The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Estimado Colega:
Mientras que esta semana los líderes de china y CELAC se reúnen en Beijing, para incluir conversaciones de $20MM en ayuda adicional para Venezuela, le escribo para compartir con Ud. mi último artículo sobre el impacto de la RPCh sobre el entorno estratégico de América Latina y el Caribe, publicado en la edición español de la revista del Ejercito de los EUA, “Military Review.”
By removing Assad, Obama may be declaring war on China
EXTRACT
President Obama continues to operate with large blind spots when it comes to Chinese interests, risking strategic misjudgment according to Professor Zhen Wang of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Seton Hall University. Wang argues this is not surprising given the Obama administration’s China policy suffers from a rather incompetent China team, “including senior positions in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, [that] are currently being held by ‘young people’ who don’t have long-term experience in dealing with China policy…many of whom are not even China experts.”
Interesting.
China May Be Biggest Winner From Ukraine Crisis
By VOA
By Mike Eckel
Thousands of miles away from the Ukrainian battlefields of Donetsk and Novoazovsk sits the country that may end up being the largest beneficiary of the turmoil along Russia’s southwest border: China.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin rewriting the playbook on security in post-Cold War Europe, Beijing has watched warily 3,700 miles to the east, though without protest or interference.
Its abstention from a U.N. Security Council resolution vote in March that condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea was unusual, given Beijing’s traditional stance on such votes, but it comes as bilateral ties have been on the upswing for years now.
Two generations ago, ties between Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China were fraught. The two fought small-scale skirmishes in 1969 along the Ussuri River border (the Wusuli in Chinese) that almost resulted in war.
That’s a distant memory now.
“China may win out” from the Ukraine crisis? asked Martha Brill Olcott, a longtime scholar of Russia and Central Asian politics. “I think the word is ‘will.’ China ‘will’ absolutely benefit.”
Continue reading “Yoda: Ukraine = China Wins, Central Asia Arms”
The most wanted man in the world
Jim Bamford
WIRED, 13 August 2014
EXTRACTS
“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.”
In the article, just published by the University of Miami Center for Hemispheric Policy, as part of their “Perspectives on the Americas” series, I review the key promises and proposals associated with Chinese President Xis recent trip to Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as their implications for the strategic position of the U.S. in the region.
“China Fills the Vacuum Left by the United States in Latin America”
The self-referencing chattering class is up in arms about the $400 billion Russia-China gas deal, seeing it and the associated Russia-China alliance as a threat to the grand strategic ambitions of the United States to remain, in the words of President Obama at West Point, the world’s “indispensable”* power. Taking place against the immediate backdrop of the prevailing US narrative** describing the Ukraine Crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the gas deal is manna from heaven for the unreconstructed cold warriors and neocons in the press, the Pentagon, the defense industry, and the State Department who are fanning anti-Russian/anti-Putin hysteria with prognostications that the US, being on the cusp of a new Cold War, should not cut back its defense spending or its propensity to meddle in the affairs of others.
Viewed thru Russian and Chinese eyes, however, the gas deal may be part of a defensive grand strategy aimed at evolving pathways around Russia’s “NATO expansion problem” and China’s “pivot east” problem. The attached essay by Immanuel Wallerstein, a traditional ‘balance of power' scholar (in the best sense of the phrase), presents a fascinating speculation in this regard. Only time will tell if he is on to something, but his hypothesis is well worth thinking about.
I have reformatted Wallerstein’s essay to highlight his main points … if you find this distracting, the original is at this link.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Wallerstein on China-Russia Grand Strategy”
China Calls for Security Alliance with Iran, Russia
Editor's Note: Well, it looks like Obama the Peacemaker image took another hit today. China, which has no overseas military bases and no carrier battle groups sailing the seas to defend its customers, considers itself a target and not a threat. Imagine that!
The US “divide and conquer” ploy with the Asia Pivot is turning into Obama's Asia Boomerang. The land of freedom and democracy has turned into the major stimulus on the planet for forming defensive military alliances.
It seems they don't want to buy one of our “Sanctions-R-US” franchises. The Founding Fathers are turning over in their graves.
Maybe it's all a trick. Maybe “they” want to divert China and Russia's capital investment away from peaceful business endeavors and whiz it out the window, following the example of the $2 trillion we blew on the military industrial complex over the last decade with no credible threats on the planet.
Good gosh, what group in America would want to do that when our bridges are falling down and the highway trust fund is almost empty… the list goes on and on. Take a look at the companies that the Bush (43) thugs are all involved with, before and after. They seem to have done well.
Don't be surprised to hear brain dead Congressional candidates screaming about how we must rearm American to protect ourselves from the yellow horde building unsinkable inner tubes to float millions of Chinese secret DNA commandos across the Pacific to invade America.
The think tanks are sharpening their pens and swords to scare Americans into putting what money they have left into their various coffers by going on their Asian Jihad. Americans need to form a security alliance of their own here at home to defend ourselves against “you know who”… Jim W. Dean ]
