Consortium News Exclusive The U.S.-Saudi alliance is coming under unprecedented strain. Everything seems to be going wrong. Up in arms over growing Shi‘ite resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, the ultra-Sunnis in Riyadh…
Category: Israel
NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve paced ahead this week with the latest arrival of more US military forces in the Baltic region. Under the guise of defending eastern Europe from «Russian aggression», more than 100 Abrams…
A cliffhanger debate will take place this Wednesday at the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Picture Secretary of State John Kerry, new Pentagon supremo Ashton Carter, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey all testifying…
The term “chaos” has been popping up a lot lately in the increasingly collapse-prone world in which we find ourselves. Pepe Escobar has even published a book on it. Titled Empire of Chaos, it describes…
Many people still think of the CIA as an agency designed to help American presidents make informed decisions about matters outside the United States. That was the basis for President Truman’s signing the legislation which…
“The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens…
The headlines at Drudge are an excellent barometer of what’s up with government and culture. Glancing over cops being killed by the other side of law enforcement (the people), Hillary’s new Whitewater files (this time electronic),…
Russia’s Remarkable Renaissance Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it’s quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of…
Two sides are required for a New Cold War — and there is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding? There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the old Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997, ‘Ukraine… is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’
One of the recurring threats used by the western nations in their cold (and increasingly more hot) war with Russia, is that Putin’s regime may be locked out of all international monetary transactions when Moscow…