Instruction: Write an article about: US troops are occupying Syria’s oil fields. Congress refuses to withdraw them. 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: Bernie Sanders, Congress, Elizabeth Warren, Rand Paul, Senate, Syria

Output:
The US military has illegally occupied Syrian sovereign territory since 2014, preventing Damascus from accessing its own oil and wheat fields. The Senate voted 13-84, rejecting a resolution to withdraw US troops.

The US military has occupied Syrian sovereign territory since 2014, preventing Damascus from accessing its own oil and wheat fields.
A top Pentagon official has acknowledged that Washington’s strategy is to starve Syria’s central government of revenue it needs to rebuild, after a decade of war fueled by foreign powers devastated the country.
Former US President Donald Trump boasted in 2020: “They say, ‘He left troops in Syria’. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil”.
The United States has at least 900 troops in Syria. Syria’s internationally recognized government has repeatedly called for them to leave, meaning the US military presence is illegal according to international law.

This issue has come up in Congress several times in recent years.
On December 7, the Senate voted 13-84, rejecting a resolution to withdraw the US troops.
The joint resolution, S.J.Res.51, “direct[ed] the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in Syria that have not been authorized by Congress”.
Of the 100 members of the Senate, which is roughly evenly split between both parties, seven Democrats voted for the resolution, along with one left-wing independent who caucuses with the Democrats (Bernie Sanders) and five Republicans.
The senators who voted to withdraw US troops from Syria were the following:
Democrats (7)
Independent (1)
Republicans (5)
The US Senate vote on whether or not to withdraw troops from Syria, on December 7, 2023
The resolution had been introduced by Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican senator from Kentucky.
The proposed legislation noted that US military forces have been active in Syria since September 22, 2014.
Since 2016, the resolution disclosed, US troops in Syria have attacked the Syrian government and its allies, including Iranian and Russian fighters, at least 11 times.
Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations repeatedly launched airstrikes in Syria against government and allied forces.
In March 2023, a senior United Nations official, Farhan Haq, inspired controversy when he falsely claimed “there’s no US armed forces inside of Syria”. (Chinese reporter Edward Xu corrected Haq’s lie, while calling out the UN’s hypocrisy on Ukraine.)
UN lies about US military occupation of Syria, reporter calls out Ukraine hypocrisy

The US corporate media was once quite open about this fact.
Back in 2018, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin bragged, “In Syria, we ‘took the oil’”. He emphasized that “the United States and its partners control almost all of the oil” in the country.
Then President Trump had claimed at the time that he wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, but Rogin complained that, “if the United States leaves, that oil will likely fall into the hands of Iran”.
Trump listened to hawkish critics like Rogin and decided to backtrack, instead leaving the US troops – who remain there today.
NPR stated clearly in 2020, “U.S. forces in northeastern Syria have a relatively new mission: securing oil fields not only from ISIS, but also from Syrian government and Russian forces”.
Trump sat down for an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that same year. The US president explained:
TRUMP: They say, ‘He left troops in Syria’. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil.
INGRAHAM: We’re taking, we’re not taking–
TRUMP: Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.
INGRAHAM: They’re protecting their facility.
TRUMP: I don’t know, maybe we should take it. But we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil. So, they say, ‘He left troops in Syria’. No, I got rid of all of them, other than we’re protecting the oil. We have the oil.
In 2019, a neoconservative US government official overseeing Syria policy, Dana Stroul, boasted that “one-third of Syrian territory was owned via the US military, with its local partner the Syrian Democratic Forces”, or SDF.
The Kurdish-majority SDF have acted as a US proxy, using oil revenue to fund their separatist operations, destabilizing Syria’s central government.
As Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton wrote at the time, Stroul emphasized that this Syrian land “owned” by Washington was “resource-rich” and constituted the “economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are… as well as the agricultural powerhouse”, with many wheat fields.
When Biden entered office in 2021, his administration appointed Stroul as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, the top Pentagon official crafting US policy for West Asia.
The top Pentagon Middle East policy official, neocon Dana Stroul, confirmed Biden is keeping troops to illegally occupy sovereign Syrian territory
Stroul once boasted that the US military "owns" 1/3rd of Syria, including its oil-rich "economic powerhouse"pic.twitter.com/NIEJ9elxhs https://t.co/01kZ22dhJ4
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 15, 2021

The United States had roughly 40,000 troops stationed in West Asia (known popularly as the Middle East), as of October 2023.
In addition to the 900 in Syria, the US has 2500 troops deployed to Iraq, where their presence also violates the country’s sovereignty and international law.
U.S. troops and military contractors have been targeted in attacks by Iranian-backed militia groups since Hamas' attack against Israeli civilians and soldiers.
The attacks could reverse efforts in recent years to reduce U.S. presence in the Middle East. https://t.co/a7nOI8fOmL pic.twitter.com/rEMyumnOa9
— Axios (@axios) October 31, 2023

On January 3, 2020, US President Trump ordered a drone strike that assassinated top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, along with a major Iraqi commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
In response to Trump’s blatant act of war on its soil, Iraq’s democratically elected parliament voted in January 2020 to expel the US troops occupying the country.
Trump ignored the Iraqi parliament’s vote, instead threatening to impose sanctions on Baghdad.
Biden, a Democrat, has continued his Republican predecessor’s policy, prolonging the military occupation of both Iraq and Syria, in flagrant violation of the nations’ sovereignty.
NEW: U.S. forces have been attacked 4 times by Iranian-proxy forces since yesterday's air strikes, 3 times last night and once this morning- all in Syria. No injuries or damage to bases have been reported. This marks 52 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since Oct 17. pic.twitter.com/zDJ7Z8VapK
— Liz Friden (@Liz_Friden) November 13, 2023

The war in Gaza that broke out in October has also spilled over to other countries in the region.
In addition to indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children, in one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in history, Israel has also attacked Lebanon, and even bombed infrastructure in Syria, such as airports in Damascus and Aleppo.
This has led resistance forces in Syria and Iraq to launch attacks on the US troops illegally occupying their countries. The Biden administration responded with air strikes against these fighters.
According to the Pentagon, US troops in the region were attacked at least 52 times from October 17 to November 13.


Instruction: Write an article about: US opposes peace as Israel ethnically cleanses Palestinians, waging war on ‘entire nation’ of Gaza. 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: Antony Blinken, BJP, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Gaza, India, Narendra Modi, Ursula von der Leyen

Output:
Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians, trying to force them out of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The US and EU support Netanyahu’s scorched-earth war on the “entire nation”, and the State Department ordered diplomats not to call for peace, de-escalation, or a ceasefire.

The Israeli government is in the process of ethnically cleansing more than 1 million Palestinians, pushing them out of their homes in Gaza.
According to senior Israeli officials, the plan of the far-right Benjamin Netanyahu government is to force Palestinians into the desert of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where they will live in so-called “tent cities”.
At the same time, Israel is brutally bombing the besieged Gaza strip – one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
There are even reports that Israel has attacked convoys of Palestinian civilians who were abiding by its evacuation order and fleeing from the north to the south of the 40-kilometer strip.

Meanwhile, the United States has adamantly refused to support calls for peace.
Instead, the State Department told US diplomats not to mention the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire”, “end to violence/bloodshed”, and “restoring calm” when discussing Gaza, according to a memo obtained by HuffPost.
Leaked Emails Warn U.S. Diplomats Against Calling For ‘De-Escalation’ In Gaza https://t.co/U9GFqJYvIp
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) October 13, 2023

On 12 October, Israel ordered the roughly 1.1 million Palestinians living in the northern half of Gaza to evacuate to the south.
The United Nations warned that it would be “impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences”.
The UN “strongly appealed” for the Israeli evacuation order “to be rescinded”, noting it “could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation”.
Israel ignored the UN and instead cracked down even harder, bombing Palestinian civilians as they evacuated.
I made a video showing how Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians
The Israeli military ordered a million people to leave northern Gaza, and plans to flatten it. Israel has bombed fleeing civilians
Meanwhile, the US State Department opposes calls for peace
Full video below pic.twitter.com/uezBYUVpk9
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 15, 2023

The BBC acknowledged that the Israeli military attacked a Palestinian convoy, writing, “These vehicles were carrying civilians, who were fleeing northern Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation order”.
The BBC verified a video of the attack, describing it as “a scene of total carnage”, which “is too graphic for us to show”.
“Bodies, twisted and mangled, are scattered everywhere”, the BBC described, adding that many of the victims of the Israeli attack were women and children, including infants aged 2 to 5 years old.

The Associated Press confirmed the same, writing:
Two witnesses reported a strike on fleeing cars near the town of Deir el-Balah, south of the evacuation zone and in the area Israel told people to flee to. Fayza Hamoudi said she and her family were driving from their home in the north when the strike hit some distance ahead on the road and two vehicles burst into flames. A witness from another car on the road gave a similar account.

As of 14 October, Israel had killed at least 2,215 Palestinians, including 724 children and 458 women, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Another 8,714 Palestinians have been wounded in a week of Israeli attacks, among them 2,450 children and 1,536 women.
Meanwhile, top Israeli officials have engaged in borderline genocidal rhetoric.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog declared at a press conference that the country is at war with the “entire nation” of Gaza.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” Herzog said, in reference to Palestinians.
“It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up [against Hamas]”, he argued, in comments reported by HuffPost.
Israeli President Says There Are No Innocent Civilians In Gaza https://t.co/nCl1Bw5q8N
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) October 14, 2023

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Israel’s plan is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and force them into Egypt.
Citing an anonymous high level source, Hersh wrote, “I have been told by an Israeli insider that Israel has been trying to convince Qatar, which at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a long-time financial supporter of Hamas, to join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border”.
This plan was in fact confirmed by Israel’s former deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, who previously served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a foreign policy adviser for far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview with Al Jazeera reporter Marc Lamont Hill on 12 October, Ayalon stated:
DANNY AYALON: This was, this is thought out. It’s not something that we tell them, go to the beaches, go drown yourselves, God forbid, not at all. There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza.
The idea is – and this is not the first time it will be done – the idea is for them to leave over to the open areas where we and the international community will prepare the infrastructure, you know, tent cities, with food and with water – you know, just like for the refugees of Syria that fled the butchering of Assad a few years ago to Turkey; Turkey received 2 million of them.
This is the idea. Now Egypt will have to play ball here, because once the the population is out of sight, then we can go…
…
I’ll tell you in a practical manner what we should do, and what we can do: create, like in the past, in history, a humanitarian corridor.
When there is a humanitarian corridor – and we have been discussing this with the United States – then we can guarantee in this corridor that nobody will get hurt.
Now, again, I say, there is a way to receive them all on the other side for temporary time, on the Sinai, because what did Hamas turn –
MARC LAMONT HILL: On the other side? Are we talking about Rafah? Are you saying the other side, they go to Egypt?
DANNY AYALON: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And Egypt will have to play ball.
While Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians and killing large numbers of civilians, Western governments have showed unflinching support.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen both traveled to Tel Aviv to symbolically back the far-right Netanyahu government.
The Financial Times reported that some EU officials are concerned “that the European Commission president could look as if she is endorsing military actions that will cause mass civilian casualties — and that will swiftly be labelled as war crimes”.
An unnamed EU diplomat told the Times, “We may be about to see massive ethnic cleansing” – a clear indication that Western capitals know exactly what Israel is doing.
“Our fear is that we’ll pay a heavy price in the global south because of this conflict”, an anonymous EU official confessed to the newspaper.
The vast majority of countries in the Global South support the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli colonialism. A rare exception is the far-right government in India, whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents a vehemently anti-Muslim Hindu-nationalist party, the BJP, which sees Israel’s religious ethnostate as an inspiration and potential model for its own plans for a so-called “Hindu rashtra”.
The @FT quotes EU officials saying “we may be about to see massive ethnic cleansing” and "we’ll pay a heavy price in the global south [for supporting it]". Europe knows it, but continues to supports #GazaGenocide. https://t.co/0raewpJ6x5https://t.co/0raewpJ6x5
— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) October 14, 2023

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has suggested that Israel plans to further escalate its extreme violence. He told soldiers near the border of Gaza that the “next stage is coming”.
The Israeli military has also been attacking neighbors Lebanon and Syria.
Human Rights Watch confirmed that Israel used white phosphorous in strikes on both Gaza and Lebanon. The human rights organization made it clear that this “puts civilians at risk of serious and long-term injuries” and “violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk”.
Israel has likewise bombed Syria multiple times, even targeting the international airport in Aleppo.
For the roughly 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the besieged Gaza strip, conditions are virtually unlivable.
Israel has cut off Gaza’s access to electricity, water, food, and fuel. The Associated Press reported, “When water does trickle from pipes, the meager flow lasts no more than 30 minutes each day and is so contaminated with sewage and seawater that it’s undrinkable, residents said”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) cautioned, “Mass casualties are unlike anything seen in past years”.
“The medical system is on its knees. As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power. Water cannot be pumped. Sewage systems will likely flood. People have nowhere else to go”, the humanitarian organization stated.
Thousands of buildings have been destroyed. Mass casualties are unlike anything seen in past years. The medical system is on its knees. ???? As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power???? Water cannot be pumped❌Sewage systems will likely flood People have nowhere else to go. pic.twitter.com/xb1H8nRKHc
— ICRC (@ICRC) October 14, 2023


Instruction: Write an article about: Western sanctions failing: EU imports more Russian gas, China beats US tech war. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: China, gas, Huawei, LNG, oil, Russia, sanctions, SMIC

Output:
Western sanctions are backfiring: The EU is importing Russian liquified natural gas at record levels, and China is making high-tech chips despite US export restrictions.

Western sanctions are backfiring: The European Union is now importing Russian liquified natural gas at record levels, and China has made high-tech breakthroughs despite US export restrictions.
Washington’s and Brussels’ economic warfare is, ironically, strengthening the economic sovereignty of Beijing and Moscow while blowing back on Europe.

The world is living through a new cold war: Cold War Two. And one of the main ways in which this war has been waged is through economic means.
Sanctions are the principal instrument of economic warfare. When they are imposed unilaterally by a country, without the support of the United Nations, they are referred to as “unilateral coercive measures” and are illegal according to international law.

One-quarter of the global population lives in countries that have been unilaterally sanctioned by the United States.
The nations sanctioned by the US and Europe represent nearly one-third of global GDP.

The application of sanctions by the United States and its European allies has skyrocketed in recent years.
Among the countries sanctioned by the United States are two of the most powerful nations on Earth: China and Russia.
China has the world’s largest economy, when you measure its GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP). Russia has the sixth-biggest economy on Earth.
The biggest economies in the world by GDP (PPP), according to 2023 IMF data
The US government has made it clear that its goal is to sabotage the economies of these Eurasian giants.
But Washington has failed.
China continues developing state-of-the-art technology, while Russia has only further solidified its role as a global commodities powerhouse, strengthening its own manufacturing sector.
The failure, and even blowback, of this Western economic warfare shows that, while unilateral sanctions can do, and often do, significant damage to smaller countries with less developed economies, like Venezuela, Cuba, or Syria; for big nations with a massive industrial base, like China and Russia, their economies may effectively be “too big to sanction”.
In these cases, Western sanctions do economic damage in the short term, but in the medium to the long term, the unilateral coercive measures actually help the targets by making them more economically and technologically sovereign.
These huge Eurasian economies find alternatives and are no longer dependent on Western corporations; they develop their own high-tech manufacturing sectors, with more value added in the production process.

In 2021, US President Joe Biden insisted he must prevent China from becoming “the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world; that’s not gonna happen on my watch”.
Similarly, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that Washington’s goal is to “slow down China’s rate of innovation”.
In order to damage China’s economy, and particularly its tech sector, the United States has imposed many rounds of aggressive sanctions, starting first under President Donald Trump and very much continuing under Joe Biden, in a thoroughly bipartisan campaign.
However, these sanctions have failed to prevent China from technologically developing; Beijing has continued taking huge strides.
The Chinese firm Huawei has developed phones with advanced chip technology. The company’s Mate 60 Pro model entered the market this September, and took the world by storm.
Bloomberg revealed that the Mate 60 Pro is Huawei’s first phone to use the most advanced technology produced by Beijing’s state-owned Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a Kirin 9000s chip with a 7 nanometer processor.
“Beijing is making early progress in a nationwide push to circumvent US efforts to contain its ascent”, the media outlet stated.
Both SMIC and Huawei have been sanctioned by the US government.
The Washington Post similarly acknowledged that “the Mate 60 Pro represents a new high-water mark in China’s technological capabilities, with an advanced chip inside that was both designed and manufactured in China despite onerous U.S. export controls intended to prevent China from making this technical jump”.
The newspaper added that the phone’s “launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology”.
Huawei revealed the new phone when US Commerce Secretary Raimondo was visiting – a clear message of defiance against her office’s campaign of economic warfare.
Russia is one of the most sanctioned countries on Earth. The United States and European Union have imposed many rounds of sanctions on the Eurasian nation over the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.
President Biden made it clear that Washington’s goal with this economic warfare was to turn Russia’s currency, the ruble, into “rubble”.
Biden boasted in March 2022 that one ruble was, at least briefly, worth less than one US penny.
The US president declared:
We are enforcing the most significant package of economic sanctions in history, and it’s causing significant damage to Russia’s economy.
It has caused the Russian economy to, quite frankly, crater.
The Russian ruble is now down by 50 percent since Putin announced his war. One ruble is now worth less than one American penny. One ruble is less than one American penny.
And [we are] preventing Russia’s central bank from propping up the ruble and to keep its value up. They’re not going to be able to do that now.
We cut Russia’s largest banks from the international financial system, and it’s crippled their ability to do business with the rest of the world.
Biden did not mention that there are more than 140 million Russians living in Russia, and they use the ruble in their everyday life; they get paid their wages in rubles.
By trying to destroy their currency, this Western economic warfare has not only harmed the Russian government and Vladimir Putin; it has been hurting the entire country, including more than 140 million civilians.
But sanctions are not a precise instrument – despite the fact that Western governments constantly, and misleadingly, claim they are “targeted” against individuals and have supposed “humanitarian exemptions”.
Sanctions are a brutal instrument of economic warfare, of collective punishment; they often do serious damage, and have major consequences for civilians living in targeted countries.
In Venezuela, for instance, mainstream experts found that at least tens of thousands, and perhaps more than 100,000, civilians have died because of the illegal, unilateral sanctions imposed on the South American nation by the United States, as part of the Donald Trump administration’s coup attempt with Juan Guaidó.
In the case of Russia, however, the economic sanctions have not done as much damage as the West would have hoped.
Initially, the ruble did significantly depreciate against other currencies, but it soon rebounded, largely because of the rise in the price of oil and other commodities. Russia is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil, gas, fertilizers, and wheat.
In fact, not only have the sanctions failed to turn the ruble into rubble and devastate the Russian economy; they have backfired on Europe, unleashing an energy crisis and contributing to high levels of inflation.
In the meantime, the European Union is importing record levels of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The Financial Times reported that, in the first seven months of 2023, EU members Belgium and Spain were the second- and third-largest purchasers of Russian LNG. The only other country that bought more was Russia’s closest ally: China.
France and the Netherlands have also been importing significant quantities of Russian LNG.
“EU imports of the super-chilled gas were up 40 per cent between January and July this year compared with the same period in 2021”, the Financial Times wrote.
The newspaper added that “the EU did not import significant amounts of LNG before the war in Ukraine due to its reliance on piped gas from Russia”.
What happened to that pipeline gas? Well, Europe pledged to boycott it. But furthermore, some of the most important pipelines connecting Russia to Germany, Nord Stream, were blown up in an international act of terrorism in September 2022.
Who exactly sabotaged this crucial energy infrastructure is not known. But Pulitzer Pitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that it was the US government.
So now EU member states are importing Russian LNG at record levels. And ironically, they are paying even more than they had before for the cheap pipeline gas.
The Financial Times reported that Europe has spent roughly €5.29 billion buying Russian LNG on the spot market from January to July 2023.
The newspaper noted, “EU officials have pointed to an overall effort to phase out Russian fossil fuels by 2027, but warned that an outright ban on LNG imports risked prompting an energy crisis akin to last year when EU gas prices hit record highs of more than €300 per megawatt hour”.
Russia is now the second-largest exporter of LNG to the Eurozone. The only country that sells more is the United States.
In fact, due to the energy crisis in Europe and sanctions on Russia, in 2022, the United States became the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world (tied with Qatar).
So while Europe’s economies suffer, US corporations are benefiting.
At the same time, Western ally India has been buying record amounts of Russian oil, below market value, at a neat discount, then refining that crude and selling it to Europe with a fat markup.
So India is handsomely profiting from selling Russian oil to Europe, because Europe refuses to buy the Russian crude directly due to its sanctions.
This suicidal sanctions policy has fueled an energy crisis in Europe, pushing economies into recession and causing de-industrialization at breakneck speed.
Average working people have shouldered the burden of this economic pain.
The real wages of workers in the Eurozone fell by 6.5% from 2020 until 2022.


Instruction: Write an article about: China report excoriates ‘US hegemony’, war crimes, CIA coups, 400 foreign interventions. 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, CIA, coup, regime change

Output:
China’s Foreign Ministry published a lengthy report condemning “US hegemony” and its crimes around the world, including wars with millions of victims, coups and “regime change” against elected leaders, and 400 foreign military interventions.

The Chinese government has published a lengthy report condemning “US hegemony” and its destructive effects on the world.
The document analyzed the ways in which the United States has “abused” its hegemony politically, militarily, economically, financially, technologically, and culturally.
China’s Foreign Ministry noted that Washington has roughly 800 foreign military bases all around the world and has launched 400 foreign military interventions.

The United States committed genocide against Indigenous nations, imposed its colonialist “Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America, and annexed independent territories like Hawaii, Beijing pointed out.
China denounced the US for sponsoring coups, regime-change operations, and “color revolutions” in dozens of countries, while constantly spreading “misinformation” and propaganda to destabilize foreign adversaries.
Just since 2001, US wars have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, wounded millions, and created tens of millions of refugees, Beijing recalled.
These devastating facts were laid out in the report “US Hegemony and Its Perils“, which China’s Foreign Ministry released on February 20. It was subsequently republished by major Chinese media outlets.
Beijing said the goal of the report was to “draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples”.
The Foreign Ministry wrote:
Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.
The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage “color revolutions,” instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights.
Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation.
It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others.
It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order.”
The US is the No.1 saboteur of international rules & order. Hegemony is the hallmark of its approach to international rules & international affairs. pic.twitter.com/mcjF3Cg1YK
— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) February 21, 2023

China condemned the countless examples of “U.S. interference in other countries’ internal affairs”.
It noted that the US has treated Latin America as its colonial territory with the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”.
Beijing denounced Washington’s illegal, 61-year blockade of Cuba; the 1973 CIA coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende; and the Donald Trump administration’s attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government.
China likewise blasted the “color revolutions” and “regime change” operations that the United States supported in George, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and beyond.
“The U.S. exercises double standards on international rules. Placing its self-interest first, the United States has walked away from international treaties and organizations, and put its domestic law above international law”, Beijing wrote.
“The U.S. arbitrarily passes judgment on democracy in other countries, and fabricates a false narrative of “democracy versus authoritarianism” to incite estrangement, division, rivalry and confrontation”, it added.
“The history of the United States is characterized by violence and expansion”, the Chinese Foreign Ministry wrote, explaining:
Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii.
After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives.
In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined.
The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.
“As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world”, Beijing added.
It cited a Tufts University report that found that the United States carried out almost 400 military interventions from 1776 to 2019.
Since 2001, US wars have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, injured millions, and created tens of millions of refugees, China pointed out.
“By taking advantage of the dollar’s status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting ‘seigniorage’ from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America’s political and economic strategy”, the Chinese Foreign Ministry wrote.
It identified the “hegemony of U.S. dollar” as “the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy”.
Through the use of sanctions and other measures, “The United States willfully suppresses its opponents with economic coercion”, and “America’s economic and financial hegemony has become a geopolitical weapon”, Beijing warned.
“The United States seeks to deter other countries’ scientific, technological and economic development by wielding monopoly power, suppression measures and technology restrictions in high-tech fields”, China said.
Beijing condemned Washington’s global use of cyber attacks and surveillance.
“The United States monopolizes intellectual property in the name of protection”, it wrote.
“The United States politicizes, weaponizes technological issues and uses them as ideological tools”, it added.
“The United States has often used cultural tools to strengthen and maintain its hegemony in the world”, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
Washington uses movies, TV shows, and media outlets as weapons of soft power, Beijing pointed out.
“U.S.-dominated Western media has a particularly important role in shaping global public opinion in favor of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”, it wrote.
Citing a report from The Intercept, the Chinese Foreign Minister noted how the “U.S. Department of Defense manipulates social media”, spreading war propaganda on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.
“The United States uses misinformation as a spear to attack other countries, and has built an industrial chain around it”, Beijing warned.
US propaganda is “targeting socialist countries” in particular, it noted, stressing that Washington “pours staggering amounts of public funds into radio and TV networks to support their ideological infiltration, and these mouthpieces bombard socialist countries in dozens of languages with inflammatory propaganda day and night”.


Instruction: Write an article about: China ‘counters US dollar hegemony’ with gold reserves, Argentina yuan currency swap deal. 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: Alberto Fernández, Argentina, Brazil, China, currency swap, de-dollarization, gold, Lula da Silva

Output:
Advancing global de-dollarization, China’s central bank is boosting its gold reserves while signing currency swap deals in yuan with countries like Argentina, encouraging the use of renminbi instead of US dollars.

China’s central bank has taken a series of steps to accelerate the global drive toward de-dollarization, challenging the hegemony of the greenback.
The People’s Bank of China is increasing the share of gold in its foreign-exchange reserves, bucking the US dollar, which has for decades been dominant in international central bank holdings.
This January, China also signed an agreement with Argentina’s central bank for a currency swap deal, in which Beijing will provide 130 billion Chinese yuan (roughly $19 billion USD) to help Buenos Aires stabilize its currency and economy.

The South American nation said it is “committed to deepen the use of the RMB [renminbi] in the Argentine market for bilateral exchange”. (Renminbi is the official name of the Chinese currency, and is often used interchangeably with yuan, which is the unit of account of that currency.)
China’s semi-official newspaper Global Times commented that the deal makes it “likely that more Latin American countries will increase the use of Chinese yuan in order to counter the US dollar’s hegemony, and strengthen economic ties with China”.
These moves show how China is responding to the new cold war that the United States is waging against it.
Concerned that the aggressive sanctions that Washington has already imposed could expand into an all-out economic war, Beijing is decreasing its holdings of dollars in reserves and encouraging the use of its currency in trade with other nations – thereby chipping away at the global reserve currency.
Meanwhile, Russia’s central bank has pledged to buy yuan in the foreign-exchange market to hold in its reserves. And Beijing is already purchasing oil from Moscow in its national currency.

In December 2022, the People’s Bank of China publicly disclosed for the first time in three years that it was increasing the share of gold in its foreign-exchange reserves.
Bloomberg noted at the time that “China’s purchases may be part of a plan to diversify its reserves away from the dollar“.
In January 2023, Bloomberg followed up indicating that the People’s Bank of China had again boosted its gold reserves.
The media outlet speculated that Russia is filling its reserves with gold as well.
China and Russia are not alone. Bloomberg reported that central banks around the world are buying gold, reaching a record of close to 400 tons in the third fiscal quarter of 2022, compared to 241 tons in the same period in 2018.
Central banks in many countries are increasingly worried that they could be targeted by unilateral Western sanctions.
The United States and European Union have frozen or seized hundreds of billions of dollars and euros from the foreign reserves belonging to the central banks of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Afghanistan.
This has pushed many nations to look into diversifying their foreign reserves – not only governments targeted by the West for regime change, but even long-time allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Türkiye.
Central banks look to China’s renminbi to diversify foreign currency reserves https://t.co/skJm1aKmmW
— FT Economics (@fteconomics) July 1, 2022

The Financial Times reported in June 2022 that central banks across the planet “are looking towards the renminbi to diversify their foreign currency holdings, in a sign that geopolitical flare-ups could chip away at the dollar’s dominance”.
A staggering 85% of central bank reserve managers have expressed interest in investing or already are invested in renminbi, the newspaper noted.
It quoted the head of strategy for global sovereign markets at top Swiss bank UBS, Massimiliano Castelli, who said: “We’re seeing a gradual erosion of the dollar… The picture that emerges is one of a multipolar currency system”.
The newspaper added, “Four-fifths of the central bankers surveyed said they believed that a move towards a multipolar world — away from a US-centric system — would benefit the renminbi”.
The US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) has made similar warnings. In March 2022, it published a research paper on the “stealth erosion of dollar dominance“.
The US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned of an “erosion of dollar dominance”
Use of Chinese yuan in global central bank reserves is increasing
And Western sanctions on Russia could weaken the dollar, strengthening other currencieshttps://t.co/weF255asil
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2022

The financial institution observed a marked rise in the use of “nontraditional currencies” in global central bank reserves. The Chinese yuan has driven this increase.
From 2000 to 2021, the percentage of foreign reserves held in US dollars dropped from a bit over 70% to just under 60%.
Thus far, the shift has been slow. But as the United States escalates its new cold war on China, the ensuing geopolitical conflict is likely to accelerate the move toward de-dollarization.

Argentina has struggled for centuries with odious debt owed to colonial and neo-colonial powers.
Today, the South American nation is trapped in $44 billion in dollar-denominated debt with the IMF.
Seeking to fortify its sovereignty and weaken US control, Argentina has strengthened its relations with China and Russia.
China is already Argentina’s second-biggest trade partner, after Brazil, and the ties between the countries are growing.
In February 2022, Buenos Aires joined Beijing’s massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
Argentina has also applied to join the expanded BRICS+ bloc, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
This January 8, the president of Argentina’s central bank met with his counterpart from China.
The Argentine central bank reported that the two countries “committed to deepen the use of the RMB [renminbi] in the Argentine market for bilateral exchange”.
The swap offers 130 billion in Chinese yuan (roughly $19 billion USD), with an additional “special activation” of 35 billion yuan (approximately $5 billion USD) for interventions in the foreign-exchange market.
The president of Argentina’s central bank, Miguel Pesce, meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Yi Gang
Argentine President Alberto Fernández had met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in November 2022, where they discussed the currency swap.
The Argentine central bank has an account in its own currency, the peso, at the People’s Bank of China. China’s central bank has an account in yuan at Argentina’s central bank. Buenos Aires must pay Beijing back the 130 billion yuan, with interest. But the advantage is that dollars are not involved.
According to the Argentine central bank’s most recent report, from November 2022, its total reserves sum to $38 billion USD.
This means that the yuan currency swap represents roughly half of Argentina’s reserves. This will have a massive macroeconomic impact.
The newspaper Global Times, which is linked to the Communist Party of China and has a nationalist perspective, explained the thinking of some officials in Beijing, arguing that the currency swap deal “help the Latin American country hedge against shocks brought about by the US’ financial policy tightening while promoting its own industrial development”.
“It is likely that more Latin American countries will increase the use of Chinese yuan in order to counter the US dollar’s hegemony, and strengthen economic ties with China”, the semi-official media outlet added.
#China-Argentina currency swap expansion reflects Latin American country's determination to seek closer cooperation with China: experts say.https://t.co/gz1YAp9sn0 pic.twitter.com/g0Ra0XA1dn
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) January 9, 2023

Argentina is a significant agricultural producer, and its top exports include corn, soy products, and wheat.
Two-thirds of Argentina’s exports to China consist of soy beans, with an additional 7% of soy oil. Argentina also exports to China smaller amounts of beef, crude petroleum, and shrimp and prawn.
Most of what China exports to Argentina is various forms of advanced technologies, including phones, TVs, and machines.
Exports, especially from the agricultural sector, are one of the only ways Argentina can get access to foreign currencies – or more specifically dollars, which it needs to service its dollar-denominated debt with the IMF.
Normally, if a company in a country like Argentina needs dollars, or if a bank needs foreign currency for a loan, these firms would buy it on the foreign-exchange market. In contrast, swap lines cut out the middleman and create direct relationships between the central banks of countries.
The Chinese swap line deal could help Argentina hold on to dollars to service its debt, while using yuan to buy products from China.
Perhaps even more importantly for Buenos Aires, which suffers with high rates of inflation, it could also use yuan instead of dollars to stabilize the ever-weakening Argentine peso by intervening in the foreign-exchange market.
China began conducted currency swaps with Argentina back in 2009, under left-wing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Deals have been repeatedly renewed since then.
But the South American nation is not the only country that has worked out a system like this with the East Asian giant.
In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing’s central bank is using an “unusual channel”: “currency-swap lines to support governments that borrowed heavily from Chinese banks”.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has given hundreds of billions of dollars worth of yuan to dozens of countries in exchange for their domestic currencies, the newspaper reported.
Among these recipients are Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Argentina, and Laos — all nations that struggle with external debt, much of it denominated in US dollars.
Hungry for foreign currency to shore up their dwindling reserves, some countries have turned to an unusual source of funds: The People's Bank of China https://t.co/QgmRnRdewt
— WSJ China Real Time (@ChinaRealTime) December 12, 2022

The Wall Street Journal explained, “By replenishing other countries’ reserves, the PBOC may be helping some of the world’s most indebted countries avoid rising borrowing costs”.
While the newspaper portrayed this as a cynical effort by China to “prop up” members of its Belt and Road Initiative, the media outlet acknowledged that Beijing is also using the currency swaps to accelerate the de-dollarization of the international financial system.
“The PBOC says the swap lines are there to help grease the wheels of international trade, ensure financial stability and further the adoption of the yuan in a world where trade and finance are dominated by the U.S. dollar”, the Wall Street Journal wrote.
It added: “The PBOC’s swap network is the largest of its kind, according to the World Bank. The PBOC said in a 2021 report that it has swap facilities with 40 countries with a combined capacity of almost 4 trillion yuan, or about $570 billion”.
While Buenos Aires is collaborating more closely with Beijing (its second-largest trading partner), Argentina has simultaneously pushed for stronger ties with Brazil (its largest trading partner) and economic integration of Latin America.
Brazil’s left-wing President Lula da Silva returned to power on January 1.
Two days later, Argentina’s Ambassador Daniel Scioli met with Brazil’s Economic Minister Fernando Haddad.
Scioli said his government’s top priority was “the agreement on deep Argentina-Brazil integration” that the countries’ Presidents Alberto Fernández and Lula da Silva are due to sign at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires on January 24.
???? | Avanzamos con el nuevo ministro de Economía de Brasil, @Haddad_Fernando, en 3 temas prioritarios de la agenda bilateral:
1⃣ El acuerdo de integración profunda Argentina-Brasil que firmarán @alferdez y @LulaOficial en la próxima reunión de la CELAC en Buenos Aires. pic.twitter.com/T0ZbawtCnJ
— Daniel Scioli ?? (@danielscioli) January 3, 2023

The Argentine ambassador likewise revealed that his government is in talks with the state-owned Brazilian Development Bank to receive financing to advance construction of a pipeline, named after former President Néstor Kirchner, which will provide a steady supply of gas to Brazil.
Argentina has the world’s second-biggest reserves of shale gas and the forth-biggest of shale oil.
Scioli added that Argentina and Brazil look to increase their exports and trade with each other, “conserving the reserves of both countries in the framework of the system of local currencies”.
3⃣ El financiamiento del BNDES a las próximas etapas del gasoducto Néstor Kirchner, que permitirá el abastecimiento sustentable de gas a Brasil y equilibrar nuestra balanza comercial.
Más integración con Brasil es más crecimiento, trabajo y divisas para la Argentina.
— Daniel Scioli ?? (@danielscioli) January 3, 2023

Scioli’s hint that Argentine-Brazilian trade will be done with local currencies led to international speculation that the countries are moving forward with Lula’s proposed plan to create a sovereign Latin American currency for regional trade.
This frightened some foreign investors, and was reported in the financial press with a heavy dose of concern – and condescension.
Haddad downplayed the reports, saying, “There is no proposal for one currency for Mercosur”. But his words were careful: The Brazilian economic minister said there was not yet a proposal; he didn’t deny that the potential currency was discussed.
It was likely that Haddad was merely trying to reassure foreign investors.
In his inauguration speech, Lula pledged more robust social spending to fight poverty and hunger and vowed to reverse the privatizations carried out by previous far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
These policies are overwhelmingly popular among the Brazilian people, but they scared some investors in Brazilian stocks, who sold off shares, leading to market instability and a slight drop in the value of the country’s currency, the real, against the dollar.
Recebi do vice-presidente China, Wang Qishan, uma carta do presidente Xi Jinping com seus cumprimentos e vontade de ampliarmos a cooperação. A China é nosso maior parceiro comercial e podemos ampliar ainda mais as relações entre nossos países ????
?: @ricardostuckert pic.twitter.com/Z8FAmn4yyW
— Lula (@LulaOficial) January 2, 2023

In the mean time, Brazil’s new government, like that of Argentina, has vowed to deepen its alliance with China.
On the day after his inauguration, Lula met with China’s Vice President Wang Qishan. The statesman gave the Brazilian leader a letter from President Xi Jinping, which called to boost Chinese-Brazilian ties.
Lula tweeted, “China is our biggest trading partner, and we can even further expand the relations between our countries”.


Instruction: Write an article about: US gov’t knew NATO expansion to Ukraine would force Russia to intervene. 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: CIA, Georgia, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, WikiLeaks, William Burns

Output:
Former US Ambassador to Russia William J. Burns, who is now CIA director, admitted in a classified 2008 embassy cable that NATO expansion to Ukraine crosses Moscow’s security “redlines” and “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
Senior US government officials knew as far back as 2008 that the possibility of adding Ukraine to NATO was seen as a serious “military threat” by Russia, one that crosses Moscow’s security “redlines” and could force it to intervene.
Yet Western leaders continued insisting that Ukraine would join the US-led military alliance, right up until Russia did indeed intervene in February 2022.
At the annual NATO summit back in 2008, the George W. Bush administration publicly called for adding Russia’s neighbors Ukraine and Georgia to the military alliance. NATO’s secretary-general declared that the two countries would eventually become members.
But privately, US diplomats knew that this move would be seen as an existential threat by Moscow, and could provoke Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
The former US ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, who is now director of the CIA, warned in a February 2008 embassy cable that Ukraine constituted a security “redline” for Moscow.

The confidential State Department cable was titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” (“nyet” is Russian for “no”).
Burns cautioned that the issue of NATO membership for Ukraine “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

Burns wrote that Foreign Minister Sergey “Lavrov emphasized that Russia was convinced that [NATO] enlargement was not based on security reasons, but was a legacy of the Cold War.”
The former US ambassador to Russia, and current CIA director, published a prescient analysis that would foreshadow Moscow’s actions in 2022:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
Burns’ warnings came true just a few years later.
This kind of internal violence did indeed break out in Ukraine, after a US-sponsored coup d’etat in 2014 overthrew a democratically elected government that had maintained a relatively neutral foreign policy, balanced between Russia and the West, and instead installed a staunchly pro-Western and anti-Russian regime.
In response to the 2014 putsch, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region rose up against the coup government in Kiev, which they denounced as an illegitimate Western puppet regime.
Independence activists declared the creation of two new autonomous states, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The Ukrainian government, with Western military support and weapons, has waged a brutal war against these breakaway republics in the Donbas ever since.
Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been displaced. Ukraine, which shares a massive 2,300-kilometer border with Russia, has been rocked by violence and instability since the 2014 US-backed coup – and this constant turmoil has had significant effects inside Russia, especially economically.
This was precisely the civil war scenario that Burns had warned about in 2008.
On February 21, 2022, Russia officially recognized Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. Then on February 24, Moscow launched an invasion of Ukraine, which it said aimed to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.
Russia’s goal is to force Ukraine to maintain political neutrality, preventing it from being a Western military outpost that could threaten Russia on its borders, potentially with nuclear weapons.
While Western governments and media outlets portrayed the Russian invasion as the crazy decision of a supposed madman, internal US embassy cables showed that Washington knew as far back as 2008 that its push to expand NATO to Ukraine would result in this exactly this outcome: forcing Russia to intervene.
The world only knows this thanks to the whistleblowing journalist outlet Wikileaks, which published the formerly classified State Department cable by William Burns, and publicized his prophetic warning on Twitter.
'Nyet Means Nyet: Russia's #NATO Enlargement Redlines' – #Ukraine Cable from 2008 written by #CIA director William J. Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow https://t.co/rOoxmuwIul pic.twitter.com/KGy0PU4Igg
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 25, 2022

At every stage leading up the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and its NATO alliance refused to give substantial concessions to Moscow, sabotaging all serious attempts at a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Since it signed the Minsk II agreement in 2015, under the supervision of Germany and France, the Ukrainian government has been legally obligated to cease hostilities against the Donbas and create a decentralized system that ensures autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk.
But Ukraine adamantly refused to abide by Minsk II, and its Western sponsors did nothing to save the diplomatic agreement.
So in December 2021, the Russian Federation sent the US and NATO a series of requests for security guarantees. Principal among these was the demand that the military alliance must not admit Ukraine and Georgia.
Moscow said that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia constituted a security “red line” – recalling the language Ambassador William Burns had used in his 2008 embassy cable.
For Russia as a country, regardless of who is president and regardless of the political ideology of the Kremlin, the prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO poses an existential security threat, given that both nations, which were former republics of the Soviet Union, directly border Russia at geostrategic points.
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in its 1941 Operation Barbarossa, it tore through and occupied Soviet Ukraine, to try to cut off Moscow’s access to the Black Sea and Caucasus, break off southern cities like Stalingrad, and ultimately surround the Russian heartland.
In its December 2021 request, the Russian Federation insisted that the United States and NATO must respond to its demand for security guarantees with legally binding written statements.
Moscow emphasized that any agreements had to be in writing precisely because NATO has a history of lying to it.
Notes from a 1991 meeting prove that the US, UK, France, and Germany assured the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east.
It’s part of a growing body of evidence that the West broke its promise to Russia.https://t.co/JY3fcuOVPa
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 21, 2022

In 1990, the US, Britain, and France repeatedly promised the Soviet Union that they would not expand NATO “one inch eastward” after the reunification of Germany.
This is an undeniable historical fact, a matter of public record confirmed by numerous internal documents from Western governments.
But NATO later broke that promise, and not once or twice but 14 times. All 14 new member states that it admitted were east of Germany, and many had previously been Soviet allies in Moscow’s former security alliance, the Warsaw Pact.
A map of NATO expansion
NATO has militarily encircled Russia more and more by the year.
Estonia and Latvia, former republics of the Soviet Union, are already NATO member states directly on Russia’s borders.
In fact Western militaries, including those of the United Kingdom and France, were using Estonia to run NATO military exercises just 100 kilometers from Russia’s border in late 2021 and early 2022, at the peak of the crisis in Ukraine.
NATO troops have launched a series of war-games in Estonia, less than 2 hours drive from the Russian border.
The “Winter camp” exercise includes troops from Britain and France, and involves armoured vehicles and live-fire drills pic.twitter.com/pEHCPYHNfV
— Murad Gazdiev (@MuradGazdiev) January 29, 2022

The United States and NATO ultimately ignored Russia’s December 2021 request for security guarantees. Leaked copies of their written responses, which they had asked to keep private, show that they refused to grant Moscow any significant concessions, and both insisted that Ukraine could and even should one day join NATO. (NATO’s response was particularly aggressive and disrespectful.)
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022, the Western military alliance’s hawkish secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, threatened that “if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO.”
The US-led NATO imperialist alliance provoked Russia right up til the end:
On February 19, a few days before its intervention in Ukraine, warmongering NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg threatened, "if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO" https://t.co/tiKDynhYqY pic.twitter.com/kd2n6kZmnL
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 25, 2022

Instead of respecting Russia’s security red lines, the United States and several European countries escalated the situation further by sending billions of dollars worth of more weapons to Ukraine.
Pointing to a Russian troop deployment inside its own territory, near its border with Ukraine, Western governments deployed more soldiers to the region as well, driving up the tensions.
Throughout the entire time, NATO depicted itself as an angelic, innocent “defensive” alliance. But Russia understands how high the stakes are, clearly seeing the consequences of NATO’s destructive wars on Yugoslavia – which destroyed and balkanized the country – Afghanistan, and Libya – which turned what had been the most prosperous country in Africa into a failed state with open-air slave markets.
The 2022 crisis in Ukraine traces its roots back to the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008, when the George W. Bush administration publicly called for adding Ukraine and Georgia to the US-led military alliance.
There were internal divisions within NATO, and some members, namely Germany and France, were uncomfortable with the possibility. But NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared that Ukraine and Georgia eventually “will become member nations.”
Ukraine’s president at the time was Viktor Yushchenko, a US-backed, pro-Western politician who supported NATO membership.
But in the 2010 presidential election, the Ukrainian people voted for a new leader who promised a more balanced foreign policy, Viktor Yanukovych.
Western media outlets often refer to Yanukovych as “pro-Russian,” but in reality he tried to keep Ukraine neutral, sometimes allying with the West and sometimes allying with Moscow.
For Washington and Brussels, however, Yanukovych was too independent. So in 2014, the United States sponsored a coup d’etat to overthrow the democratically elected president.
Far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a key role as the violent muscle behind this putsch.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, senior US diplomats like hardline anti-Russian hawk Victoria Nuland were conspiring with friendly Ukrainian politicians to create a pro-Western puppet regime right on Russia’s borders.

A leaked 2014 phone recording shows that Nuland and other US officials had handpicked the top officials who would run Ukraine’s government after the Washington-backed coup.
The Joe Biden administration brought Nuland back in 2021, appointing her third-in-command of the State Department, where she helped to shape US policy toward Russia, pushing for an extremely aggressive strategy.
Nuland is a key figure in Washington’s neoconservative foreign-policy circles. Before she helped run the Obama and Biden State Departments, Nuland was Vice President Dick Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser from 2003 to 2005, during the Iraq War.
Nuland’s mentor Cheney has himself made it clear that the United States will never tolerate a strong and independent government in Moscow. Cheney sought to break up Russia itself after the overthrow of the Soviet Union.
Back in 1992, the Pentagon drafted a new belligerent US defense strategy, overseen by a neoconservative ally of Nuland and Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. It clearly stated that Washington’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival… deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
The zero-sum game mentality behind this Wolfowitz Doctrine, which insists that the US empire must run the world without any opposition, and which refuses to countenance the possibility of Russia having its own security interests, still undergirds Washington’s foreign policy to this day.
The US “maximum-pressure” strategy against Moscow that this imperial doctrine has inspired, under the watch of anti-Russia hawks like Nuland, helped provoke exactly what Ambassador William Burns warned about in 2008: a Russian military intervention in Ukraine.


Instruction: Write an article about: China deepens ties with Venezuela, challenging US ‘hegemonic mindset’. 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: BRICS, China, gas, Iran, Nicolás Maduro, oil, sanctions, Venezuela, Xi Jinping

Output:
Condemning Washington’s “hegemonic mindset” and sanctions, China strengthened its strategic partnership with Venezuela. The oil-rich South American nation’s President Nicolás Maduro took a historic trip to Beijing, and applied to join BRICS.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro took a historic trip to China this September. There, the two nations signed 31 comprehensive agreements and formally “upgraded” their relations to an “all-weather strategic partnership”, one of Beijing’s highest designations.
China and Venezuela jointly blasted the “hegemonism” of the Western powers. Beijing formally condemned the illegal sanctions that Washington has imposed on Caracas.
Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized this his government will “firmly support” Venezuela’s “just cause against external interference”.

The global political and economic order is changing rapidly.
One of the biggest shifts the world has seen in the past 20 years is in relations between China and Latin America.
At the beginning of the 21st century, there was not much trade between China and Latin America. But in the past two decades, their economic relations have skyrocketed.
Today, China is the second-largest trading partner of the region, after the United States. There are nine countries in Latin America that trade more with China than any other nation. (The United States is Mexico’s biggest trading partner, and Mexico has the second-biggest economy in Latin America. But if Mexico is excluded from the data, China becomes Latin America’s top trading partner.)
Among the Latin American nations that already trade more with China than the United States are the largest economy in the region, Brazil; as well as the third biggest, Argentina; along with one of the world’s top lithium producers, Bolivia; the second-largest copper producer, Peru; and the country with the biggest known oil reserves: Venezuela.

Venezuela has a lot of economic potential, but has suffered for years under a brutal economic war waged by the United States.
In 2019, the Donald Trump administration launched a coup attempt. Washington claimed a little-known right-wing opposition politician, Juan Guaidó, was the supposed “interim president” of the country, despite the fact that he had never participated in a presidential election.
The United States pressured countries around the world to recognize Guaidó as the supposed leader of Venezuela.
At the same time, the United States imposed upon Venezuela one of the most grueling sanctions regimes in history.
Washington’s goal was clear: to destroy Venezuela’s oil sector, thus starving the leftist government of revenue and leading to its overthrow.

For a century, ever since oil was discovered in Venezuela, the South American nation’s economy has been extremely reliant on one industry: oil.
This over-dependency is a problem that predates the Bolivarian Revolution declared by revolutionary socialist President Hugo Chávez at the turn of the 21st century.
Long before Chávez was born, Venezuela has been a petrostate. The government has historically relied on exporting oil to get revenue to fund social programs. This was the case even when the state was controlled by right-wing political parties.
The US sanctions on Venezuela began in 2015, when the Barack Obama White House issued a bizarre executive order “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”.
When Trump entered office in 2017, he drastically escalated the economic war on Venezuela that Obama had started into a full-on embargo (like the blockade Washington has illegally imposed on Cuba for more than six decades).
US sanctions have devastated the Venezuelan economy. According to the top United Nations expert on the issue, special rapporteur Alena Douhan, Washington’s unilateral coercive measures, which are illegal under international law, resulted in the Venezuelan government losing 99% of its revenue.
Independent experts have reported that US sanctions have caused at least tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Venezuela, perhaps more than 100,000.

While it is widely known that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, what is much less known is that the South American nation’s crude is very heavy.
Venezuela’s oil needs a lot more processing than the lighter crude of other countries. It must be diluted, blended with lighter crude or liquids like naphtha.
US sanctions have aimed expressly at trying to prevent Venezuela from importing the diluents it needs to process its oil. This was yet another part of Washington’s strategy to destroy Venezuelan oil production, to starve the government of revenue.

However, the numerous US coup attempts have failed. Still today, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is firmly in power. He continues the legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution that was initiated by his predecessor, Chávez.
Maduro is also deepening Caracas’ alliance with Beijing.
This September, the Venezuelan leader took a seven-day trip to China, which both Beijing and Caracas described as “historic”.
Maduro met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and signed 31 comprehensive agreements, involving collaboration in a wide array of areas, including economic integration and trade, geology and mining, health, technology transfer, construction of public housing, energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, and even outer space.
During Maduro’s trip, Xi also announced that China had “elevated” its diplomatic relationship with Venezuela.
Beijing previously considered its ties with Caracas to be part of a “comprehensive strategic partnership”. Now, China calls it an “all-weather strategic partnership”.
This means that Venezuela is among China’s closest allies, at the same level as Pakistan, which is one of China’s neighbors and plays an important role in the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global infrastructure project.
In his remarks upon meeting with Maduro, President Xi said that “China will continue to firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, dignity and social stability, as well as its just cause against external interference”.
China and Venezuela released a joint statement calling to “oppose all forms of hegemonism and power politics, oppose all forms of unilateralism”.
Beijing-based newspaper the Global Times, which is close to the government, described Maduro’s trip writing: “The further consolidation and elevation of bilateral relations also suggests the irreversible momentum of South-South cooperation, which leads to win-win results and unity among the developing world rather than certain Western countries wrestling for power out of a hegemonic mindset”.
For his part, Maduro said the two nations’ growing relations are part of a “new era”. He added, “We have a relation of deep friendship, of successful cooperation. Our relations have been a model for the Global South”.
The Venezuelan president added that China has been the “great motor of development in a new era of a multipolar and pluricentric world”.
Maduro emphasized that the partnership between Venezuela and China is “not about dominating countries, much less taking their resources or wealth. On the contrary, we are working for the development of industry, agriculture, technology, the capacity to make jobs and satisfy the needs of the peoples. It is the century of a different world, pluripolar and pluricentric”.
La asociación estratégica entre Venezuela y China no es para ir contra nadie, ni dominar países, ni mucho menos para quitarle los recursos o riquezas a las naciones. ¡Al contrario! Trabajamos para desarrollar la industria, la agricultura, la tecnología, la capacidad de generación… pic.twitter.com/hduaDl9IBa
— Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) September 14, 2023

China has the world’s largest economy, when its GDP is measured at purchasing power parity.
China is also the world’s biggest importer of both oil and gas. It needs stable, reliable energy partners, particularly as Washington pressures countries to minimize their relations with Beijing.
Venezuela not only has massive oil reserves, but also very significant gas deposits.
BP reported in 2021 that Venezuela has proven gas reserves amounting to a staggering 6.3 trillion cubic meters, larger than those in Saudi Arabia (6 trillion), the United Arab Emirates (5.9 trillion), and Iraq (3.5 trillion).
In recent years, the Venezuelan government has slowly expanded exploration, looking for more gas fields.
China is slowly trying to end its reliance on fossil fuels. Beijing recognizes that climate change is a very serious threat, not only to the planet, but to its own national security.
In fact, China is the world’s leader in renewable energy, representing more than 80% of global clean energy manufacturing investment.
Beijing is on the path to install more solar panels in 2023 than the United States has installed in the history of the technology.
But, in the short- to medium-term, China still needs a lot of oil and gas, and Venezuela is a natural energy partner, with a government that Beijing can rely on not to betray it and ally with Washington.
China installed 96.6 GW of solar power capacity in 2022: 42% of the entire planet (231 GW)
China had a total of 462 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) power installed as of 2022: 37.5% of the global total of 1233 GW
China has more solar power installed than these countries COMBINED:… pic.twitter.com/tL81uR0nOZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 18, 2023

Maduro’s trip to China came just a few weeks after a historic summit of the BRICS, in which the bloc founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa formally invited six countries to become new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Venezuela has formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc as well.
China has publicly endorsed Venezuela for membership. Brazil, under President Lula da Silva, has also made it clear that it supports Venezuela joining BRICS.
The fact that Iran is now integrating into the bloc shows that countries in the Global South are increasingly willing to challenge the illegal unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States.
In fact, in July, Iran also became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an important institution for security policy in Eurasia. Other members include China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and numerous Central Asian nations.
China has deepened its alliance with Venezuela mere months after helping to broker a historic peace breakthrough between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
For decades, the United States pressured Riyadh to wage a proxy war against Tehran, in hopes of weakening and eventually toppling Iran’s post-revolutionary government.
Today, Iran and Saudi Arabia certainly are not allies, but they have normal diplomatic relations and will work alongside each other members of BRICS.
Developments like these show that, while the United States wages wars and seeks to overthrow governments across the planet, China encourages peace, diplomacy, and stability, in the name of “win-win cooperation” and mutually beneficial economic development.


Instruction: Write an article about: Ukraine says Russia doesn’t plan to invade, while US/UK threaten war and Germany/France want peace. 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: Britain, Estonia, EU, European Union, France, gas, oil, Russia, UK, Ukraine, United Kingdom

Output:
Ukraine’s president urged calm, and its defense minister argued “there are no grounds to believe” Russia is planning an invasion, while the US and Britain send weapons and troops.

UPDATE (February 27, 2022): Despite these previous claims by top Ukrainian government officials, Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, has argued that Russia does not have plans to invade, telling his country’s parliament that “as of today, there are no grounds to believe” Moscow will soon attack.
While top leaders inside Ukraine are stating this clearly, and calling for calm, the United States, Britain, and some European Union member states are threatening war over claims that Russia is preparing an invasion.
Top corporate media outlets have helped fan the flames of war.
Citing anonymous US intelligence officials, CNN published an elaborate conspiracy theory, claiming Moscow is planning to attack Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine in a “false-flag operation” to justify an invasion. The network did not provide a shred of evidence to bolster this extraordinary accusation.
The British government has, likewise without any proof, accused Russia of planning to invade Ukraine to install a “puppet” regime.
But decision-makers actually in Ukraine think that this is mostly just propaganda, and argue Moscow is not planning on an offensive operation.
The Associated Press acknowledged this in a largely overlooked January 25 article, titled “Ukrainian leaders: Stay calm, Russian invasion not imminent.”

“Ukraine’s leaders sought Tuesday [January 25] to reassure the nation that an invasion from neighboring Russia was not imminent,” the AP wrote.
President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ukrainian public to remain calm.
The withdrawal of some Western diplomats from Ukraine was simply “part of a complex diplomatic game” they are playing, Zelensky said.
The AP quoted Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who told parliament “there are no grounds to believe” Russia will soon invade.
“Don’t worry, sleep well,” Reznikov said. “No need to have your bags packed.”
The Ukrainian defense minister told the TV network ICTV, “As of today, the armed forces of Russia created no strike groups, indicating they were ready to launch an offensive tomorrow.”
He added that the chance of a Russian invasion during the Winter Olympics in Beijing was “low.”
While Ukrainian leaders are urging calm, some Western governments appear to be pushing for war.
The United States sent 200,000 pounds of so-called “lethal aid, including ammunition” to Ukraine, bolstering $2.7 billion in support Washington has delivered since 2014.
2014 was the year Washington and Brussels backed a violent coup d’etat in Ukraine and installed a pro-Western government – ironically the same kind of thing London is now accusing Moscow of.
The UK also delivered some 2000 short-range anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, and dispatched dozens of elite troops.
The shipment – and $2.7 billion USD since 2014 – demonstrates U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine bolster its defenses in the face of growing Russian aggression.  ???? #partnershipstrong [2/2] pic.twitter.com/scPFWM3we7
— U.S. Embassy Kyiv (@USEmbassyKyiv) January 22, 2022

Not everyone in Europe is saber-rattling, however. Germany and France have proven to be rare voices of reason, cautioning against the threat of war.
Germany has even gone so far as to block EU and NATO member Estonia from sending weapons to Ukraine.
And in an implicit acknowledgement that Berlin is not on board with its war drive, Britain sent weapons to Ukraine on a circuitous route avoiding Germany.
French President Macron, for his part, has called for de-escalating the situation. Paris wants dialogue with Russia over Ukraine, and has offered to host talks to discuss it.
Macron was just inaugurated as president of the Council of the European Union, giving his words extra import.
Berlin and Paris are concerned about the serious damage such a conflict could do to European economies, which are very much integrated with Russia.

Europe still heavily relies on Russian gas and oil imports. Moscow remains the single biggest energy exporter to the EU.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on February 27 to reflect the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24.


Instruction: Write an article about: Ukraine war is frozen, no territorial changes expected, says Council on Foreign Relations chief, while dismissing peace talks. 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: CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, Crimea, Munich Security Conference, Richard Haass, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
The president of the US government-linked Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, said the proxy war in Ukraine is frozen and he expects no territorial changes in the next year of fighting. At the same time, he dismissed the possibility of peace negotations.

The president of the powerful US government-linked Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has argued that the proxy war in Ukraine is frozen.
He said he expects no territorial changes in the next year of fighting between Russia and NATO-backed Ukrainian forces.
At the same time, he dismissed the possibility of peace negotiations to end the frozen conflict, insisting, “There is no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything, they’re escalating their demands”.
Haass is a former US diplomat who served as director of policy planning for the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, during the lead-up to its illegal invasion of Iraq.
The president of the powerful US Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, admitted the proxy war in Ukraine is frozen. He expects no territorial changes in the next year of fighting.
So why doesn't the West support peace talks?
They want to bleed Russia (as Ukrainians die) pic.twitter.com/JnNPE8PXPM
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 19, 2023

“If you ask me a year from now, if we were to meet again, I think we’re going to see something pretty similar to where we are. I don’t expect the next year to bring fundamental changes in who controls what amount of territory [in Ukraine]”, Haass confessed.
The Council on Foreign Relations chief made these remarks on February 19 in Germany, in an interview at the Munich Security Conference.
The mediator of the interview, Jack Kelly, asked Haass about the potential for peace talks, and if it would be possible to return to the kind of negotiations that Türkiye held in March 2022.
These previous peace talks had been sabotaged by Western governments.
Haass totally dismissed the idea, stating, “Look, I’m not confident… Neither side right now has any desire to negotiate”.
“There is no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything, they’re escalating their demands. It’s not just all the territory, every square inch of it, going back to what they had when they became independent; [it’s also] economic reparations and war crimes accountability”, Haass said.
“So the gap between the sides is enormous, and I simply don’t see that changing for some time to come”.
While arguing the proxy war is frozen, Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haass (former top State Department official under George W Bush) dismissed the possibility of peace talks:
"There's no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything they're escalating their demands" pic.twitter.com/r75jILWrcZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 19, 2023

Haass emphasized that the proxy war in Ukraine “has been going on since 2014”, and did not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which he called “just this latest chapter, this more intense chapter”.
Haass implied that the war began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, after a democratic referendum in which more than 90% of Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation. (Western governments denounced this referendum as illegitimate, but a Pew poll found that a staggering 88% of people in Crimea supported it.)
What Haass did not mention is the US-sponsored coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in February 2014, which set off a civil war and led to Russia’s intervention – precisely what US Ambassador to Russia William Burns (who now serves as CIA director) had warned of in a 2008 embassy cable.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is closely linked to the US government, and has a revolving door with the State Department.
The influential New York-based think tank acts as a kind of privatized arm for US policy-making, with funding from the billionaire Rockefeller oligarchs and their family foundation.
During World War Two, the CFR’s War and Peace Studies project helped formulate the strategy for the creation of the US empire and the subsequent Cold War.


Instruction: Write an article about: Belarus at UN: Nazi-esque US/EU waging ‘economic terrorism’ and hybrid war for ‘color revolution’. 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: Belarus, imperialism, Nazis, Russia, sanctions, Soviet Union

Output:
At the United Nations, Belarus compared Western imperialists to the Nazis it fought in WWII, condemning US/EU sanctions as “economic terrorism,” denouncing the “large-scale hybrid war” against it

Belarus spoke out forcefully against US and European imperialism, unilateralism, and meddling in its internal affairs, in the country’s address at the United Nations General Assembly on September 27.
What Belarusian government officials say is almost never reported on in Western corporate media, so this is a rare opportunity to get the perspective of a country that is uniformly demonized and maligned in the press.
Foreign Affairs Minister Vladimir Makei compared Western imperialists today to the Nazis that his nation nobly fought in World War II, noting one-third of Belarus’ population was killed by the fascist invaders.
Makei condemned US and EU sanctions on Belarus, Cuba, and other countries as an illegal form of “economic terrorism.”
“Belarus is subjected to a large-scale hybrid war from all sides,” he said, noting that Washington and Brussel attempted a “color revolution” and regime-change “blitzkrieg” — but they ultimately failed to overthrow its government.
Stressing that Western interventionism has only “created chaos and instability,” Makei stated that the US and EU have distorted the concept of “human rights” and turned it into a “weapon,” while using fake news and communications technologies as tools of hybrid warfare to destabilize and topple independent governments.
The top Belarusian diplomat also criticized the increasing influence of corporations and Western state-funded non-government organizations (NGOs) at the UN, warning that this is undermining multilateralism and state sovereignty.
Highlights of some of the main points of Makei’s speech appear below. They will not be reported on in the Western media, and it is important to hear what targets of Western imperialism actually say, in their own words.

“Belarus has also been drawn against its will into the vortex of this geopolitical war,” Makei lamented.
“Our country for more than a year has been a target for belligerent pressure from the West, and only because Belarus did not manage to act out the highly polished script of yet another color revolution.”
“Today, Belarus is subjected to a large-scale hybrid war from all sides. We are surprised by the creativity of the authors, who are using beautiful but hypocritical adjectives to justify their destructive actions.”
But the Western “blitzkrieg to change the government in Belarus did not work,” Makei continued. “Moreover, the West quickly lost the support of the people, with their protests organized from outside. It was a miscalculation. Belarus continues to develop successfully and carve its own path.”
The Belarusian foreign minister used his platform at the UN to condemn the US-EU strategy of imposing unilateral sanctions to try to destroy foreign nations and force them to bend to its will.
The “barbarous policy of sanctions” is a form of “economic terrorism,” Makei said.
“Unilateral measures violate clearly international law and carry out serious damage to the whole system of international relations,” and “it is clear that the main victims of unilateral sanctions are normal people.”
“We express our solidarity with other countries who are suffering from sanctions, particularly brotherly people of Cuba, who for so many years have been suffering from unjust economic blockade,” Makei emphasized.
“Today, the world is being governed by economic egotism, political ambition, blackmail, imperial habits, crisis, conflicts, and, orchestrated chaos,” Belarus’ top diplomat lamented.
Makei condemned Western “hybrid wars and malicious and criminal use of modern information technologies,” as well as “blatant interference by self-styled oracles in internal affairs of other sovereign states.”
Fake news has become a new regime-change weapon, he said: “Today, with the help of electronic gadgets, you can undermine the domestic peace and harmony in any state, and also remove its leadership from power.”
The Belarusian foreign minister warned that Western interventionism has only “created chaos and instability.” Makei cited the 20-year US-NATO war on Afghanistan as “a recent example of this senseless policy from some so-called champions or citadels of democracy. However the consequence of this policy today is on the shoulders of the whole international community.”
Western imperialist countries have refined “human rights,” and it “is not only a dangerous toy in the hands of blundering and short-sighted politicians, but a real weapon against undesirable and disobedient countries,” he continued.
This weapon is used by “so-called developed countries to monopolize the copyright on ‘democracy,’ and arbitrarily define the level of democracy in other countries, and depending on that, stick offensive labels on sovereign states.”
Makei said this cynical tactic “clearly reminds us of methods of the Nazis, who also divided the world into those who should rule and those who should be a slave.”
The foreign minister also commemorated the anniversary of World War II, or what Belarus calls the Great Patriotic War.
“The atrocities of the Nazis led to cost millions of lives around the world during the military ordeal. A third of Belarus’ population died in the fight against the fascist invaders and their allies, who waged genocide against our people,” Makei said.
“It is deeply regrettable that today we can see dangerous trends of skewing the moral and legal assessments of the outcomes of the Second World War, equating the rights of the victims and the slaughterers, of the liberators and the aggressors, and casting doubt on the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials.”
These comments were a clear reference to attempts by NATO/EU-backed far-right governments in Eastern and Central Europe — such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland — to rewrite the history of World War II to portray the Soviet Union as the villain, whitewashing or even praising fascists and Nazi collaborators in the process.
Holocaust experts describe this dangerous trend as the “double genocide” conspiracy theory, and warn it is becoming increasingly common, with help from NATO and the EU.
Belarus likewise criticized the extreme hypocrisy of the European Union, which has accused the country of violating the rights of immigrants and refugees. Foreign Minister Makei noted that many of these people are fleeing wars fueled by the EU, and Brussels’ own “response is a iron curtain made of barbed wire.”
“The West has fabricated a conflict with refugees on the western border of Belarus, forgetting about their own international obligations, both as regards our country and as regards the countries of origin of these refugees,” Makei said.
“Today millions of refugees are trying to reach a full Europe from all over the world, to escape from the hunger and disaster created by this same Europe and West as a whole.”
“But as it has turned out, no one wants them in Europe, and it has even gone as far as in Poland, a neighbor of Belarus, as well as in Baltic states, refugees are not only deliberately beaten up, but are being killed, and their corpses are secretly at night being dragged across the border into Belarusian territory. And these are not isolated cases; it has become a norm of conduct of our western neighbors.”
“Is this not the height of cynicism and heresy from those who champion human rights, who boast of the highest level of civilization and who try to teach others how to live?”
Belarus’ top diplomat also used his speech at the General Assembly to criticize the United Nations itself.
“The UN is commercializing its agenda, and becoming more and more a mimic of Western policy,” Makei warned. “The UN is thinking more and more like the West, trampling on important principles of solidarity and multilateralism.”
Makei noted that Western governments fund so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and use them to weaken state sovereignty.
We see “an attempt to give NGOs, who are often created and supported with the support of some interested states, to give these NGOs a status that is identical to sovereign member states of the UN. This is categorically unacceptable,” the Belarusian foreign minister said.
“I would like to also recall the existence of a key principle of the UN: one state, one vote. We are also against the degradation of sovereignty of UN member states, and creating puppets dressed up as NGOs who would be able to drown out the views of independent states.”