Japan’s Odd Pro-Western ‘Nationalism’

    Can one be a nationalist, while faithfully serving the interests of a foreign country or an empire? Anywhere else in the world the answer would be resolute and loud “No!” It would appear…

Of Empire and Government Operation Nazification

Annie Jacobsen’s new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America.  It isn’t terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent.  Jacobsen has added some details,…

Russia Chooses ‘SOFT’ Approach to the Arctic

Recent initiatives in the Arctic Council show that Arctic nations have chosen business as a universal language of rapprochement. Russia’s limited military presence should be viewed as an opportunity to build a safer economic environment…

Iran READY for WAR against US & Israel

Iran’s Armed Forces chief of staff has dismissed US officials’ threats of military action against Iran as “political bluff”, saying the Islamic Republic is ready for the “decisive” battle against the US and Israel. “We are ready for the decisive war with the US and the Zionist regime [of Israel],” said Major General Hassan Firouzabadi on Wednesday.
Iran has been planning for such a battle for years by carrying out various drills, he said, stressing that Iran’s Armed Forces are prepared to fend off any military aggression. The top commander warned that in case of aggression against Iran, all the US and Israeli interests will be targeted, “We warn that if our forces come under attack from any territory, we will hit all the positions which belong to that [territory],” Firouzabadi said.

East African Response Force Created by Pentagon

Growing instability in East and Central Africa will be the focus of Washington’s intervention Over the last two months developments in Central and East Africa has dominated the news coverage of the continent. The split…

Fanning Fires of Chaos in Ukraine: What is Real Price Starting Another Cold War?

In the late 1980s, the leaders of the west promised Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that they would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War. That promise was not kept. A triumphal West stuck it to the Soviet Union’s greatly weakened Russian successor, by incorporating the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and the EU. But that was not enough to sate the lust of the neo-liberal triumphalists in search of a new imperium. Their next move tried to incorporate the Caucasus country of Georgia — a country more a part of Central Asia than of Europe — into the West’s sphere of influence. That turned out to be a bridge too far; the Russians intervened militarily to put a stop to the lunacy. But events in the Ukraine suggest that stop may have been viewed as a temporary speed bump on the pathway to rolling back Russia’s geography to the years of Ivan the Terrible.

China’s EFFORTS CAN HELP MAINTAIN STABILITY in the Latin American Region

China Has Good Reason to Help Stabilize Latin American Economies In the last week or so much of the international business press has been focused on the problems of financial stability in developing countries, some of whom have recently become more vulnerable to capital outflows. The main cause is that investors are trying to get the jump on possible moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve to allow U.S. interest rates to rise, which will draw capital from developing countries and cause their borrowing costs to rise. Argentina has gotten some of this attention, as it allowed the peso to fall by 15 percent in one day and increased some access for Argentines to dollars on the official market. Venezuela is not so much affected by these market developments, but is always negatively portrayed in the international media, and more so in the last year since its exchange rate system problems have caused its inflation to rise to an annual rate of 56 percent over the past year.