By Pepe Escobar : Posted with permission Biggest story at ASEAN was convergence of moves toward Asia integration, leaving Delhi out for now A pan-Asia high-speed train has left the station – and India – behind. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which would have been the largest free trade deal in the world, was not signed in Bangkok. It will probably be signed next year in Vietnam, assuming New
By Godfree Roberts for The Saker Blog Eurasia has most of the world’s wealth, resources, and population — yet there is very low economic connectivity. A Sino-Russian partnership can collectively create a gravitational pull that allows them to capture the geoeconomic levers of power by creating an alternative to the Western-centric model. This entails developing new global value chains that captures the high-value activities in strategic industries and energy markets,
By Pepe Escobar – Posted with permission Compare US pillaging with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution to normalize Syria What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian
by Pepe Escobar : posted with permission and x-posted with Consortium News The presidential election in Argentina was no less than a game-changer and a graphic lesson for the whole Global South. It pitted, in a nutshell, the people versus neoliberalism. The people won – with new President Alberto Fernandez and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) as his VP. Neoliberalism was represented by Mauricio Macri: a marketing product,
By Pepe Escobar : Posted with permission Trump’s victory-lap movie version buries the embarrassing story of deploying tanks to ‘protect’ Syrian oilfields “He died like a dog.” President Trump could not have scripted a better one-liner as he got ready for his Obama bin Laden close-up in front of the whole world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fake caliph, ISIS/Daesh leader, the most wanted man on the planet, was “brought to justice”
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission and x-posted with Strategic Culture Foundation Neoliberalism is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again, is showing the way. Against the vicious, one-size-fits-all IMF austerity prescription, which deploys weapons of mass economic destruction to smash national sovereignty and foster social inequality, South America finally seems poised to reclaim the power to forge its own history. Three presidential
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission Russia-Turkey deal establishes ‘safe zone’ along Turkish border and there will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols The negotiations in Sochi were long – over six hours – tense and tough. Two leaders in a room with their interpreters and several senior Turkish ministers close by if advice was needed. The stakes were immense: a road map to pacify northeast Syria, finally. The press
by Pepe Escobar : posted with permission and crossposted with Consortium News What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way: “It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that
American troops have left their military bases in Syria in the district near Dadat town and Um Mial locality and headed for Iraq. Syrian government forces have entered the districts abandoned by the US, and the contact line between the Syrian and Turkish armies is now controlled by the Russian military police. This fact is especially annoying for the American press. The New York Times and the Washington Post have
A South African writer for The Saker Blog Around 2008, what is called Xenophobia, broke out. This has been repeated from time to time and to state it simply, the South African blacks kill everyone that they can get their hands on, that hail from anywhere in the rest of Africa. We now have the African Continental Free Trade Agreement and the South Africans seem to be sensitive to truck drivers
By Pepe Escobar : Posted with Permission Forget an independent Kurdistan: They may have to do a deal with Damascus on sharing their area with Sunni Arab refugees In the annals of bombastic Trump tweets, this one is simply astonishing: here we have a President of the United States, on the record, unmasking the whole $8-trillion intervention in the Middle East as an endless war based on a “false premise.” No wonder
By Pepe Escobar – Hong Kong : Posted with permission Deciphering who’s behind the violence leads to a long list of possibilities “If we burn, you burn with us.” “Self-destruct together.” (Lam chao.) The new slogans of Hong Kong’s black bloc – a mob on a rampage connected to the black shirt protestors – made their first appearance on a rainy Sunday afternoon, scrawled on walls in Kowloon. Decoding the
By Pepe Escobar : Hong Kong – Posted with permission Lawyer Lawrence Ma claims the US has been supporting the protests via groups such as the NED Lawrence YK Ma is the executive council chairman of the Hong Kong Legal Exchange Foundation and director of the China Law Society, the Chinese Judicial Studies Association and the Hong Kong Legal Exchange Foundation. He also finds time to teach law at Nankai
Masseer Especial Journal, which belongs to Khamenei.ir, has conducted an interview with Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which is published for the first time. The following is part one of the interview: I would like to start the interview by asking you how the situation in the region was, at the time when the Islamic Revolution became victorious. How was the situation in the West Asian region?
by Pepe Escobar – Beirut : Posted with permission More attacks on Saudi Arabia appear inevitable unless it agrees to stop war against Houthi rebels Never underestimate the power of blowback. Right now, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of the House of Saud, is staring at it, an ominous abyss opened by the Houthis in Yemen. This past weekend, Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier Yahya
Sergey Lavrov, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, addresses the general debate of the 74th Session of the General Assembly of the UN (New York, 24 – 30 September 2019). Transcript : http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3822351 28 September 201900:13 Statement by H.E. Mr. Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, New York, September 27, 2019 Unofficial translation Distinguished
By Pepe Escobar from Beirut – posted with Permission ‘From a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously,’ scholar says “It is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details.” The statement above was not written by Franz Kafka. In fact, it was written by a Kafka derivative: Brussels-based European bureaucracy.
by Pepe Escobar – posted with permission The Yemeni Shiite group’s spectacular attack on Abqaiq raises the distinct possibility of a push to drive the House of Saud from power We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing
by Pepe Escobar – Posted with permission Fringe practicing wanton destruction for destruction’s sake surely have learned tactics from European black blocs What’s going on deep down in Hong Kong? For a former resident with deep cultural and emotional ties to the Fragrant Harbor, it’s quite hard to take it all in just within the framework of cold geopolitical logic. Master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai once said that when he came
