Instruction: Write an article about: Anti-China hawks’ drive to expand NATO into Asia may destroy Western military alliance. 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.

Input: China, Geopolitical Economy Hour, Michael Hudson, NATO, Pepe Escobar, Radhika Desai, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar to discuss how the war hawks’ drive to expand NATO into Asia to contain China may destroy the Western military alliance.

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar to discuss how the war hawks’ drive to expand NATO into Asia to contain China may destroy the Western military alliance.
You can find more episodes of Geopolitical Economy Hour here.

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello everyone and welcome to the [15th] Geopolitical Economy Hour, a program that discusses the political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.
MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.
RADHIKA DESAI: And today we have once again Pepe Escobar, roving reporter extraordinaire. Welcome, Pepe.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Thank you. It’s an enormous pleasure to be with you guys again.
RADHIKA DESAI: And today we are going to continue the discussion we started in the last Geopolitical Economy Hour, entitled “NATO Out of Bounds: War Against Russia, War Against China”.
Last time we discussed where the Vilnius Summit had left NATO, and the divisions within the alliance that the summit had exposed; how the proxy war on Russia was faring; and how the Biden project of uniting so-called democracies against so-called autocracies relies so critically on the outcome of this war, which by present indications does not look good for Ukraine, and it does not look good for NATO.
We then went on to discuss how much longer Europe and other US allies could sustain the appearance of NATO unity, which is cracking as we speak, and ended with a discussion of how the grain deal [the Black Sea Grain Initiative] had broken down.
Now that discussion already permitted us to expand our frame out of Europe and to take in the world as a whole, because, as it became very clear in our discussion, you cannot understand the breakdown of the grain deal unless you put it in the larger context of how imperialism has a long and murderous history of attempting to deny food security to most of the world.
So now today we are going to continue that discussion by focusing on the danger of NATO being transformed from a North Atlantic Treaty Organization to a North and South Atlantic and Pacific Treaty Organization, as Biden leads to an ever-widening and deepening hybrid war on China with trade, technology, diplomatic, and military aspects, but which is coming ever closer to some kind of military war.
So once again, we framed our discussion around several questions, so I will just begin by posing the first one:
What is the United States’ wider intention and strategy vis-a-vis China in the so-called Indo-Pacific region?
What do recent events mean for the region? I’m thinking of events such as the visit of high-ranking Chinese and Russian officials to Pyongyang to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the armistice in the Korean War.
I’m thinking of Western hysteria over the recent agreement between China and the Solomon Islands, one of a very large number of Pacific island nations.
The recent announcement of a new package of military aid to Taiwan from the United States, which essentially is going to be done by a kind of presidential decree, using the same military drawdown program that President Biden has been using to fuel the war in Ukraine.
And generally, I’m thinking of rising tensions in the region, thanks to the announcement of AUKUS a couple of years ago, and the reactivation of the so-called Quad alliance, or incipient alliance, whatever you want to call it, between the United States, South Korea, Japan, and India.
And of course, there has been the recent NATO declaration that it considers China a threat.
U.S. strategy is not easy to understand, because, while on the one hand, there seems to be some effort to promote dialogue with the visits of recent high-ranking U.S. officials, such as Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen, while on the other hand, U.S. actions continue to ratchet up tensions across all the fronts.
So, Michael, why don’t you start us off with your views on this matter?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, today is just two years since America was driven out of Afghanistan, and we’re seeing a repeat of the defeat in Ukraine.
So the U.S. and NATO have lost Ukraine, but they want to keep the fighting going because Biden said this is a fight against China that’s going to take two decades, maybe three decades.
So it looks like the Pacific and even the Arctic may become the new U.S. disruption zone.
Now, especially since Russia and China are working with North Korea to develop ports for the new trade from the Pacific via the Arctic to Northern Europe. So the United States is losing militarily, but it looks like it’s going to lose Europe in a few years.
And the American strategic plan since the 1990s was to absorb the Warsaw Pact into NATO. And it’s done that, but now it looks like it’s overplaying its hand. And the cost ultimately may be to lose Western Europe, headed by Germany, France, and Italy.
And we’re already seeing, in the last few days, just since our last broadcast, we’re seeing riots throughout Europe as the economy and employment are declining.
And there’s discussion, where is the German chemical industry, led by the BASF company, going to go? They’ve announced they are not going to make any further capital investments in Germany. They say that they’re being pressured to move their facilities to the United States. And they already have facilities in China.
So where will the German industrial population go when it abandons the country, just like Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania’s population have fallen by about one-third since 1990?
When you look at how this all works out geopolitically, the Baltics and Central Europe are not important economically. Their population is declining.
And only Poland has a military value, because of its dreams of recovering where it was in the 16th century, when it controlled most of Scandinavia and the Baltics.
So the U.S. is pushing the insistence, either you’re with us or against us. And the break that’s coming may move Western Europe into the Russian and SCO – Shanghai Cooperation Organization – orbit.
When they finally make the decision, if they do decide, “Gee, we shouldn’t have lost the trade with Russia. And now we’re being told to stop trading with China. Maybe we shouldn’t have made that”. If they reverse their decision, this is going to be irreversible.
And you could say the same of the Global South countries that are being pressured – and indeed, most of the Global Majority – they’re being forced to choose, either you’re with the U.S., whose industrial economy is shrinking, or you’re with the expanding BRICS+, plus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
So where are these countries going to realign over the next few years?
The U.S. can keep England as a dependency. And England’s fate is, I think, going to be a warning to what happens to countries that adopt U.S.-style finance capitalism instead of socialist industrialization and public services as a human right.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Michael gave us the big picture, right? I would like to focus on something that happened these past few days, which is enormous, and I would say, for most of the planet, quite unforeseen, which is Russia bringing back North Korea, the DPRK, to the rank of a very important Global South power with enormous reach.
So we have [Russian] Ministry of Defense Sergei Shoigu received like Mick Jagger in Pyongyang. He got a true rock star welcome, the whole thing, including a private audience with Kim Jong-un and obviously the whole leadership of the DPRK.
What leaked, of course, was the possibility of many military agreements and increasing their military collaboration.
What did not leak is the best part of them all, because it’s the geoeconomic part.
What do the Russians really want to do with Pyongyang? They want to integrate Pyongyang with South Korea, with Seoul. And of course, this will mean Russia developing a sort of go-between, diplomacy between both. And they have the possibility to do both, because they are also respected in Seoul.
And something that has already been discussed at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. These discussions, they started at least three or four years ago in Vladivostok. And what they’re all about basically is to build a trans-Korean railway, which is going to connect with the trans-Siberian and connect both Koreas to the Russian far east, and then all the way across Eurasia.
So imagine that you are a Samsung businessman in Seoul. You look at that and say, “Wow, I don’t need to use cargo tankers anymore; I can have direct access to the enormous developing market in the Russian far east, not to mention the whole of Eurasia via Russia, just by building a railway”. Very, very simple.
Which sooner or later, and I would say, with Chinese input, could become a high-speed rail. Considering that the Chinese are already investing in high-speed rail in Russia, and considering that if there is a duplication of the trans-Siberian into a trans-Siberian high-speed rail is going to be built by the Chinese, this trans-Korean railway could also be built with Chinese input, technical input as well.
And financed via a Chinese Silk Road Fund, the BRICS Development Bank, Russian banks, etc. It could be a reorganization of finance, East Eurasia style.
So they were discussing that, of course, and this is going to be re-discussed, and they’re going to get deeper into it at the next Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in early September. So it’s around the corner, literally.
So the fact that this is happening now, it’s very, very important, because this is a sort of a preamble to what they’re going to get into at the next Eastern Economic Forum. So everybody is happy with this arrangement.
North Korea, because they are brought back to the forefront of trade in the parts of Eurasia. The possibility of having some sort of geoeconomic deal between North Korea and South Korea.
Russia, developing the far east and integrating the far east with the Koreas.
And China, of course, because this also integrates this part of Eurasia, this Northern Eurasia framework.
And it’s part of BRICS. It’s part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And this opens, I would say, this leaves us with the possibility of North Korea sooner or later getting integrated into the Eurasia Economic Union.
And that’s fantastic, because I see that happening in at least two stages.
The first stage, the EAEU strikes a free trade agreement with North Korea, just like the ones they have with Cuba, or with Vietnam in Southeast Asia.
And they are also working with Indonesia to have an EAEU free trade deal with Indonesia. They could also do the same thing with North Korea.
And fantastic, this bypasses US sanctions, because it’s going to be – the EAEU basically, Russia is 80% of the firepower of the EAEU. They can devise a settlement mechanism involving North Korea that bypasses the US dollar completely.
You have expansion of EAEU to Northeast Asia, which is very important. The Chinese are going to love it as well, because they can also, even if they’re not part of the EAEU – don’t forget that Putin and Xi have already said, and the directives are already there – the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI and EAEU, they have to converge.
And this would be a perfect example of convergence between BRI and EAEU.
So that’s why, the way I see this visit by Shoigu as Mick Jagger, it extrapolates it everywhere, geoeconomically and geopolitically. And it’s no wonder that it was not even mentioned, I would say, or barely mentioned in Western mainstream media.
RADHIKA DESAI: That’s absolutely true.
And I mean, the more one thinks about it, the fact of the matter is that it is only a matter of time when the US’s strategy will stop working in the region.
So first of all, I mean, this idea that the United States can extend NATO to the Pacific is not going to wash, because the Pacific region has historically focused on its own economic development.
The Chinese are essentially pitting their own strategy of proposing economic development to the NATO strategy of securitizing everything, and essentially turning everything into a military conflict or a military alliance. We’re going to see the contestation of these two visions in the region.
And I would say, basically, it’s a matter of time before everybody begins to realize that what the United States is doing in Asia, what the United States has been doing around the world, at least since the Second World War, if not before, is essentially, well, the United States says it is providing protection to the world; in reality, the United States has been running a protection racket.
What is a protection racket? A protection racket is to promise to provide security against dangers that you have yourself created, so that your promise to provide security appears credible and attractive.
So, for example, the United States has continued to foment disunity on the Korean Peninsula. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Koreans, North and South, deeply yearn for some form of unification. There is absolutely no doubt.
And this is attested to by the fact that, periodically, governments come to power that have advanced progress towards unification, but the United States then comes in and disrupts it.
It’s only when Koreans realize this that they will stop voting for those forces. And I think it’s a matter of time.
Similarly, in the case of Taiwan, already we are seeing in the run-up to the elections that are due, I think, in a few months, you have in the appearance, side by side with the KMT that wishes to promote peaceful reconciliation with China, the emergence of a new party that is going to do the same.
This is going to essentially push the DPP out of the picture. So they’re not going to win.
Similarly, also you read in the papers, although Japan has signed, has pronounced a new military policy in recent years that people say should be unthinkable in a country with a pacifist constitution, but in reality you see that the overwhelming majority of the Japanese are not going to join any kind of US-led war against [China over] Taiwan.
And so finally, what I’m really driving at is that the wonderful specifics that you gave about what can happen just in the case of North Korea, this is part of a wider set of pressures that I like to think of as the exertion of the economic magnetism, the economic gravity of China.
And no country can afford not to respond to that. And so we are going to see a shift, but at the same time, in terms of what we can expect to happen in the next few years, maybe even few decades, is an attempt on the part of the United States to stop this inexorable development from occurring.
And you were saying, Michael, that I agree with you, that, at one level, it looks as the United States is looking at a multi-decade war. But we also read in the papers that the United States feels compelled to do something now, because they think that they have up to 2027 before China will become capable of really resisting US forces.
But yeah, I mean, this is a kind of a segue into the next question, which is basically, what can the US expect from its allies?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Japan has sort of a Stockholm Syndrome, and it identifies with the United States because the US bombed it. And despite its export trade opportunities with China, its right-wing government is still willing to lose this market and sacrifice its economy for the United States once again, just as it did in the Plaza and Louvre Accords.
And South Korea is really the key to all of this, partly because it’s so important in ship making, and it’s being pressured to continue cutting back its export of sophisticated ships to China. The Wall Street Journal just had a long report on that.
But if it sees the promise of the Chinese market – and as Pepe has explained, the whole Eurasian market, thanks to the railroad – it’s going to decide, what it is going to choose: the export markets to resolve the military overhead and the threat of North Korea, or is it just going to continue to back the US?
It’ll probably have to tell the US to remove its occupation troops, because I think the Korean War still is legally on. So we may finally see an end of the Korean War that began in 1950.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Your question is what America will do essentially. Just look around and see what they are incapable of doing in several parts of the Global South or the Global Majority.
For instance, Southeast Asia. Well, I lived in [Southeast Asia]; it’s my home. I moved to Southeast Asia in ’94, a long time ago.
So I followed the relationship between the ASEAN 10, the 10 members of Southeast Asia, with Russia, China, India, and the US on the spot.
And nowadays, everybody knows that the number one trade partner of all ASEAN is China.
We also know that the U.S. has more margin of maneuver in some of the Southeast Asian nations than in others.
For instance, Singapore, we usually joke that Singapore is an American aircraft carrier station in Southeast Asia, side by side with Indonesia and Malaysia.
More and more relations between Indonesia and China are being, finally, there was a lot of mutual suspicion during the times of Suharto, of course, and immediately afterwards.
And the Chinese have been very, very clever to explain to Indonesia, “Look, we don’t have any designs on your islands, the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea”. So the Indonesians are more relaxed.
So now they are talking business, for instance, like, you know, Chinese investments, part of the Belt and Road Initiative across Indonesia.
Philippines, we all know, it remains an on-off American colony.
But the Americans, for instance, have absolutely zero penetration in, for instance, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. This is Chinese territory. And these have Belt and Road Initiative projects all over the space, like the absolutely extraordinary high-speed rail that the Chinese built from Yunnan to Vientiane.
I saw that being built in the middle of the forest across the Mekong River. It’s something that only the Chinese are capable of pulling off. And they did in record time on top of it, because the Laos government said, “OK, come here, do everything”, and it’s the way to go.
In Thailand, there’s going to be an extension, because, of course, of foreign interference, because of Thai lobbies fighting among themselves, the Thais haven’t even started to finish their own stretch, you see.
But this proves that Southeast Asia, in terms of Chinese-U.S. relations, it’s a balancing act. But most of these nations know exactly what’s going to happen from now on.
Their number one trade partner is China. And Chinese influence in all of them will continue to be very, very strong, directly and indirectly, via the Chinese diaspora in all of them, what we call the “bamboo internet”, which is strong in all of these nations.
South America: South America, what they basically, against Argentina and Brazil, of course, the Americans have tactical victories.
In case of Argentina, for instance, they forced Argentina to get a loan to pay another IMF loan.
So basically, the plan is to get Argentina to keep begging for IMF loans ad infinitum. So this is plan A. There’s no plan B.
Brazil is much more complicated. But for the moment, it’s a tactical victory, because the margin of maneuver of the Lula government is very, very slim.
And we have the famous list of what you’re going to do, that Jake Sullivan went personally to Brasilia to hand out to the new Brazilian government.
So obviously, Lula inside BRICS has to be very, very careful. Every time that he opens his mouth and he talks about de-dollarization, we see people shrinking in the beltway. So very complicated.
And across Africa, of course, which I’m sure we’re going to discuss, we are watching basically a second wave of decolonization.
And now, finally, the real thing with a new generation of young African patriots in Burkina Faso, in Mali, in Niger, in Gambia.
And of course, with very, very important allies, not only Russia and China outside, but Algeria in the Maghreb, who plainly supports all these new governments in the Sahel area.
So in terms of not only the U.S., but the collective West as a whole, they’re being expelled little by little, with or without AFRICOM, from Africa.
And of course, in West Asia, they still cling to, for instance, Syria.
Everybody seems to forget nowadays, with the war in Ukraine, that one-third of Syria is still occupied by the Americans. And they are plundering oil virtually on a daily or weekly basis, and wheat. And this disappeared completely from the narrative anywhere.
Even in West Asia, the war in Syria is not over. The war in Syria continues, and there is an illegal occupation of one-third of the Syrian territory.
So we have tactical victories. At the same time, we have Hezbollah growing stronger and stronger by the day.
So the Americas are losing terrain everywhere.
[The US has] tactical victories in Europe, of course. They managed to get Germany and the EU separated from Russia. But this is not eternal. This is a tactical victory for the moment. This could change in a matter of a few years only.
And of course, across Eurasia, we all know what’s happening. Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS+, the Greater Eurasia Partnership conducted by Russia, Belt and Road Initiative. We’re going to have a forum in Beijing in October.
This is it. Eurasia now is Eurasia controlled by Eurasians, and without foreign interference.
Of course, we still have attempts at color revolutions.
I’m going back to Central Asia soon. I’m going to see what’s happening in Kazakhstan now. Kazakhstan, they are so uncomfortable; they’re trying to hedge their bets, considering that they suffered a color revolution a year and a half ago. And there are sequels. This thing is not controlled yet.
So it’s a very mixed picture, guys. I think we all agree that, in terms of tactical victories, the Americans have some serious ones. But in terms of the overall strategy, they are losing virtually in every continent.
RADHIKA DESAI: And the very fact that Kazakhstan would be having second thoughts about this is a very important thing. Because from what I understand, of all the Central Asian republics, it is the most pro-Western. It is the most penetrated by American capital, and so on and so forth.
So that’s really fascinating. And you’re absolutely right that the picture is very complex.
But we can see where the undercurrent of history is going. It’s going away from the United States and toward China and Russia and so on.
But at the same time, the undercurrent is one thing. But on the surface, the United States will continue to try and make attempts to block this from happening. There will be vain attempts, but they will be made. People will pay the price for it, et cetera.
But still, if you try to, you know, as you say, the United States’ ability to conduct all this is in danger.
One indication of this, as we’ve discussed in the past, is that the U.S. cannot, you know – today it’s in the news that the U.S. is going to use the drawdown facility that has been created for Ukraine to send weapons to Taiwan.
But the fact of the matter is, what’s also being reported in the U.S. media itself, let alone elsewhere, is that the U.S. ability to produce the sort of arms that are necessary for theater operations today is actually very weak. It is not able to produce.
The United States provides vast quantities of money to its pampered military-industrial complex to produce weapons that are of no use – or they are not sufficient.
You know, they’re very good at producing high-priced, big-ticket items that cannot be used on the battlefield.
Now, this is really a fascinating comment on capitalism, on American-style monopoly capitalism, that you have a pampered military-industrial complex that cannot produce what you need, and you still keep supporting them. So that’s one contradiction.
And of course, there are also many others, you know, within an election campaign about to go into high gear in the United States. The unpopularity of the [Ukraine] war, even in the U.S., will be clear.
Every other day, there is some item in some or the other newspaper saying, “You know, why are we sending so much money to Ukraine when we can invest in the U.S.?”, etc.
So what are the U.S.’s options?
I mean, Michael, you recently wrote a paper in which you said that the United States has lost any capacity to rationally calculate what it ought to do, what strategy will win. Perhaps you can say something about that.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the U.S. chip makers like Intel are protesting very loudly that China represents one-third of their market.
And so if they’re told by the Biden administration to stop selling sophisticated chips to China, then the government is going to be told, well, you’ll have to make up maybe a $50 billion subsidy to us.
And will the U.S. Treasury really be asked to replace the China market? That’s what’s already being debated in Congress.
So if it does that, how is this kind of giveaway going to affect the U.S. presidential and the congressional elections just next year? This is already an issue.
And business donors are not giving money to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, because they’re wondering what to do.
And on the other hand, you have Donald Trump trying to get votes by being even more anti-China than the Democrats.
So the great unknown is how China is going to respond to the U.S. shooting itself in the foot. Is it going to be willing to turn the tables and retaliate by imposing its own sanctions?
And it has a much stronger ability to impose sanctions on the U.S. than the U.S. has to impose sanctions on China.
And [China] fired a warning shot a week ago by stopping the exports of gallium – it produces 80 percent of the world’s supply – and germanium, which it does 60 percent.
And on August 1st, China just announced that it has limitations on rare earth exports. And rare earths are a key to making the magnetic characteristics that are required for sophisticated chip technology.
So China can simply impose sanctions on trade that doesn’t have much monetary value, but a key technology value, and can limit the trade in raw materials only to its Shanghai Cooperation Organization allies, and say, “Well, look, I’ll provide you with all the materials, and you can make what the United States and Western Europe are no longer able to make, because they don’t have what only we can supply”.
So the question is, when will China’s political mentality decide to actually fight the U.S. type of negative war with sanctions instead of the competitive cost-cutting, high-technology war that economic trade is supposed to fight? That’s the issue.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And, you know, as you were talking, Michael, I was reminded of the fact that, of course, sanctions against Russia were supposed to, you know, “reduce the ruble to rubble” and, you know, push the Russian economy back into the stone age and whatnot.
And, of course, if they didn’t win against Russia, they are not going to win against China. We know that, as you say, rightly, that perhaps China should engage a little bit more in the kind of action that it has just undertaken to deny the West important inputs that it needs, important raw materials that it needs.
But even without such restrictions, China is already making U.S. sanctions useless, because it has rapidly accelerated its innovation in chip technology and so on.
And you know that if the Chinese really roll up their sleeves and say we are going to attack this problem, that problem will be solved in relatively short time.
If the Taiwanese can do it, why can’t the Chinese? It’s not you know, the Chinese have been happy to rely on imports since they were easily available. But if they are not, they will develop their own.
So the sanctions are going to boomerang big time vis-a-vis China as well. In fact, in a much bigger way.
And so the thing that becomes very clear is that it’s very unlikely that there’s going to be anything like an Asian NATO.
In fact, given the failure of the war, as I’ve argued before, in Ukraine, the real question will become whether even a European NATO can survive.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Radhika, can I change the subject a little bit? Touching on what Michael just said, it dawned on me that the ultimate form of sanctions against the empire is de-dollarization.
Because if you don’t change the geoeconomic paradigm, nothing’s going to happen in terms of multipolar integration.
So I’d like a little introduction and then I’m going to ask Michael a direct question. Because he’s probably the number one specialist in the world that can give us, without being part of the negotiations, that can give us, OK, what are they planning to do?
It’s about the so-called BRICS new currency. What I learned from BRICS Sherpas is that there won’t be an announcement of a BRICS new currency in South Africa in three weeks, for a number of very complex reasons.
First of all, they don’t have time. Second, their negotiations started only a few months ago. And this is something that I discussed in Moscow; you need five, six, seven years to design a system like that, if not 10 years, and start to implement it and test it with businesses first, and then with nation states.
What is going to happen in South Africa is they’re going to announce an increase in bilateral trade in their own currencies, which is something that they already do. And they are already working on alternative settlements.
So basically, starting with the five BRICS currencies – which significantly, [their names] all start with an “R”. That’s very, very quirky, isn’t it? Obviously, if we use renminbi instead of yuan, so we have renminbi, real, rand, rupee, and ruble.
So we’re going to have the R5 together, organizing an alternative settlement system of payments. And this will be the first step towards multilateral trade in their own currencies, the five.
Don’t forget that we’re going to have BRICS+. So we’re not going to have five; we’re going to have maybe seven, eight, nine, or even 10, depending on the first wave and the second wave of candidates to become parts of BRICS+.
And then expanding multilateral trade with these national currencies. And, of course, building, okay, let’s start designing a system, and let’s try to sell this to our businesses in our individual nations, and then to other ones as well. And that will mean the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Eurasia Economic Union, etc.
The Eurasia Economic Union, they have already started discussing an alternative currency three years ago, at least. And they’re still discussing it. Like, you know, two months ago, [Prominent Russian economist] Sergey Glazyev went to Beijing to discuss this with the Chinese.
Essentially, it’s an extremely complex thing. And, of course, taking into consideration that the Chinese are terrified of American secondary sanctions, especially. So this is all extremely complicated.
So my question to Michael would be, what would be the ideal path in terms of elaborating an alternative payment system inside BRICS first, then expanding to BRICS+, and then selling this system of payments, considering that the Chinese have their own payment system; the Russians have their own payment system; Iran have their own payment system.
So getting these all together, so you can settle trade within this new framework, bypassing the U.S. dollar. And then you’re going to have your big enterprises, your big companies, individual nations say, “Well, this is an excellent deal, fantastic”.
So now if we’re a company in Turkey, we can do business with a Russian company and we use an alternative payment system.
What would be the best way to proceed ahead? And when would we reach a stage where we can actually discuss an alternative currency in terms of bypassing the U.S. dollar and the euro?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, actually, Radhika and I have devoted two programs of this series to just that question. And we pointed out that what people think of when they say BRICS currency is something like a euro that you can use for buying and selling things, either buying steel or spending at the grocery store.
You’re absolutely right. That’s far away, because you need political integration to have that.
But what we’re really talking about, and what the kind of currency that’s being talked about isn’t really a currency; it’s a bank credit, a bank settlement system, very much like the SDRs [Special Drawing Rights] for the IMF, except it won’t be controlled by the U.S.
But most of all, this is what [John Maynard] Keynes supported in [the Bretton Woods Conference in] 1944 with the bancor. It’s a means of settlement only for spending among central banks.
So it’s not a general currency. It’s a means of settling credits among central banks. And the credits are apparently going to be based on the artificial bank currency, tied to the price of raw materials that the member countries all support.
And it’ll be very much like paper gold. Right now, the alternative to holding each other’s currencies or U.S. dollars is gold, because gold is an asset without a liability. It’s just something that you can invest in. But you have to somehow earn the money to buy the gold.
Many countries have left their gold, since the pre-1991 movement devaluation. Countries used to leave their gold with the U.S. Federal Reserve to settle, buy, and sell in the gold market to stabilize their exchange rates. They never asked for their gold back.
Finally, Germany asked a few years ago, and the Fed said, I’m sorry, all your gold is gone. We’ve kept down the price of gold to prevent people from moving away from the U.S. dollar by pledging it to commodity dealers. And we don’t have any gold to give you.
And how much of the world’s gold has been left with the Federal Reserve? We don’t know.
So to avoid the problem of how to really settle new gold, the BRICS bank will create a credit system where all the countries have credit to buy and sell with each other to be settled in their own currency, so that China, for instance, won’t hold too much Argentinian currency – especially since Argentina has just done the currency swap to pay the IMF for its foreign debt that it should have simply wiped out.
So we’re talking about a central bank special currency, not a general spending currency. There are two different things that are often confused in the public discussion.
RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, and if I may add to that, because – you know, Michael and I have done work on this together in our programs, in a paper that we jointly wrote; and then also, independently, so Michael has done his work in Super Imperialism and so on; and my own work on geopolitical economy, is really, it’s primarily – in the book called Geopolitical Economy – it’s primarily a critique of the US dollar system, which I argue has never worked stably.
So it has always run into crisis. And in order to appear to function, [the dollar system] has required the inflation, particularly after 1971, of very dangerous bubbles of financial activity.
And the reason for that is very simple. You know, the loose talk – which, by the way, includes a lot of academics who engage in loose talk – loose talk of the naturalness of the sterling system and then the dollar system has given everybody to understand that somehow, yes, of course, the currency of the most powerful country should be the world’s currency.
But this is, in fact, as we’ve shown, an extremely unstable situation. It cannot obtain.
And that’s why Keynes in 1944, speaking on behalf of his country – not willing his country to be subject to the external authority of the dollar, knowing that the sterling can no longer perform the role it once used to perform, knowing intimately well why that was so – proposed the bancor.
And essentially this completely separates out the issue of international settlement of imbalances from the ordinary requirements of money within a society.
So within a society, money has to be run in order to create full employment, a productively dynamic, ecologically sustainable currency that will work domestically.
But often the requirements of that may go directly counter to the need to maintain its international value.
And gold, by the way, often people confuse it: gold is not money. When gold is used as money, it shows that there is no money.
Gold is a commodity. You know, Michael said it’s an asset without liabilities, but maybe it’s even more pertinent to say it’s a commodity.
So it’s a bit like, you know, going back to barter. So you give me steel and I’ll give you gold. That’s the exchange of two commodities. It just happens to be a widely accepted commodity. But people have proposed other things.
But essentially, the resort to gold, the Germans and others saying we want our gold back, etc., it’s one of the signs – one of the many signs, by the way – that the American dollar system is not working.
So essentially, the point that I’d like to make, therefore, is what would need to happen? You know, your original question was, you know, how will these currency plans work, etc.?
So I would say that the first step would be to, of course, create a relatively stable system of exchange rates between these – let’s just assume it’s the five Rs.
So let’s say, you know, what is the mutual exchange rate of the five Rs, and to try to stabilize them and so on?
And then, in the long run, you know, this kind of system can work. They can even create a sort of bancor based on the five Rs – although originally Keynes had said, let’s not even not use any currencies; let’s just tie the value of bancor to a basket of a few dozen, most widely traded commodities, because that’s what ultimately matters in international trade.
So you could do that, and maybe you can get there, but you can begin by stabilizing the values.
But then I think the big step would have to be, you would have to try and create relatively balanced trade among all the trading partners.
Why is that? Because, Michael said that we have to ensure that, you know, China does not end up with too much Argentinian currency or whatever, or any one of the five does not end up with too much of the currency of the other.
Because what it shows is that one country buys a lot from another country, but that country, which is exporting a lot, has no use for its export revenues.
Now, that would require a development plan among the holders of the five Rs so that, for example, let’s assume a trade relationship between China and Russia.
Well, China and Russia have to ensure that each would want to buy things with what it earns from the other country. So if it’s absent, then maybe there should be investment and opportunity to develop the capacity to produce the thing.
Because, you see, the genius of Keynes’s arrangement was that it had mechanisms within it to force people, force countries to move towards balance. Surplus countries were equally responsible, as were deficit countries, to try to address imbalances, both in terms of capital flows and in terms of trade.
So once you create those mechanisms, then you create an incentive for, say, if China has too many rubles, then China says, “OK, Russians, we are going to help you develop this productive capacity, so that you can export more of X, Y, Z to us, etc.”.
So I think that’s what needs to be done. And just one final point, Keynes’s genius is really apparent in our time because, just as Keynes said, a stable system should try to eliminate persistent imbalances.
Now, move your eyes to the dollar system. The one thing it primarily relies on is the generation of persistent imbalances, because to provide the world with money on the basis of your persistent trade deficits and the current account deficits with the rest of the world, means that the whole system is reliant on imbalances, which means it is volatile and unstable.
So, as you rightly say, Pepe, this is a very complex thing, and it’s going to take time to work out.
But it won’t be worked out if people are laboring under misapprehension, such as that, you know, we need to create a currency like the euro rather than a currency like bancor.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Just one thing about the dollar. You just mentioned, and everybody who discusses the dollar system talks about how the US has been providing dollars.
In [my book] Super Imperialism, and my work for Arthur Anderson years ago, the US private sector is exactly in balance. Since 1950, year after year, from the Korean War to the Vietnam War, the private sector, trade and investment, is just in balance; it hasn’t provided any extra dollars at all to the world.
The entire US deficit supplying dollars to the world has been military. It used to be called the dollar glut. It was to stop that, that [French] General de Gaulle kept cashing in [dollars for] gold.
What the new system of the BRICS and the five Rs are going to cure is that the credit is not going to be paid by building 800 military bases around the other countries, to lock them into a dependency system.
You’ll have the international payment settlement system demilitarized. That’s the basic aim of all this.
The US dollar system is a militarized system. The dollars are US military spending abroad.
That’s the number one reason for world peace, that the dollar system should be superseded.
RADHIKA DESAI: I agree that in terms of trade, US trade was balanced for a long time, like longer than you might imagine.
But certainly starting in the 1980s, the US trade deficit also made its own contribution to the current [account deficit]. The US trade deficit is today between 3 and 4 percent of US GDP.
MICHAEL HUDSON: No, that’s absolutely fictitious. It’s based on fictitious statistics.
Much of the trade deficit is in oil. When the oil comes in, it’s counted as a trade deficit. But only about 10 percent of the price of this oil is paid in non-dollars. All the oil that’s imported is from US oil companies.
And the offset is the earnings on this, the interest paid, or the cost of producing this oil are all made in the United States.
So you have investment inflows on the capital account and on the income account to offset the fictitious payments of oil imports that don’t involve foreign currency at all.
RADHIKA DESAI: OK, I’m not quite sure what you mean, because the fact of the matter is that the whole point is that the United States pays for this oil in dollars.
But let me just make another further point, which is that, you know, people tend to focus on the US trade deficit, and then they say, “Look, the Chinese are buying so many US treasuries and so they are essentially financing the trade deficit, and so this is a kind of a mutually supportive system” – “Chimerica” and all that.
But in reality, what people forget is that what’s really keeping the dollar system going is not Chinese financing, not Chinese purchases of US treasury securities; what keeps the dollar system going is the vast expansion of financial activity, which goes in both directions.
And so, for example, if you look at the statistics, the financial statistics about all the international capital flows that were going on, the bulk of them being in dollar-denominated assets in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Chinese played hardly any role in it.
The biggest role that was played, the part of the world that was most fully integrated into the US financial system, which was producing these toxic securities that led to the 2008 financial crisis, was Europe.
And therefore, it is no wonder that Europe was the part of the world that suffered the most from the 2008 crisis. The 2008 crisis set the foundation for the 2010 Eurozone crisis, and so on and so forth.
And that is why I really find it important to correct people when they term what happened in 2008 a global financial crisis; there was nothing global about it. It was a North Atlantic financial crisis.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right.
PEPE ESCOBAR: I want to pose a question to both of you. Because I was reminded of something very clever that the Chinese are doing and maybe they are setting an example for the whole Global South.
You know that they have now oil futures being traded at the Shanghai bourse, especially the GCC. It’s fascinating.
So the GCC goes to the Shanghai bourse. They sell their oil futures. The Chinese buy it. They pay yuan.
But then the GCC says, look, we don’t want all that yuan. You know, what are you going to do with so much yuan?
The Chinese said, no problem. You can trade your yuan with gold using the Shanghai exchange, a clearing house, or in Hong Kong if you want.
This is absolutely brilliant. Do you think that this could be expanded to the other BRICS, starting with the other BRICS, and then if we have, for instance, Iran and Saudi Arabia being part of BRICS+, adopting the same mechanism?
RADHIKA DESAI: I think that can work. I would say that, you know, the role of gold, as I see, is always residual.
If all the money in the world were actually backed by gold, we would suffer massive deflation, because there wouldn’t be enough money in the world, because there isn’t enough gold in the world.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Gold only finances international balances, not general activity, as the gold exchange standard, not the gold standard.
And again, the gold is an alternative, the easiest alternative to the dollar, because everybody accepts it.
It’s taken a couple of thousand years, but they finally decided something that they can accept as an alternative.
It’s a transition to the BRICS artificial currency. It’s a transition to something away from gold – the idea of an international currency that is not the embodiment of not the U.S. trade deficit, but U.S. military spending.
RADHIKA DESAI: So then to further add to that, so I would say that essentially, when people buy gold, what they’re saying is they don’t want money; they want a commodity; they want that commodity, etc., an easily tradable commodity, so some kind of asset.
So in that sense, it’s a good idea. You know, the function of gold, I often like to say that the sterling standard in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the sterling exchange standard was often called the gold standard, you know, because sterling was backed by gold.
But two things. Number one, the genius of the system actually lay in creating such wide international acceptability for the sterling that it was rarely exchanged for gold. And the reason and the mechanisms by which this was done, we can talk about it.
But the point is, it was rarely exchanged for gold. Keynes writes in his [book] Indian Currency and Finance, which is actually a primer on the functioning of the international gold standard, the sterling standard. And I’ll come in a minute to why a book on Indian currency and finance should serve as the primer on the gold standard. But let me just finish this point.
He makes the point that the Bank of England had less gold than the Caja of Argentina. And he prided himself on that. And he also used to berate the French for holding gold. He says, look, you don’t need to, et cetera. But that’s a whole other set of questions.
Now, let me come to how the British were able to do this. It’s because they drew – I mean, the so-called gold standard actually had very little to do with gold, except for the fact that gold was the benchmark of the value; the price of gold was the benchmark of the value of sterling, and sterling was occasionally exchanged into gold.
And, you know, in those days, some gold coins did circulate. But that was really a very limited role.
The real foundation of the sterling standard was the surpluses that the British drew from their colonies, chiefly British India, which is why a book on Indian currency and finance, which is really a description of how surpluses were transferred from India to the UK. What were the mechanisms employed in order to do this?
So my point being that that is why this book is a primer on the gold standard. And the real foundation of the gold standard was the surpluses Britain extracted from its colonies, and then exported as capital exports.
To where? To Europe, to North America and Oceania, and to some extent to South Africa – that is to say, to all its settler colonies.
So if you think about it in a different way, Britain drew surpluses from her non-settler colonies – British India, Africa, the Caribbean – and exported them as capital exports to her settler colonies.
This is really, it’s quite a racialized thing, but that is the way it was. It is primarily where the money went.
And so Britain provided the world with liquidity by exporting capital, not by running deficits as the US would do later.
The US had no choice. The US didn’t have colonies which it could squeeze to provide surpluses to export to the rest of the world. So the US had to take a different role.
So to come back to your question, I think that the Chinese strategy of allowing things to be exchanged for gold is a good confidence-building measure.
And, you know, at the moment, the transactions are few enough that it can do so. I mean, ultimately, the system should work so well that it does not need gold.
Now, there again, the question is, if China tried to internationalize its currency on the model of the dollar, it would actually reduce China to the sort of economy the US has, of de-industrializing and aging infrastructure. So it will not do so.
That is why Michael and I, and anyone who thinks about it, always says you should not internationalize your currency in that way, not to any significant extent; instead, you need this kind of artificial currency that will help settle international imbalances.
PEPE ESCOBAR: So you’re right, Radhika. And this is the official position in Beijing. They want to go very, very slow with the internationalization of yuan.
RADHIKA DESAI: Yes, yes, exactly.
So, folks, I should say, you know, we’ve had a really wide-ranging discussion, as usual, absolutely fantastic.
We’re about an hour and we’d like not to go too much over an hour. So let me ask you both to say any closing remarks you want to say.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve been brought back to the point that we’ve been making in part one of this discussion, which is the U.S. sanctions were designed to isolate Russia’s raw materials and China’s information technology and shipmaking.
These are not in the economic interest of America’s allies, or of China’s Asian neighbors, or even the United States.
Europe is being told to buy its oil and gas from the U.S. Korea, and Japan, and Taiwan –
Basically we’re back to the issue of whether trade is going to be economic or national security in nature. And it seems now, given the U.S. military presence, it’s going to be both. It’s going to be economic with national security.
And I think it’s hard to see getting the U.S. using any military leverage at all, given the failure of the NATO tanks and the missiles and the anti-aircraft. And the idea is that basically the U.S. is, the dollar is being rejected.
And at first glance, the thought of the BRICS and the Global Majority emerging may seem outrageous, but it’s no more outrageous than the thought that the Nobel —
I want to make a suggestion that, just as the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Henry Kissinger for destroying Laos and Cambodia and covering Vietnam’s forest with Agent Orange, or Obama was given the Peace Prize for destroying Libya and confiscating its gold that Gaddafi had hoped to use for an African gold-based currency and turning it over, and the final Obama act starting today’s crisis with organizing the pro-Nazi coup in Ukraine, I think that America is trying to force Europeans to believe that war is peace in the same sense that Tacitus described a British chieftain of saying that Rome was making a desert and calling it peace.
But in view of what we’re seeing in the last year and a half, I could imagine President Biden getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. It would fit in perfectly. It meets the traditional qualifications of destroying a country, Ukraine.
But actually, there’s another reason which he can get it. Biden and Blinken and their neocon team have driven most of the entire Global Majority together to create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world that has become increasingly one-sided.
And under the Biden administration, the United States is forcing the entire rest of the world, except for its NATO satellites, to create a new economic order. And that’s what we’ve been discussing.
And this new international economic order is on the lines that the United Nations was supposed to be created in the first place, before it was taken over by the U.S.
Self-sufficiency in food production for each country. They won’t have to run a trade deficit to import food, because, just like Russia was able to make itself independent in grain and become a grain exporter, other countries can do the same thing, when they’re freed from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund trying to block it.
The new economic order will be a mixed economy along socialist lines, to uplift the entire economy, at least of the expanded BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
And there will be a focus more on peaceful integration instead of military and financial integration.
So it turns out that the NATO war in Ukraine has turned out to be this grand catalyst for this new world order. And just because this wasn’t Biden’s and Blinken’s original intention doesn’t mean that it’s not the effect in practice.
And remember, [Charles Maurice de] Talleyrand, the French official in the 18th century, said of one policy, “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder”. And you could say that that describes American policy perfectly.
But let’s give it credit for this fortuitous blunder that has driven the whole Global Majority together, to make an alternative to the World Bank, an alternative to the IMF, and an alternative to the failed U.S.-centered unipolar order.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Well, I am in touch with a group of Chinese writers and scholars, and they are always absolutely fascinated. And one of them, in fact, Michael was just talking about blunders.
They said, this is the number one blunder in the history of the empire, and they won’t be able to recover. And the Chinese have a little bit of experience with blunders, right?
Well, I would like to finish basically saying that in three weeks we’re going to have the BRICS Summit. So everything that Michael was telling us a little while ago is going to be discussed at the BRICS Summit.
And this is what the Sherpas have been doing these past few weeks. The Sherpas were actually organizing and designing the proceedings, what’s going to happen, the agenda, and the procedures for BRICS Plus, the expansion.
So in three weeks, we’re going to have a geopolitical, geoeconomic earthquake. There’s no question about that. Just to remind all of you, there is a list of potential members of BRICS+.
This is fascinating because these are part of an organization parallel to BRICS called Friends of BRICS. Whenever there is a BRICS Summit, you have Friends of BRICS Summit as well. They interact and they also have their own mini summit.
And this is exactly what happened in South Africa, what, two weeks ago, maximum. I’ll give you the list. Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan.
So probably the first tier, the first wave of BRICS+ is going to come from these guys to one, two, three, or four of these. And there’s also Belarus, which was not in Friends of BRICS, but it’s very close to Russia. And Belarus also applied for BRICS.
You will notice that in this list, there’s no Argentina, unfortunately. And this, I think we discussed this in our previous, because Argentina, basically, they were, I would say, forced to withdraw their application toward BRICS. And this, they didn’t know how to explain that in Buenos Aires. But this is what it is at the moment.
So can you imagine if we have just in terms of the brand new world ahead? Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as a member of BRICS.
So we’re going to have BRICS+ directly linked to OPEC+, directly linked to major sources of energy to China, directly linked to that mechanism at the Shanghai bourse of the GCC selling oil. And if you want gold, you can have your gold as well.
So can you imagine this in a matter of two or three days? We’re going to have this thing turning upside down. And then maybe this is the beginning of the new world economic order. Voila.
RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, absolutely, folks. And so, yeah, let me just wind this down by making just a couple of remarks.
Number one, I think that, you know, you were talking about blunders.
But if you look at the long term historical point of view, the whole project of American hegemony has been a blunder. We are just seeing the latest and ever more desperate blunders of the United States in trying to keep it going.
This has been my argument for a very, very long time. And bringing the matter back to NATO, which was at least formally the subject of our thing, NATO has always, of course, been an instrument of U.S. hegemony.
But if you cast your mind back a couple of decades, you will see that people, very few people really talked about NATO very much. Because U.S. hegemony was much more extensive. NATO was one part of a larger structure of U.S. hegemony.
Now we’ve come to a point where the U.S.’s purchase on world events relies on NATO to such an extent that it has become the mainstay of U.S. power.
And this mainstay of U.S. power was, you know – part of the reason people didn’t talk about it very much is because it was always fractious. There were always tensions between the Europeans and the Americans and so on. So there was not much to see there in terms of U.S. hegemony.
And now that so-called U.S. hegemony has become reliant on reliance on this outfit is really telling, is really telling about how far, how low U.S. power has sunk.
So perhaps with that, I think we should end today’s today’s show. Please look forward to more shows with us. Hopefully, Pepe, we will have you back another time, after these upcoming summits, or something like that, to assess them.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Thank you so much. My pleasure.
RADHIKA DESAI:  Thanks very much. And thanks again to our videographer, Paul Graham. And of course, as always, to Ben Norton for hosting our show.
Goodbye, everyone. And see you next time. Bye bye.


Instruction: Write an article about: CNN promotes neo-Nazi commander from Ukraine’s white-supremacist Azov regiment. 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.

Input: Azov, CNN, media, Nazis, PBS, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Top US media outlet CNN promoted a commander from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov regiment, failing to mention his militia’s white-supremacist ideology. Azov then proudly shared the video on its official Twitter account.

Leading US media network CNN has promoted a commander of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov regiment, without mention of his hate group’s extremist views.
In 2014, a gang of Ukrainian neo-Nazis formed a militia called the Azov Battalion. These far-right extremists played a leading role in a violent US-sponsored coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government, which they had deemed too “pro-Russian.”
The new pro-Western regime that was installed in Kiev after the 2014 “Maidan” coup waged a brutal war on Russian-speaking Ukrainian separatists in the east of the country. Kiev turned to fascist gangs like Azov to help strengthen its weak military forces.
Azov was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian state. It became a regiment in the National Guard, while still maintaining its white-supremacist ideology and use of numerous Nazi symbols.
This March 21, the neo-Nazi Azov militia posted a video on its official Twitter account of one of its commanders being promoted on CNN.
CNN had republished a video clip of Azov Major Denis Prokopenko, who was helping lead the fight against Russian troops in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The major US media channel described the fascist extremist simply as a “Ukrainian military commander who has been defending the city from the siege.”
Коментар командира полку "Азов", майора Дениса Прокопенка (друга Редіса), для CNN щодо ситуації в Маріуполі pic.twitter.com/pacZzbPaRZ
— АЗОВ (@Polk_Azov) March 21, 2022

CNN subsequently quoted this neo-Nazi commander in two different print reports, which failed to disclose his far-right politics.
A March 19 CNN report titled “Mariupol residents are being forced to go to Russia, city council says” quoted him simply as “Major Denis Prokopenko, from the National Guard Azov Regiment,” with no further details.
Ironically, just two paragraphs before, CNN had cited the mayor of Mariupol to try to compare Russia to Nazi Germany.
CNN cites the mayor of Mariupol to compare Russia to Nazi Germany, before two paragraphs later quoting a commander of the neo-Nazi Azov regiment, with no mention of its Nazi ideology.
A similar CNN article from earlier that same day repeated the same quote from Prokopenko, but did mention euphemistically in passing that the “Azov Battalion is an ultra-nationalist militia that has since been integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces.”
With state backing, Azov preaches a white-supremacist ideology and uses Nazi symbols like the German Wolfsangel and racist black sun.
The Nazi symbols used by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, neo-Nazi extremists from Azov and other far-right militias have played a leading role in the fight.
NATO member states have provided Azov with weapons and training. And Ukraine’s National Guard proudly tweeted a video of an Azov Nazi greasing his bullets with pig fat to kill Russian Muslims, whom the Ukrainian state institution demonized as “orcs.”
This is the official, verified Twitter account of Ukraine's National Guard publicly portraying Russian Chechen Muslims as monstrous "orcs," and praising its Nazi soldiers for threatening to kill them with lard-greased bullets: https://t.co/gs0yYu4qXohttps://t.co/PMKeTajw9e
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 27, 2022

CNN is far from the only Western media outlet that has actively promoted neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Many major media outlets amplified a propaganda photo shoot that was staged by Azov before the Russian invasion.
US government-sponsored network PBS even heroized notorious neo-Nazi Artem Semenikhin, the mayor of the Ukrainian city Konotop, in a softball interview in which he demonized Russians as “cockroaches.”
PBS did not mention the “heil Hitler” symbol on Semenikhin’s car, or even the portrait of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera that was on the wall behind the extremist in the video.
US government-sponsored outlet PBS heroized a neo-Nazi mayor in Ukraine, in a softball interview in which he called Russians “cockroaches”
It didn’t mention the “heil Hitler” symbol on his car or portrait of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera on his wallhttps://t.co/vqVuubMIUV
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 9, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: Britain admitted US/UK-backed Afghan Mujahideen were ‘reactionary feudalists’ driven primarily by class, not religion. 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.

Input: Afghanistan, Britain, feudalism, Matt Kennard, Mujahideen, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, USSR

Output:
The far-right Mujahideen the US and Britain supported in Afghanistan were “stubborn reactionaries determined to maintain a system of feudal antiquity” against socialist reforms, the UK embassy wrote.

The British government internally acknowledged back in 1980 that the right-wing insurgents the United States and United Kingdom supported in Afghanistan were “stubborn reactionaries determined to maintain a system of feudal antiquity.”
Moreover, London conceded that these reactionary feudalists were primarily motivated to fight against Afghanistan’s revolutionary socialist government and its Soviet allies not by religion, but rather because the ruling marxists had implemented land reforms and policies to redistribute their inherited wealth.
In other words, the Western-backed proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s was, like most wars, fundamentally a class war.
But Britain and the US consciously decided to “play up the Islamic nature” of the feudal Mujahideen to disguise their class war on the poor as a religious conflict. And it was this strategy that fueled the fire of sectarianism and gave birth to Islamist extremist groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
We now know this due to the publication of a confidential cable from the British embassy in Kabul, written in November 1980.
The letter was published by British journalist Matt Kennard, one of the best reporters in the world today, who helps run the investigative outlet Declassified UK.
Interesting declassified letter from UK embassy in Kabul in 1980 saying opposition to the progressive reforms of Soviet-backed govt in Afghanistan (such as land reform removing landlord control, banning dowry payments) had caused most trouble for Afghan govt, before adding… pic.twitter.com/7KnbzrMoQY
— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) August 28, 2021

As early as 1972, the CIA had supported far-right Islamist elements in Afghanistan, encouraging them in their war on Afghan leftists.
Yet despite Washington’s years-long campaign against the Afghan left, communists managed in 1978 to overthrow the military dictatorship of General Mohammed Daoud Khan and institute a socialist government, in an uprising called the Saur Revolution.
In response, the CIA and Britain’s equivalent, MI6, immediately began cultivating right-wing forces to fight the new revolutionary government. They did so with help from Pakistan’s spy agency ISI and the Saudi monarchy.
The guerrilla army of ultra-conservative warlords these foreign powers brought together came to be known as the Mujahideen.
The terrorist violence these Mujahideen carried out against Afghanistan’s revolutionary socialist government forced it to request assistance from the Soviet Union. Moscow militarily intervened in December 1979 to help its ally in Kabul fight the well-funded insurgency.
While the US proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is typically associated with Republican President Ronald Reagan, who met with the Mujahideen and sang their praises as “freedom fighters,” the reality is that it started under Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s national security advisor, key US imperial planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, later admitted in a 1998 interview that the president had signed the order officially authorizing Operation Cyclone — the CIA program to arm, train, and fund the Mujahideen — back in July 1979, nearly six months before the Soviet Union intervened.
Brzezinski said that, at the time, he knew “this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” But he insisted it was an “excellent idea,” as it “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.”
“We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,” Brzezinski gloated to Carter in 1979.
The United Kingdom joined the United States in waging this proxy war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited a camp of Afghan Mujahideen in a PR stunt in 1981 and declared that “the hearts of the free world are with you.”
While the Iron Lady’s staunchly right-wing administration publicly insisted that the Mujahideen it sponsored were fighting the socialist government in Kabul and its Soviet allies for “freedom,” and while its loyal stenographers in the press maintained that Afghan insurgents were motivated by alleged Russian human rights violations, the British embassy that was actually in the country was quietly admitting otherwise.
The November 1980 UK cable revealed by Matt Kennard noted that, “in the popular imagination,” there was “the idea of a struggle between Communism and Islam.” But London conceded that this narrative was “an oversimplification.”
“Opposition was originally provoked by the [Afghan] government’s early reforms, and the reform which caused the most trouble was the land reform,” wrote the embassy officer, Peter Barker.
These socialist land reforms “broke down a centuries-old system” of feudalism in Afghanistan, the cable continued, and “removed the landlord from whom the peasant traditionally obtained his seed and tools.”
“The opposition to the reform was therefore the outcome of practical grievance and not outraged religious sentiment,” the diplomat concluded.
And it was not just land reform. “Similarly the banning of dowry payments, for example, destroyed a traditional means of accumulating and transferring wealth,” Barker acknowledged.
That is to say, the leaders of the Mujahideen were feudal landlords who were angry about the socialist Afghan government’s land reforms and policies to break up wealthy families’ inherited wealth.
Barker conceded that the revolutionary “government would gain far more by backpedalling on all reforms rather than by starting government functions, ministers’ speeches and television programmes with Islamic invocations.”
Yet even while he recognized that the conflict was the result of an “immature government encountering stern traditionalist resistance to changes,” the British diplomat insisted that London should portray the war in Afghanistan as a religious conflict, intentionally fueling the narrative of Islamist extremists.
“All the same it serves our interest to play up the Islamic nature of the opposition,” Barker wrote, because “the picture of Islamic freedom fighters is much more acceptable to world public opinion than that of stubborn reactionaries determined to maintain a system of feudal antiquity.”
It was precisely this sectarian strategy that gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This British embassy cable shows how Western government officials were well aware of what they were doing in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Western imperialist powers knowingly supported ultra-conservative feudal landlords in their class war against a socialist government that was intent on implementing land reform and modernizing the country.
They intentionally turned what was fundamentally a class war into a religious war, pouring sectarian fuel onto a massive, nation-wide fire. Why? Because, as London put it bluntly, “it serves our interests.”
Remember this when Western capitals complain about the new Taliban-led government in Afghanistan today. If they don’t like Islamist fundamentalism, they shouldn’t have spent decades fostering it.


Instruction: Write an article about: Imran Khan: Pakistan should be non-aligned in cold war, neutral over Ukraine, applauds China. 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.

Input: China, Imran Khan, India, Non-Aligned Movement, nuclear weapons, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Ex Prime Minister Imran Khan argued Pakistan should have been non-aligned in the first cold war and in the new one between the US and China/Russia, as well as independent in the Ukraine proxy conflict. He also praised Beijing’s historic poverty reduction program.

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was overthrown in April 2022 in a soft coup supported by the United States. Khan argued that he was targeted due to his independent foreign policy, comparing his ouster to the CIA coup in Iran in 1953.
Since leaving office, Khan has held massive protests across the country, blasting the unelected coup regime for surrendering its sovereignty to Washington.
“The US has made Pakistan a slave without having to invade it,” Khan fumed. “The people of Pakistan will never accept the imported government.”

Khan has also become a leading voice on the international stage calling for the rebirth of the Non-Aligned Movement.
He argues that Pakistan should have been non-aligned in the first cold war. And he insists his country must be independent today in the new, second cold war between the US on one side and China and Russia on the other.
“Pakistan should not take any sides,” Khan said. “Why do we have to take sides? Pakistan should have a good relationship with both China and with the United States. Similarly, I feel with Russia and the United States.”
“For instance, that’s the policy of India,” he added. “I must say that I have always admired the way India remained non-aligned during the [first] cold war. I thought it was a sensible thing to do.”
The Non-Aligned Movement is coming back, bigger than before:
Pakistan's ex Prime Minister Imran Khan said it was a mistake to ally with the US in the first cold war.
He called for non-alignment in the new cold war and neutrality over Ukraine.
More here: https://t.co/meidLn0wBg pic.twitter.com/bnbhZejSjH
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 31, 2022

Just weeks before he was overthrown, the US government demanded that Khan denounce Russia over its war in Ukraine. Khan rebuked the pressure campaign, declaring that he refused to be a “slave.”
“When we are told to take sides in a conflict like Ukraine, why should we?” Khan asked. “When things that are important to us, the Western countries don’t take a stand or moral stand on it. And so I feel that, I think we should be nonaligned in this. We should be neutral.”
Khan also praised Beijing’s massive poverty reduction program, pointing to the “friend in need” in China as a model for Pakistan, where tens of millions of people struggle in economic hardship.
“There is no precedent in human history of what China has achieved,” Khan stressed. “They have lifted 700 million people out of poverty in the last 35, 40 years. It’s never been done in human history. And when you go to China, the rate of their development is phenomenal.”
Pakistan’s ex PM Imran Khan (overthrown in a US-backed soft coup in April), praised Beijing’s poverty reduction campaign:
“There is no precedent in human history for what China has achieved. They have lifted 700 million people out of poverty.”
More here: https://t.co/XhDHCWxU2w pic.twitter.com/gu84rdi1fH
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 31, 2022

Khan issued this call for Pakistan to be be non-aligned in a December 28 interview with the Istanbul, Türkiye-based think tank the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).
His proposal marks a radical shift in the foreign-policy history of the South Asian giant, the fifth-most populous country on Earth.
During the first cold war, Pakistan had been a key ally of the United States. It did have good relations with China, but it took a hard line against the Soviet Union.
1982: ?? President Ronald Reagan and ?? President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq at the @WhiteHouse #USPak70 #70SaalMubarak Photo: @AP_Images pic.twitter.com/Pu6KiHapBv
— U.S. Embassy Islamabad (@usembislamabad) August 15, 2017

In the 1980s, Pakistan’s notorious spy agency the ISI even helped the CIA and Saudi Arabia support extremist Mujahideen militants in Afghanistan, assisting the US in its proxy war against the USSR.
Khan represents a new generation of Pakistani nationalists who think Islamabad’s historic alliance with Washington was a mistake. He wants his country to be independent and to act in the interests of its own people, not those of another nation.
When Imran Khan arrived to Moscow, he had no idea that he was about to find himself in the middle of a massive global conflict.
The fateful trip had been planned long in advance, and Khan sat down with President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022 – the same day that Russia sent its troops into Ukraine.
Clearly, Khan did not know what had been planned. Western governments pressured Khan to denounce Putin, right there on the spot. But he maintained a diplomatic position.
#Kremlin: Vladimir Putin met with Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan, who is in Russia on a working visit https://t.co/jrvKVN0fzX pic.twitter.com/WF7aupsZau
— President of Russia (@KremlinRussia_E) February 24, 2022

Several days later, 22 Western countries sent Khan a letter demanding that Pakistan vote against Russia on the international stage.
“What do you think of us? Are we your slaves?” Khan shot back defiantly. He asked if they thought “that whatever you say, we will do?”
“We are friends with Russia, and we are also friends with America,” Khan explained at the time. “We are friends with China and with Europe; we are not in any camp.”
Khan’s steadfastness set geopolitical shockwaves across the West. During the first cold war, Pakistan had a very antagonistic relationship with Russia. Now Khan had reversed this longtime policy.
Until he was overthrown in April, Khan made sure that Pakistan was neutral over the Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine.
But immediately after the coup, Islamabad’s unelected US-backed regime did a 180 and promptly criticized Moscow.
There have even been reports that the coup regime has sent weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
English version: showing Pakistan army chief at Sandhurst and dates on shells with type of fuze. pic.twitter.com/bKpzsbODpH
— ST (@aviation07101) September 2, 2022

In his December 28 interview, Khan reiterated his call for Pakistan to be neutral and non-aligned:
I happened to be visiting Moscow on the day when Russia decided to go into Ukraine [February 24, 2022]. You know, I had a meeting that same day with President Putin. So I know the Russian point of view. And the Russian point of view is that we had repeatedly indicated to the Western countries that we would not allow NATO to come right on our doorsteps.
And their argument is that, just like the United States would not want Russia to come in, say, in Mexico, with all their weaponry. So the conflict, from the Russian point of view, has been triggered out of fear that if there are moves in Ukraine, which they felt should have been demilitarized or should have been neutral, they felt that, then the security of Russia was at stake.
And the other thing that President Putin kept saying was that, in the past, Western leaders, American leaders had all told him that, look, this will not happen. And they had given him assurances. And so, unfortunately, he said that these assurances are broken, and hence the conflict.
The Western point of view is very straightforward, that this is Russian aggression; it’s invasion; they invaded a country, and they’re blaming Russia for all the destruction that is taking place due to war.
So now my point of view, I basically feel that countries like Pakistan, we should not become partisan in this. We should not pass value judgments on this, or moral judgments on this. The reason: I don’t feel that our countries should get involved in conflicts that don’t affect us. And I’m talking about the developing world, countries like Pakistan, which have 100 million people vulnerable, almost 50 million people below the poverty line, 50 million people above the poverty line.
And so when we make moral judgments in conflicts, it comes at a cost for countries like us. So, for instance, we would have wanted cheap oil from Russia. We would have wanted wheat, 2 million tons of wheat from Russia. A gas pipeline was arranged with a Russian company. So all that gets affected the moment you take sides.
And you know, our neighbor India, which is a part of the Quad, which is a strategic economic-military alliance with the United States, India abstained on this, because they do feel that they needed cheap oil from Russia.
And what this conflict has done, post the Covid situation, where already there was a commodity supercycle, and this conflict has raised energy prices to the level which is causing a lot of problems in Europe. We all know that in Europe they are suffering from gas shortages and an energy prices spike.
But in the developing world, it has caused massive problems in our balance of payments. Because the oil prices going up – I know they’re coming down now – but that caused an enormous problem for countries like us.
So therefore, my take on this, there are two points of view, we would like to abstain, my country, we would like to abstain on this. But I do feel that this conflict has caused massive problems all over the world.
Khan’s push for neutrality also applied to the US government’s so-called “war on terror.” He stated:
So when came 9/11, Afghanistan gets invaded by the Americans, now the Pakistan government took the stand – which I opposed, we should have stayed neutral – they started supporting the US war on terror.
In the interview, Khan argued that Western countries are hypocritical because they pressure developing countries like Pakistan to take their side, but then the West abandons Pakistan in issues that are important to it.
He explained:
When we are weak countries, we developing countries, are pushed to take sides. And I feel that Pakistan should not take any sides. I’m talking about our country. Because, you know, why? Why do we have to take sides? Pakistan should have a good relationship with both China and with the United States.
Similarly, I feel with Russia and the United States. For instance, that’s the policy of India.
I must say that I have always admired the way India remained non-aligned during the [First] Cold War. I thought it was a sensible thing to do.
I mean, when you become part of a bloc, that means that the whole other bloc is excluded from you. And of course, great powers do put enormous pressure on you to take sides.
So let me first say that the China-Pakistan relationship goes back a long time, 60 years. And China has been what we call always a friend in need. China has stood by Pakistan, you know, whether it is on international forums, on politics.
For instance, Kashmir is an issue, a United Nations resolution on Kashmir stating that there should have been a plebiscite in Kashmir, for the people of Kashmir to decide whether they wanted to be with India or Pakistan. And that right was not given to them.
But hardly any other country stands with us. China has always stood with us. And I must say Turkey has stood with us.
But, you know, other even Muslim countries, despite knowing the injustice going on in Kashmir, just like in Palestine, they do not stand with us.
Which is, by the way, one of the reasons I feel that when we are told to take sides in a conflict like Ukraine, why should we? When things that are important to us, the Western countries don’t take a stand or moral stand on it.
And so I feel that, I think we should be nonaligned in this. We should be neutral. We should be friendly with both.
Applauding China’s anti-poverty program, Khan continued:
What about China? I have seen the development of China in the last 30 years, and I must say what they have achieved is, there is no precedent in human history of what China has achieved. They have lifted 700 million people out of poverty in the last 35, 40 years.
It’s never been done in human history. And when you go to China, the rate of their development is phenomenal.
And I just do not think that Western countries will be able to compete with them. Because, you know, electoral politics, it has its limitations. I mean, the amount of maneuvering a democratic government which comes about through electoral politics, you have a lot of limitations.
In China, what is considered national interest? The people stand with the government. And what they have managed to do, like, for instance, shifting populations – I don’t think that happened in Western countries.
So I just don’t think that the other countries will be able to stop the growth of China. They’re a system of meritocracy. I visited China, and I saw the way they bring up all the talent. And then the single focus, long-term planning,
I haven’t seen such long-term planning in most countries. Certainly countries like us, which every five years are supposed to have elections. So very rarely governments plan beyond five years. But in China, they have just planned so far ahead. And then they single-handedly pursue their goals. And I feel that, you know, China is going to be the [leader]; I think it will leave everyone behind.
When asked about Western government allegations that China is guilty of egregious human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims, Khan refused to take the bait, responding diplomatically:
Well, let me say that the Pakistan-China relationship was such that, whatever the issues of Uyghurs, the Chinese have always preferred to speak behind closed doors. Their system is such that they hate talking about sensitive issues like the Uyghurs in public. So we have had discussions with them, and they gave us a different side of the story.
And there are always two sides of the story. And so the conversations I’ve had with the Chinese government on the Uyghurs, we have always, knowing the sensitivity they feel, we have kept that behind closed doors.
Khan also used the December 28 interview as an opportunity to warn that nuclear weapons should never be used, because it would mean “the end of the world.”
He said Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is strictly defensive:
First of all, let me tell you, I am not a great fan of nuclear weapons, because I do believe in settling your issues. I’m not also a great fan of military solutions. For instance, I would never try and solve issues militarily.
But for me, it is basically for defense. I mean, if someone is going to take away your freedom, then that’s when you fight for it and you use the military.
So the Pakistan military, the nuclear program, has always been a defensive one. Because India is seven times the size of Pakistan. It has huge resources now, and the people in Pakistan have always been threatened by the idea that a bigger neighbor would just overwhelm the country.
Remember that we’ve had three conflicts with India, and this was from ‘48, 1965, and then 1971.
And so ever since Pakistan has had the nuclear program, we actually have had no conflict. So it gives the country of a 220 million people security, when you are facing a neighbor, which is 1.3 billion people.
And hence, the nuclear program for Pakistan is essentially defensive.
…
The idea of a nuclear war, the idea that you will actually be face to face with another country with nuclear weapons, is beyond my imagination.
And I say this simply because, you know, nuclear war is the end of the world. You must remember, it’s a suicide attack on the world, because I don’t think the world will be able to sustain or survive a nuclear holocaust.


Instruction: Write an article about: Arabia Saudita usa bomba de EEUU para matar a 91 y herir a 236 detenidos en Yemen. 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.

Input: Arabia Saudita, Joe Biden, Raytheon, Saada, Yemen

Output:
Arabia Saudita atacó un centro de detención en la ciudad de Saada en Yemen con una bomba fabricada por la empresa estadounidense Raytheon, matando a 91 personas e hiriendo a 236 más. El presidente Joe Biden afirmó que terminaría el apoyo de Estados Unidos a esta guerra, pero no lo hizo.

(You can read this article in English here.)
Las fuerzas militares saudíes, respaldadas por Estados Unidos, bombardearon un centro de detención en Yemen tres veces el 21 de enero, matando al menos a 91 personas e hiriendo a 236 más.
Esta atrocidad masiva en la gobernación de Saada, en el noroeste de Yemen, se llevó a cabo utilizando armas fabricadas en EEUU, incluyendo una bomba guiada por láser fabricada por el principal contratista del Pentágono, Raytheon.
La complicidad de Washington fue confirmada por Amnistía Internacional, cuyos expertos analizaron fotos que mostraban los remanentes de una bomba Raytheon GBU-12, de 500 libras.
Arabia Saudita, uno de los países más ricos del mundo per cápita, ha estado bombardeando a Yemen, la nación más pobre de Asia Occidental, desde marzo de 2015, con el firme apoyo de Estados Unidos y Reino Unido.
La guerra en Yemen ha creado la peor crisis humanitaria del mundo, provocando la muerte de cientos de miles de yemeníes.
La ayuda estadounidense a la monarquía saudita en esta guerra ha continuado bajo las administraciones de Barack Obama, Donald Trump y ahora Joe Biden.
Hasta Amnistía Internacional, que es infame por su parcialidad pro occidental, reconoció que esta masacre en Yemen es “la pieza más reciente de una red más amplia de indicios sobre el uso de armas de fabricación estadounidense en incidentes que podrían constituir crímenes de guerra.”.
La organización escribió:
Desde marzo de 2015, el personal de Amnistía Internacional ha investigado decenas de ataques aéreos y ha encontrado e identificado repetidamente restos de municiones de fabricación estadounidense. Amnistía Internacional había identificado anteriormente el uso de esas mismas bombas fabricadas por Raytheon en un ataque aéreo encabezado por Arabia Saudí lanzado el 28 de junio de 2019 contra un edificio residencial de la gobernación de Taiz, Yemen, que mató a seis civiles, tres de ellos menores de edad.
La Organización de las Naciones Unidas informó que el centro de detención de Saada estaba lleno con unas 2.000 personas, incluyendo 700 migrantes, en el momento en que fue bombardeado “por tres ataques aéreos en rápida sucesión”.
El portavoz de la Oficina del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos (ACNUDH), Rupert Colville, dejó en claro que era un objetivo civil, y afirmó, “Durante la reciente visita de nuestro equipo esta semana, no vimos señales que indicaran que este sitio, antes un cuartel, sigue teniendo una función militar.”
El mismo día de este ataque, las fuerzas saudíes y emiratíes apoyadas por EEUU y Reino Unido también bombardearon la red de telecomunicaciones de Yemen, cortando el acceso a internet de todo el país.
El ACNUDH informó que, en los primeros 28 días del año 2022, las fuerzas saudíes respaldadas por EEUU lanzaron 1.403 ataques aéreos en Yemen.
El presidente Joe Biden prometió durante su campaña presidencial de 2020 que terminaría el apoyo de Estados Unidos a la guerra contra Yemen. En febrero de 2021, solo unas semanas después de asumir el cargo, Biden afirmó que estaba “poniendo fin a todo el apoyo estadounidense a las operaciones ofensivas en la guerra en Yemen, incluidas las ventas de armas relevantes”. Esto era demostrablemente falso.
La administración Biden ha mantenido el apoyo a Arabia Saudita y la venta de armas a la monarquía, mientras bombardea regularmente a civiles en Yemen.
Amnistía Internacional informó:
Desde noviembre de 2021, el gobierno de Biden ha aprobado la venta —y ha asignado contratos a empresas estadounidenses— de misiles, aviones y sistemas de defensa antibalística a Arabia Saudí, incluido un acuerdo de 28 millones de dólares firmado a mediados de enero para el mantenimiento, por parte de Estados Unidos, de aviones saudíes.
Entre estos acuerdos estaba la venta aprobada a Arabia Saudí de 650 millones de dólares en misiles, también de Raytheon, a la que el Congreso dio luz verde a pesar de las mociones para bloquearla. En diciembre, el gobierno declaró que mantenía su compromiso respecto a las ventas propuestas, por valor de 23.000 millones de dólares, de aviones F-35, MQ-9B y municiones a Emiratos Árabes Unidos, a pesar de los serios motivos de preocupación en materia de derechos humanos. El seguir armando a la coalición encabezada por Arabia Saudí no sólo incumple las obligaciones contraídas por Estados Unidos en virtud del derecho internacional, sino que viola también la legislación estadounidense. Tanto la Ley de Ayuda Exterior como las Leyes Leahy prohíben las ventas de armas y ayuda militar estadounidenses a quienes hayan cometido violaciones graves de derechos humanos.
La ONU ha pedido que se investigue el ataque.
Amid ??#Yemen’s escalating conflict, which saw deadly airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition on 21 January, we call for a transparent, independent and impartial investigation to ensure accountability for any breaches of international humanitarian law.https://t.co/pt3cg0urY5 pic.twitter.com/ZNtCEqXY8A
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) January 28, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: Canada: Complaining about gas prices only helps Putin and China. 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.

Input: Canada, China, Chrystia Freeland, Covid, inflation, Justin Trudeau, Russia, Vladimir Putin

Output:
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland claimed in Parliament that complaining about high gas prices is “doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.” She blamed inflation on Russia and “China’s zero Covid policy.”

Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, insisted on the floor of Parliament that her nation’s citizens should not complain about high gas prices, or they are helping Russian President Vladimir Putin and China.
Freeland, the second-most-powerful Canadian official, argued that blaming her government for skyrocketing inflation is equivalent to “doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.”
In a question period in the House of Commons on May 16, a Conservative lawmaker complained that “gas prices are at record highs, and Canadians are suffering.” He accused Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of wanting high gas prices in order to reduce fuel use, to better protect the environment.
Freeland replied, “I think everyone in this House needs to be mindful of the fact that none of us should be doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.”
“And that means we all need to recognize the reality, and be honest with Canadians about the reality, that inflation, including the higher price of fuel, is a global phenomenon,” she continued.
“It is being driven by Vladimir Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine. It is being driven by China’s zero Covid policy,” Freeland claimed.
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland claimed that complaining about gas prices is “doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.”@CAFreeland blamed inflation on Russia and “China’s zero Covid policy.” (She didn't mention Western sanctions)
More here: https://t.co/S5GZl1gK1O pic.twitter.com/viNfy5Wav2
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 17, 2022

Freeland did not mention the extensive Western economic sanctions on Russia, which have significantly contributed to the inflation crisis.
Even the Washington Post, which takes an extremely anti-Russian editorial line and strongly supports the Western sanctions on Moscow, has admitted that these economic coercive measures “are also exacerbating a political headache for Biden at home: inflation and worries about an economic downturn.”
The Post acknowledged that “sanctions — especially as they get more extreme — could contribute to higher prices in a variety of areas, such as energy and food products that use wheat.” It also conceded that there “are several factors driving prices upward, and many of them were at work long before Russia invaded Ukraine.”
Chrystia Freeland is a hard-line anti-Russia hawk. Before being promoted to deputy prime minister and finance minister, she made her name as Canada’s stridently pro-interventionist foreign minister.
As the top Canadian diplomat, Freeland strongly supported the Donald Trump administration’s coup attempt in Venezuela, recognizing unelected US-appointed putsch leader Juan Guaidó as supposed “president.”
When Trudeau chose Freeland as his foreign minister in 2017, the US embassy in Ottawa boasted in an internal memo, “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.”
Praising “her strong U.S. contacts,” the embassy noted that Freeland’s “number one priority” was collaborating with Washington.
Canada's hawkish FM @CAFreeland — who was celebrated in a declassified US State Department memo for bringing Canada an "American first" foreign policy — is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist.
She knew this, but called it "Russian disinfo"https://t.co/B8w8uXEdf5
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 6, 2019

Freeland’s work in US regime-change operations goes back to the days of the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, she traveled to Ukraine to support the right-wing anti-communist opposition. In collaboration with the Canadian embassy, Freeland covertly provided money, recording equipment, and computers to anti-Soviet dissidents, while also helping to organize protests.
Chrystia Freeland is also the granddaughter of an infamous Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, Michael Chomiak.
Chomiak edited an explicitly anti-Semitic, pro-fascist propaganda newspaper, using a printing press stolen from a Jewish publisher who was later killed in a Nazi extermination camp.
Freeland knew for decades that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator, but lied about this fact and continued to praise him.
She event went so far as to claim that journalists and researchers who correctly reported on her grandfather’s work with Nazi Germany were engaged in a supposed “Russian disinformation” campaign.
Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper https://t.co/Fhri8a76yk @GlobePolitics #cdnpoli
— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) March 8, 2017

Freeland’s links to far-right Ukrainian groups are extensive.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Freeland attended a rally in which she was photographed posing with a fascist symbol.
Freeland tweeted an image of her with the red-and-black flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), an extreme-right paramilitary group that collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
Faced with backlash, Freeland later deleted this tweet, and posted a new photo without the far-right extremist symbol. She did however keep the fascist-created slogan “Slava Ukraini.”
Canada's deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, deleted her tweet with a photo holding a Ukrainian fascist banner, and instead posted a different photo without the banner.
But she still left the same text, including the fascist slogan "Slava Ukraїni"https://t.co/fT4waUI7wN pic.twitter.com/0X0Thov3xd
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 28, 2022