+ members, making up 32% of global production. Seven of the world’s 10 largest oil producers are now de facto BRICS+ members. According to 2022 data from the US Energy Information Administration, these include the: In this video I discuss the importance of the expansion of BRICS The BRICS+ bloc now represents:-37% of global GDP (PPP)-40% of global oil production-1/3rd of global gas production It can challenge the petrodollar system that undergirds US economic hegemony Full video below pic.twitter.com/SDQm1ymacV — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 25, 2023 A key topic at the Johannesburg BRICS summit from 22 to 24 August was de-dollarization – the international movement of countries seeking alternatives to the hegemonic US currency. The Russian government has confirmed that some BRICS members are slowly making plans for a new global currency for international trade, to settle balance of payments, and to hold in central bank foreign-exchange reserves. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, an original co-founder of the BRICS, used the meeting in South Africa as a platform to call for creating a new international reserve currency, to challenge the dollar. BRICS has a working group dedicated to developing concrete proposals for this new reserve currency. Lula emphasized that it would be “a unit of account for trade, which will not replace our national currencies”. These comments made it clear that BRICS model is not the euro; it is rather something like the bancor, the international unit of account proposed by economist John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference (which ended up adopting the dollar as the global reserve currency, under US pressure). Discussions of a new international unit of account are still in the early stages, however, and the currency is only on the horizon in the medium-to-long term. In the short term, BRICS members voted to increase their use of national currencies in bilateral trade. The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), now under the leadership of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff, has promised to gradually de-dollarize the bank’s lending, instead providing financing for projects in the national currencies of members. In an August article published before the BRICS bloc announced its expansion, economic geographer Mick Dunford explained: In 2022, the combined economic output of the five BRICS members, measured in purchasing power parity, exceeded for the first time that of the US-led G7. At market exchange rates in 2021, the BRICS accounted for 26.1 percent of global GDP and 53.1 percent of world population, compared with 43.5 percent and 9.8 percent for the G7. However, GDP is misleading. If one examines the production of manufactures, energy and raw materials and food, the BRICS countries account for 36.6 percent, 28.3 percent and 53.1 percent of world output, respectively (compared with 35.5 percent, 28.1 percent and 14.1 percent in the case of the G7). This contribution to the production of real goods vital for human survival significantly exceeds the BRICS’ share of GDP (without correcting for purchasing power differences which significantly raise its shares) while those of the G7 are much smaller than its GDP share. The bloc has become a massive economic powerhouse – and is only growing in influence. President Xi Jinping stressed in his speech at the BRICS summit that China does not want a “new cold war”. Xi called for “win-win cooperation”, guided by the goal of “common prosperity” for all. At the same time, the Chinese leader warned of the “hegemonic and bullying acts” of “some country” – obviously a reference to the United States. Xi stated: We need to promote development and prosperity for all. Many emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) have come to what they are today after shaking off the yoke of colonialism. With perseverance, hard work and huge sacrifices, we succeeded in gaining independence and have been exploring development paths suited to our national conditions. Everything we do is to deliver better lives to our people. But some country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the EMDCs. Whoever is developing fast becomes its target of containment; whoever is catching up becomes its target of obstruction. But this is futile, as I have said more than once that blowing out others’ lamp will not bring light to oneself. China's President Xi at the BRICS summit: "some country [hint: the USA], obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the EMDCs (emerging markets and developing countries). Whoever is developing fast becomes its target of containment; whoever is… https://t.co/mjXvydA5yz pic.twitter.com/XNHc0aYsPT — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 23, 2023 On the sidelines of the summit, Xi also met with Cuba’s President Díaz-Canel. State media reported that Xi pledged that “China will continue to firmly support Cuba in defending national sovereignty and opposing external interference and blockade”. In a similar vein, Brazil’s President Lula condemned the unjust, Western-dominated international financial system and insisted that countries need “a fairer, more predictable, and equitable global trade”. “We cannot accept a green neocolonialism that imposes trade barriers and discriminatory measures under the pretext of protecting the environment”, he added. In his speech at the BRICS summit, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa compared the bloc to the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was organized to oppose colonialism. “When reflecting on the purpose and role of BRICS in the world today, we recall the Bandung Conference of 1955, where Asian and African nations demanded a greater voice for developing countries in world affairs”, he said. “We still share that common vision”, Ramaphosa added. “Through the 15th BRICS Summit and this Dialogue we should strive to advance the Bandung spirit of unity, friendship and cooperation”. Among the six countries invited to join BRICS+, a question mark is hanging over the head of one. Argentina’s current, centrist government, led by President Alberto Fernández, has vowed to join BRICS+. However, whether or not the South American country actually does depends on the results of the elections approaching in October. Two of the three main presidential candidates have publicly stated that they will not join BRICS+: the right-wing candidate Patricia Bullrich and the far-right extremist candidate Javier Milei. Milei wants to abolish Argentina’s central bank, abandon monetary sovereignty, and adopt the US dollar as the official national currency (while also implementing mass privatizations of state institutions, building private for-profit prisons, and heavily militarizing the country). When asked if he would consider joining BRICS+ if he won the election, the far-right extremist Milei declared: “Our geopolitical alignment is with the U.S. and Israel. We are not going to align with communists”.

Write an article about: Burkina Faso’s new president condemns imperialism, quotes Che Guevara, allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Burkina Faso, Cuba, Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, France, Ibrahim Traoré, Iran, Nicaragua, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, Roch Kaboré, Thomas Sankara, Venezuela

Burkina Faso’s new President Ibrahim Traoré has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism. Pledging a “refoundation of the nation”, invoking revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, and quoting Che Guevara, his government has allied with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba. The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara. The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia. In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated. The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa. Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years. The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country. In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders. Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”. The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!” As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara. Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup. Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs. Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South. Burkina Faso’s revolutionary former President Thomas Sankara These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014. Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism. This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech. “We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS. TASS reported: In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed. “However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit. On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II. Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburgh on July 29, 2023 The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America. In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela. Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”. Con el objetivo de avanzar en la cooperación, solidaridad y crecimiento de ambas naciones, me reuní con el Primer Ministro de Burkina Faso, Apollinaire Kyélem de Tambéla. Tengo confianza que con esfuerzo y voluntad, seguiremos construyendo una sólida relación fraterna. pic.twitter.com/5mEXzzXIec — Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) May 12, 2023 In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Burkina Faso’s Prime Minister Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla speaks at the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Managua, Nicaragua on July 19, 2023 Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla. Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government. Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations. Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“. By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara. In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua. Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year. When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared, “I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination”. In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro. Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega “For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023. “We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled. “And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution”. Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the US government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.) “Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed. In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. “We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added. “President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro”. The 44th anniversary of Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution this July 19 was dedicated to Burkina Faso's former revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara Burkina Faso's current PM spoke at the ceremony, reaffirming solidarity Sankara visited Nicaragua during the US terror war in 1984 pic.twitter.com/Kkng2cENR3 — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 20, 2023

Write an article about: ‘Western dominance has ended’, EU foreign-policy chief admits, warning of ‘West against the Rest’ geopolitics. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

EU, European Union, Gaza, General Assembly, Global South, Josep Borrell, Sahel, Ukraine, United Nations

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, admitted that the “era of Western dominance has indeed definitively ended”. He warned that the EU must not divide the world into “the West against the Rest”, as “many in the ‘Global South’ accuse us of ‘double standards’”. Europe’s top diplomat has acknowledged that the “era of Western dominance has indeed definitively ended”. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, wrote this in a blog post on the official website of the EU’s diplomatic service on February 25. “If the current global geopolitical tensions continue to evolve in the direction of ‘the West against the Rest’, Europe’s future risks to be bleak”, he warned. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, along with the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa’s Sahel region, have “significantly increased this risk” of Europe becoming geopolitically irrelevant, Borrell said, lamenting that “Russia has managed to take advantage of the situation”. The European foreign-policy chief revealed that “improving our relations with the ‘Global South'” is one of ” the four main tasks on EU’s geopolitical agenda”. “Many in the ‘Global South’ accuse us of ‘double standards'”, he confessed. Borrell is known for sporadically making frank comments, admitting inconvenient truths that most European diplomats leave unsaid. In 2022, the EU foreign-policy chief confessed, “Our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market”, with “cheap energy coming from Russia” and “access to the big China market” as the cornerstone of the European economy. However, Borrell’s insistence that Europe must not divide the world into the “West against the Rest” was contradicted by his insistence in the same February 2024 article that the EU must expand its “cooperation with key partners, and in particular the US”. The top European diplomat wrote that “recent months have reminded us how important NATO remains to our collective defence”, calling to strengthen the US-led military bloc. In 2023, the influential think tank the European Council on Foreign Relations published a white paper titled “The art of vassalisation”. It warned of “Europe becoming an American vassal”, noting how the war in Ukraine had “revealed Europeans’ profound dependence on the US”. The EU’s foreign-policy chief does recognize that it would be an error to pit “the West against the Rest”, yet he is simultaneously calling for deepening the trans-Atlantic alliance between the US and Europe, which only exacerbates that geopolitical division. On the global stage, Europe frequently joins the United States in violating the will of the international community. At the United Nations, the US and Europe often vote together, while the vast majority of member states, which are located in the Global South, vote against them. Source: Alastair Iain Johnston, “China in a World of Orders: Rethinking Compliance and Challenge in Beijing’s International Relations”, International Security (2019) The US only voted with the majority of the world at the UN General Assembly 32.7% of the time from 1983 to 2012. In 1988, just 15.4% of overall UNGA votes coincided with the US vote. Europe is the only region of the world that consistently votes with the US. In November 2023, the West voted against the vast majority of the world in UN General Assembly resolutions concerning democracy, human rights, cultural diversity, mercenaries, and unilateral coercive measures (sanctions). In April 2023, the West once again voted as a bloc against the other countries on the UN Human Rights Council, defending unilateral sanctions, which violate international law. In December 2022, the West voted against the rest of the planet in UN General Assembly votes calling for a new international economic order. West votes against democracy, human rights, cultural diversity at UN; promotes mercenaries, sanctions

Write an article about: Despite Biden’s claims, Gaza health ministry death toll is accurate, scientific studies show. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Gaza, Israel, Palestine, The Lancet

US President Biden criticized Gaza’s health ministry, but its statistics on Israel’s killings of Palestinians are accurate, according to peer-reviewed articles in top medical journal The Lancet. The death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza reported by the Palestinian health ministry is accurate, according to two peer-reviewed studies by scientific experts published in top medical journal The Lancet. As of December 18, Israel had killed 19,453 Palestinians in Gaza, the ministry reported. Two-thirds of the deaths were children (7,729) and women (5,153). United Nations bodies, human rights organizations, and major media outlets have often used these statistics, because they have a history of being accurate. “International organizations including the United Nations usually rely on these same figures as they are seen as the best available”, the Washington Post acknowledged. “Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements”, the prominent US newspaper wrote. Israel has claimed, without any evidence, that Gaza’s health ministry is untrustworthy, because it is supposedly run by the political party Hamas. (In reality, the Gaza health ministry is partially funded by and linked to Hamas’ political rival, the Palestinian Authority, based in the Occupied West Bank.) The US government has echoed Israel’s disinformation. President Joe Biden said in an October 25 press conference, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed… I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”. Despite Biden’s criticism, HuffPost revealed that the US State Department uses the Palestinian health ministry figures in its own reports on Gaza. In one of such memos, a US official acknowledged that, if anything, “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation”. This was exactly the conclusion reached by scientific experts at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. The peer-reviewed article “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health”, published in leading medical journal The Lancet on December 6, noted that the Palestinian institution “has historically reported accurate mortality data”. In past conflicts, discrepancies between Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) data and independent United Nations figures were only between 1.5% and 3.8%. Gaza MoH data were also quite similar to figures from Israel’s own Foreign Ministry, with a difference of just around 8%. Scholars Benjamin Q Huynh, Elizabeth T Chin, and Paul B Spiegel wrote that they “found no evidence of inflated rates”. Scientific experts from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine came to a similar conclusion in their own peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, published on November 26. For this previous study, scholars Zeina Jamaluddine, Francesco Checchi, and Oona M R Campbell reviewed death statistics from October 7 to 26, analyzing the list of 7028 deaths compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Out of the 7028 names, only one had a duplicated ID number, one had an implausible age, and just 281 lacked an ID number. The experts concluded that the data were reasonable, writing, “We consider it implausible that these patterns would arise from data fabrication”. They also reviewed MoH figures from previous wars in Gaza, and found them to be reliable. “Assessments of Palestinian MoH data validity in the 2014 conflict had shown them to be accurate, and we saw no obvious reason to doubt the validity of the data between Oct 7 and Oct 26, 2023”, the scholars stated. If anything, they concluded that the Gaza MoH figures may be rather conservative. “The death reporting system currently being used by the Palestinian MoH was assessed in 2021, 2 years before the current war, and was found to under-report mortality by 13%”, they wrote, adding that “it is plausible that the current Palestinian MoH source also under-reports mortality because of the direct effect of the war on data capture and reporting, for example by omitting people whose bodies could not be recovered or brought to morgues”.

Write an article about: Inside Ethiopia and Eritrea, facing war and sanctions, with journalist Rania Khalek. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, Cold War Two, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Horn of Africa, new cold war, Tigray, TPLC

Journalist Rania Khalek discusses her reporting in Ethiopia and Eritrea, as both suffer from foreign-backed war and sanctions, and the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa, a key point of conflict in the US new cold war on China. Journalist Rania Khalek joined the Geopolitical Economy Report podcast to talk about her reporting trip to Ethiopia and Eritrea. In Ethiopia, armed insurgent group the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is waging war on the central government, apparently with Western support. Its East African neighbor Eritrea is one of the world’s most sanctioned countries. Faced with this forced isolation, it has created a unique developmental model based on self-sufficiency. We discuss the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa, and how the area has been affected by the US new cold war on China. “Imperialism is all about dividing and conquering, and making sure everybody’s stuck in their own little places, because you can control them easier that way,” Khalek explained. “That’s why the US is so supportive of the sort of ethnic-based system that the TPLF set up in Ethiopia, because it keeps people divided. That’s why the US is so supportive of sectarianism in the Middle East, because it keeps people divided. That’s why the US is so supportive of these right-wing movements that divide across Latin America, because it keeps people divided. And on and on.” “So people really need to start thinking about things in that context,” she said. “Especially understanding the Horn of Africa in that context, because the Horn of Africa has often been neglected in our analysis, because Africa is just kind of neglected, but this region, especially as this cold war with China kicks off and becomes even more intense, is going to become a bigger” site of conflict.

Write an article about: Countries worldwide are dropping the US dollar: De-dollarization in China, Russia, Brazil, ASEAN. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

ASEAN, Brazil, China, de-dollarization, Dilma Rousseff, dollar, gas, IMF, India, Indonesia, Kenya, LNG, Lula da Silva, Malaysia, NDB, New Development Bank, oil, petrodollar, renminbi, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, World Bank, yuan

The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN nations, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are now using local currencies in trade. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China and Russia are trading in their own currencies. Beijing and Brazil have also dropped the dollar in bilateral trade. The UAE is selling China its gas in yuan, through a French company. Southeast Asian nations in ASEAN are de-dollarizing their trade, promoting local payment systems. Kenya is buying Persian Gulf oil with its own currency. Even the Financial Times newspaper has acknowledged that a “multipolar currency world” is emerging. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin revealed that two-thirds of the countries’ bilateral trade is already conducted in the ruble and renminbi. “It is important that our national currencies are increasingly used in bilateral trade“, Putin said. “We should continue promoting settlements in national currencies, and expand the reciprocal presence of financial and banking structures in our countries’ markets”. The Russian leader added, “We support using Chinese yuan in transactions between the Russian Federation and its partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America”. China’s President Xi Jinping traveled to Russia, where he pledged “changes we haven’t seen for 100 years”. Both agreed to deepen economic integration and challenge the hegemony of the US dollar, using yuan and other currencies in international tradehttps://t.co/uTPkDIrfVb — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 26, 2023 Just a week after Xi’s trip to Moscow, China announced that it had for the first time used yuan to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the UAE. The deal was negotiated between the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company and the French company TotalEnergies, meaning European firms are now willing to conduct transactions in yuan. French media outlet RFI described the trade as a “major step in Beijing’s attempts to undermine the US dollar as universal ‘petrodollar’ for gas and oil trade”. The report quoted the chairman of the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, Guo Xu, who said the deal encouraged “multi-currency pricing, settlement and cross-border payment”. China's first yuan-settled liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade was completed on Tuesday through the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, with about 65,000 tonnes of LNG imported from the UAE changing hands in the trade. (file pic) pic.twitter.com/7J9KYipvmB — People's Daily, China (@PDChina) March 29, 2023 On March 30, China and Brazil (the world’s most populous and sixth-most populous countries) announced they had come to an agreement to trade with each other in their local currencies, yuan and reais. China’s media network CGTN reported, “The deal will enable China, the world’s second-largest economy, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the dollar”. It noted that China is Brazil’s biggest trading partner, and in 2022 the two countries did more than $150.5 billion worth of trade. Brazil’s leftist President Lula da Silva has called for Latin America to develop a new currency for regional trade, which he calls the Sur. It's happening: Brazil and Argentina are making plans for a Latin American currency, to “boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the US dollar”, the Financial Times reported Lula (a co-founder of the BRICS) had pledged this while running for presidenthttps://t.co/IAiwfeLz2z — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 22, 2023 Just two days before China and Brazil revealed their deal to trade in local currencies, the South American giant’s former President Dilma Rousseff officially assumed her new role as chief of the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai. The NDB, commonly known as the BRICS Bank, was created by the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank. Dilma, like her ally Lula, is a leftist from Brazil’s Workers’ Party. In a speech that Geopolitical Economy reported on in 2022, Dilma analyzed the US-China conflict as “a rivalry of two systems”, a struggle between neoliberalism and socialism. She condemned US sanctions and “dollar hegemony” and called for Latin America “to break with the Monroe Doctrine”. H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023 Countries in Southeast Asia are also de-dollarizing. The finance ministers and governors of the central banks of the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Indonesia on March 28. According to the news website ASEAN Briefing, at the top of their agenda were “discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies”. ASEAN is developing a cross-border digital payment system that would allow the use of local currencies in regional trade. ASEAN Briefing noted that Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand agreed on this in November 2022. The media outlet added that Indonesia’s central bank plans on creating a local payment system as well. ASEAN Briefing wrote: Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged regional administrations to start using credit cards issued by local banks and gradually stop using foreign payment systems. He argued that Indonesia needed to shield itself from geopolitical disruptions, citing the sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector from the US, EU, and their allies over the conflict in Ukraine. Indonesia is the fourth-most populous country on Earth, after the United States. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is meeting in Indonesia "Top of the agenda are discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies" https://t.co/BPMGhpgtLv — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2023 Another Southeast Asian nation, Malaysia, is publicly advocating de-dollarization. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim met with Chinese President Xi in Beijing on March 31, where the two leaders discussed plans to weaken US dollar hegemony and even create an “Asian Monetary Fund”. This is a frontal challenge to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), which emerged from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that established the dollar as the global reserve currency. Anwar proposed the Asian Monetary Fund at the Boao Forum in China’s Hainan province. “There is no reason for Malaysia to continue depending on the dollar”, Anwar said, in comments reported by Bloomberg. The media outlet added that Malaysia’s central bank is developing a payment mechanism so the Southeast Asian country can trade with China using its own currency, the ringgit. China is open to talks with Malaysia on forming an Asian Monetary Fund, said Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, amid the world’s growing impatience with the King Dollar’s dominance https://t.co/oXnuqomt9n — Bloomberg (@business) April 4, 2023 Bloomberg noted: The Malaysian leader’s comments come just months after former officials in Singapore discussed what economies in the region should be doing to mitigate the risks of a still-strong dollar that’s weakened local currencies and become a tool of economic statecraft. The dollar’s strength is a headache for Asian nations including Malaysia, which is a net importer of food items. “Economic statecraft” is a roundabout way of saying economic warfare. The unilateral sanctions the United States has imposed on countries all across the planet, in flagrant violation of international law, are backfiring. Many nations are now seeking financial alternatives, afraid that they could be the next target. And with the US Federal Reserve constantly raising interest rates, the dollar has become so strong that it is hurting the currencies of other countries, making imports more expensive. Even US ally India is hedging its bets on de-dollarization. Reuters reported that Russia’s largest oil producer, the state-owned company Rosneft, made an deal with India’s top refiner Indian Oil Corp, which is also state owned, to use the Dubai price benchmark in oil sales, as opposed to the Brent benchmark. The decision “to abandon the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark is part of a shift of Russia’s oil sales towards Asia”, it wrote. Reuters cited “Rosneft’s chief executive Igor Sechin, [who] said in February that the price of Russian oil would be determined outside of Europe as Asia has emerged as largest buyer of Russian oil”. Russia and India agreed to use the Asia-focused Dubai oil price benchmark in their bilateral trade. "The decision by the two state-controlled companies to abandon the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark is part of a shift of Russia's oil sales towards Asia"https://t.co/dpYheR1mHQ — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 4, 2023 Several countries on the African continent are advocating de-dollarization as well. In March, Kenya signed an agreement with state-owned companies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to buy oil on credit, using the country’s local currency, the shilling. Kenya asked to do so because the African nation’s dollar reserves are running low, as it pays for more expensive imports. Kenya to start buying petroleum products with Kenyan shillings https://t.co/Q6HEcB4I6r — Peoples Gazette (@GazetteNGR) March 27, 2023 One of the world’s leading newspapers, the Financial Times, acknowledged in an article in March that these historic developments are part of a transition to a “multipolar currency world“. The chair of the Financial Times’ editorial board and US editor-at-large, Gillian Tett, wrote that “US banking turmoil, inflation and looming debt ceiling battle is making dollar-based assets less attractive”. She noted that the former Goldman Sachs economist who first popularized the term BRICS, Jim O’Neill, has stated that “the dollar plays far too dominant a role in global finance”. Prepare for a multipolar currency world https://t.co/gCoN2YjEEY — FT World News (@ftworldnews) March 30, 2023

Write an article about: Europe angry that US profits from Ukraine proxy war while destroying EU economy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

EU, Europe, European Union, gas, Joe Biden, LNG, Ukraine

EU leaders are furious that the US is making lots of money from the proxy war in Ukraine by selling weapons and exporting expensive natural gas. Meanwhile European industries are being destroyed as high energy prices and US subsidies push its companies to go overseas. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) Cracks are emerging in the NATO alliance. Numerous Western corporate media outlets have published reports showing growing political divisions between the United States and European Union. EU leaders are angry that the US is making lots of money from the proxy war in Ukraine, both by selling vast quantities of weapons and by making Europe reliant on its expensive liquified natural gas (LNG), instead of Russia’s significantly cheaper pipeline gas. Meanwhile, European economies suffer from high inflation rates and an energy crisis that make manufacturing so expensive and uncompetitive it could bankrupt entire industries. Politico published an article in November detailing precisely this, titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war.” An unnamed “senior official” in Europe told the publication, “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.” Politico wrote: French President Emmanuel Macron said high U.S. gas prices were not “friendly” and Germany’s economy minister has called on Washington to show more “solidarity” and help reduce energy costs. Ministers and diplomats based elsewhere in the bloc voiced frustration at the way Biden’s government simply ignores the impact of its domestic economic policies on European allies. When EU leaders tackled Biden over high U.S. gas prices at the G20 meeting in Bali last week, the American president simply seemed unaware of the issue. The escalating US-EU conflict recalls the notorious maxim of former Secretary of State and imperial planner Henry Kissinger: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The Biden administration’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act this August has sent the EU “into full-blown panic mode,” and even threatens to bring about a “transatlantic trade war,” according to Politico. The law pledges up to $369 billion in subsidies to support companies that claim to be environmentally friendly, as part of a “green” transition. These huge US subsidies “threaten to destroy European industries,” the outlet reported, and have led Brussels to “draw up plans for an emergency war chest of subsidies to save European industries from collapse.” An unnamed EU diplomat told Politico, “The Inflation Reduction Act has changed everything,” asking, “Is Washington still our ally or not?” A similar article by a staunchly pro-NATO columnist, also published by Politico, insisted “Biden keeps ignoring Europe. It’s time EU leaders got the message.” The column emphasized that the US government’s top priority its its new cold war on China. “The U.S. remains steadfastly focused on what most perceive to be its main existential challenge: China,” Politico wrote. “In that equation, Europe is often an afterthought.” The media outlet concluded: But what the Europeans are discovering is that the Ukraine war is just one facet of the U.S.’s larger strategic duel with China, which will always take precedence over EU interests. That was true under Trump, and it remains true under his successor. It’s just that the message is delivered in a different style. In the long run, Biden’s polite indifference may prove more deadly. As recently as the beginning of 2022, Russia was the largest exporter of both gas and oil to Europe. But in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the US and EU imposed harsh sanctions on Moscow and vowed to boycott its energy. This has blown back on Europe, and hard. In August, Bloomberg published an article titled “European Power Prices Reach Records as Industry Starts to Buckle.” It noted that electricity prices in Germany have risen as much as 500% in the past year. The report warned the “magnitude of the crisis isn’t comparable to anything in the past few decades.” “Countries across Europe are planning for possible power shortages this winter, with some considering rationing supplies to certain industries to ensure essential demand can be met,” Bloomberg said. These historically high energy prices were already painful enough. But Washington’s proposed subsidies have only further incentivized European companies to move to the United States. In a November report titled “European industry pivots to US as Biden subsidy sends ‘dangerous signal,’” the Financial Times reported the same: the Inflation Reduction Act “is moving momentum a lot from Europe to the US.” The FT wrote: The combination of the Biden Administration’s $369bn package and high energy costs in Europe, where even after recent declines gas prices remain five times more expensive than in North America, is sounding alarm bells in EU capitals. “I think we need a European wake-up on this point,” French president Emmanuel Macron told executives from domestic industrial companies such as glassmaker Saint-Gobain and cement maker Lafarge in a speech last week. Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, described the US support as “excessive” and “hoovering up investments from Europe”. The EU has accused Washington of breaching World Trade Organization rules and set up a task force with the Biden administration to resolve their differences. The Wall Street Journal published a similar article in September, titled “High Natural-Gas Prices Push European Manufacturers to Shift to the U.S.” “The Ukraine war is driving up energy costs in Europe, while relatively stable prices and green-energy incentives are luring companies to the U.S.”, the newspaper wrote. “Battered by skyrocketing gas prices, companies in Europe that make steel, fertilizer and other feedstocks of economic activity are shifting operations to the U.S., attracted by more stable energy prices and muscular government support,” the Wall Street Journal added. The report predicted that Europe “could face high prices, at least for gas, well into 2024, threatening to make the scarring on Europe’s manufacturing sector permanent.”

Write an article about: What is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’? Inside China’s economic model. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, John Ross, neoliberalism, podcast, socialism

How does socialism with Chinese characteristics differ from Western neoliberal capitalism? Economist John Ross, who has taught in China, explains Beijing’s model. Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton discussed China’s socialist model with economist John Ross, a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. Ross criticized Western left-wing academics like David Harvey, who have argued that China’s economy is capitalist or even neoliberal. “The Chinese model has nothing to do whatever with neoliberalism. And that’s why it produced totally different results,” Ross said. “China has raised, by World Bank criteria, since 1978, 850 million people out of poverty,” he emphasized. “This is the greatest contribution to human rights in the entire world.” “There has never been such an alleviation of poverty in the whole of world history,” he noted. “It’s more than 70% of all those people taken out of poverty on the world scale.” Ross continued: “You can see it most clearly by looking at the state sector within the Chinese economy. The state sector within the Chinese economy accounts for around 40% of the investment in China. And that is concentrated in all the large companies. The largest companies in China are state-owned companies, by far.” “This means that the economy can be controlled by lifting the level of investment by the state up and down. And that’s the way the economy is run.” “Where does the word socialism come from? It comes from ‘socialized,’” he explained. “Of course the economy develops in a very uneven way. You have very, very large, that is highly socialized companies, which are the most powerful, the most developed, and we may say the commanding heights of the economy. And then you go down to single-family farms, single-family shops, etc., which are not highly socialized.” “China does differ from the Soviet Union,” Ross pointed out. “The Soviet Union had what I would call an administered economy. Every single detail down to the prices were controlled.” “China doesn’t do that. The way China runs its economy is that it moves the level of state investment up and down.” In the Soviet Union all industries were owned and run by the state, “whereas China took what you would call the commanding heights, or if you want to use Marx’s term, the most socialized sections of the economy are taken into the state.” “This means in particular, China, the Chinese state, owns the largest companies. It particularly dominates the banks. All the large banks in China are state-owned. The land is state-owned. The energy system is state-owned. The largest manufacturing companies are state-owned.” “But it doesn’t want to take over, and shouldn’t take over incidentally, every little local corner shop, every single restaurant, etc. There, that can be done perfectly well by individual people; in fact it will develop more efficiently.” Ross, who previously served as director of economic policy for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, also discussed the sabotage of leftist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s turn to the right. “If you look at the situation, what was done by the Labour Party to Corbyn, it was a flat out vilification and falsification of him, ridiculous charges such as that he was an anti-semite. Jeremy Corbyn is the most determined anti-racist,” Ross said. “The idea that the Labour Party was institutionally anti-semitic, or that Corbyn was anti-semitic, was absolute nonsense, an absolute frame up.” “And now what has happened is we now have a very right-wing, I’m afraid, leadership of the Labour Party, because this attack on Corbyn was not successfully defeated, which has very terrible consequences.”

Write an article about: BRICS Bank de-dollarizing, promises 30% of loans in local currencies, new chief Dilma Rousseff says. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Brazil, BRICS, de-dollarization, Dilma Rousseff, dollar, inflation, interest, Lula da Silva, NDB, New Development Bank

The new chief of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members. The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar. The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members. Dilma Rousseff, the left-wing former president of Brazil, took over the leadership of the Shanghai, China-based New Development Bank (NDB) this March. The new chief of the BRICS' New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members. More here: https://t.co/CyJKBODc2D pic.twitter.com/PUGokEHYxw — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2023 The NDB was created in 2014, by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as a Global South-oriented alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is infamous for imposing neoliberal economic reforms on impoverished countries, which hinder their development. In an interview with China’s major media outlet CGTN on April 14, Rousseff explained, “It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar”. “The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real”, she said. “At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries”, Rousseff added. “That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments”, the new NDB president stressed. H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023 Members of the NDB not only include the founders of the BRICS but also Bangladesh, the UAE, and Egypt. Uruguay is likewise in the process of joining, and many other countries have expressed interest. Argentina, Iran, and Algeria have formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc, and according to the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, other nations that are interested “include Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, and a number of African nations”. Flags of the members of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB) South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, revealed in January that BRICS plans to “develop a fairer system of monetary exchange” in order to weaken the “dominance of the dollar”. “The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which have to make payments in dollars, which costs much more in terms of our various currencies”, she said. “So I do think a fairer system has to be developed, and it’s something we’re discussing with the BRICS ministers in the economic sector discussions”, Pandor added. BRICS is making “a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed. Saudi Arabia, which applied to join BRICS, is considering selling oil in other currencies. China says it will by Gulf energy in yuanhttps://t.co/fDWhqExVAw — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) March 13, 2023 This April, Brazil’s current president, Lula da Silva, a fellow member of Dilma’s leftist Workers’ Party, took a historic trip to China, where he called to challenge US dollar dominance. While in Shanghai, Lula was the first head of state to visit the NDB headquarters, where he attended the swearing in ceremony for Dilma. Lula said the NDB’s goal is “creating a world with less poverty, less inequality, and more sustainability”. He added that the bank should play a “leading role in achieving a better world, without poverty or hunger”. This was the first time that a Head of State visited the Bank's Headquarters in Shanghai and addressed the NDB staff in person. President Lula had the opportunity to witness the NDB's commitment to promoting sustainable development and delivering on its mandate.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/MlC9tfySPY — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023 Dilma also commented, “As a former president of Brazil, I know the importance of the work of multilateral banks to support developing countries, particularly NDB, in addressing their economic, social, and environmental needs”. “Becoming the president of the NDB is undoubtedly a great opportunity to do more for the BRICS, the emerging markets, and developing countries”, she said. In her speech, H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff emphasized the Bank's commitment to supporting Brazil's sustainable development goals and highlighted the importance of the presidential visit for strengthening the cooperation between the NDB and Brazil.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/0aut3dLM1H — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023 In her interview with CGTN, Rousseff explained her goals with the BRICS Bank: It is very important to me that New Development Bank, the bank of the BRICS, acts as the tool to support the development priorities of the BRICS and other developing countries. We need to invest in projects that contribute to three fundamental areas: First, we need to support the countries with regards to climate change and sustainable development goals. Second, we should promote social inclusion at every opportunity we have. And I believe we should finance their most critical and strategic infrastructure projects. That said, we want to promote quality development. Developing countries still don’t have the necessary infrastructure. They don’t have enough ports, airports, and highways to meet their needs. And many times, the ones they have are not adequate. They still have to build alternatives and more modern models of transportation, for instance. I see China, a country that has developed capability for alternative transportation at the scale and quality it needs. NDB has to support the other countries to also build their quality infrastructure as well, like high-speed trains. It is very important to invest in technology and innovation, invest in universities for example. Our countries will not overcome extreme poverty if we don’t invest in education, science, and technology. When asked what challenges the BRICS and NDB face, Rousseff replied: The world now is under the threat of high inflation and restrictive monetary policy, particularly in developed countries. Such monetary policy means a higher interest rate, and therefore a higher probability of reduction in growth and a higher probability of recession. This presents an important question for the BRICS. We need a mechanism, a so-called anti-crisis mechanism, which must be counter-cyclical and support stabilization. It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar. The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real. At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries. That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments.