Guest Analyses
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stresses urgent need for international coordination ‘to build a shared future’ Few postmodern political pantomimes have been more revealing than the hundreds of so-called “international decision-makers,” mostly Western, waxing lyrical, disgusted or nostalgic over “Westlessness” at the Munich Security Conference. “Westlessness” sounds like one of those constipated concepts issued from a post-party bad hangover at the Rive Gauche
Fabio Reis Vianna for The Saker Blog When U.S. President Donald Trump announced on December 2 the taxation of Brazilian and Argentine steel, restoring the immediate effect of the “tariffs on all steel and aluminum sent to the United States by these countries,” the amateur members of Bolsonaro´s government were unable to hide their disbelief in their faces of disappointment. Even with reality falling on their heads, the blindness of
by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog A reliable and exceptionally knowledgeable source, who doesn’t wish to be publicly identified, has confidentially informed me that an agreement has been reached in which U.S. troops will remain permanently in Iraq but under exclusively NATO command, no longer under the command of CentCom (US Central Command in the Middle East). On February 12th, NATO’s defense ministers agreed to increase operations in Iraq.
by Ghassan Kadi for The Saker Blog It is hard to say if Erdogan is running out of choices, friends, time, or all of the above; and his stands on various issues and the contradictions he ploughs through are making his situation increasingly untenable. For the benefit of readers who haven’t heard this before; Erdogan is juggling being a Turkish Muslim reformer who parades under the photos of Turkish secular
by Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog In the capitalist West, a reinvention of bourgeois culture is continuously expressed through ownership of devises that legitimise power. Alternating forms of bourgeois culture come and go to allow the public to toy with alternative bourgeois values, but never with the idea of alternatives ‘to’ bourgeois values as such. The net result of all of this is that the public is permitted
by Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan for The Saker Blog The term “terroriste” in French, meaning “terrorist”, is first used in 1794 by the French philosopher François-Noël Babeuf, who denounces Maximilien Robespierre’s Jacobin regime as a dictatorship. Terrorism has many definitions but the well-recognized by the UN is “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a
By Chris Faure for The Saker Blog Can you imagine the puce colored faces of indignation in the US house of exceptionalism when Mr Lavrov grabbed the imperial tiger by the tail during his 3-country trip to Latin America. His trip may not have been planned this way, but it gave an opportunity for Lavrov to resist the warmongering SOTU address of Mr Trump, where Trump again took aim at
Paul Schmutz Schaller for The Saker Blog Introduction In some sense, this article is a comment on some aspects of Andrei Martyanov’s two books „Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning“ (2018) and „The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs“ (2019). I am not aiming at discussing these excellent books; if you do not intend to read them, you may at least look at the book reviews of The
Pepe Escobar – posted with permission The United States may be destined for a shorter historical existence than the Mongol era established by Genghis Khan A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown? Michael Vlahos has argued that the US
by Susan Babbitt for The Saker Blog Margaret Randall’s new memoire, I Never Left Home, [1] is a story of resistance in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua. Now 83, in New Mexico, she is writer, teacher and mentor to younger artists. Randall is an intrepid, compassionate example of anti-imperialist creativity, with more than 150 publications of poetry and non-fiction, all demonstrating profound respect for ideas from the South. It is not
by Ghassan Kadi for The Saker Blog Even though the Syrian Army, with the aid of its international friends and allies, especially Russia, has been able to score many victories and liberate most of Syria’s major cities from the control of terrorist groups, the fight is far from over. Before the situation in the American-controlled North-East is addressed, the Western regions, including Idlib and its surrounds must be put back
by Alexey Mineev (Проект Кино telegram in Russian) for the Saker’s blog. “It is the economy, stupid.” It is the corruption, stupid. The reason that President Putin just undertook the major government shake-up axing PM Medvedev, his economy handling deputies and the minister, as well as several underperforming ministers, is undoubtedly the government’s failure to invigorate economic growth in last years. The plague of the country’s poverty is only the consequence
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission Chinese President Xi Jinping is leading a scientific ‘People’s War’ against the coronavirus President Xi Jinping formally told WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus, at their meeting in Beijing earlier this week, that the coronavirus epidemic “is a devil and we cannot allow the devil to hide.” Ghebreyesus for his part could not but praise Beijing for its extremely swift, coordinated response strategy – which includes
By George Eliason for The Saker Blog To paraphrase a saying so relevant today it’s scary, those that don’t understand history are bound to be bitten on the buttocks by it. Do you hear that sound? That’s history running up behind you. Israel just had a Holocaust commemoration that featured celebrating the memory of unrepentant WWII murderers and torturers along with the memory of their victims. That’s a win, win
by Naresh Jotwani for The Saker Blog Consider the hypothetical case of an economy with annual GDP of 5 trillion US dollars, the broad economic dynamics of which are the subject matter of this exploration. The hypothetical country whose economy we analyse here is named AB, because its internal economy is composed of two distinct components A and B. The total population of AB is 100 million, but only about
by Haider Geoanalyst for The Saker Blog Several sources in the past several days have analyzed the Iranian missile strikes on US forces at the Ayn Al Asad Airbase which took place more than two weeks ago on the 8th of January 2020 as a retaliation for the US assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Sulaimani. The reports have focused on several topics and methods ranging from satellite image interpretation,
by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog U.S. officials have now made clear that if U.S. forces become removed from Iraq as Iraq’s Parliament unanimously demanded and Iraq’s Prime Minister affirmed on January 5th, then the U.S. will try to break Iraq up into separate Sunni and Shia nations, and will also definitely impose sanctions against Iraq or (if Iraq becomes successfully broken up) against the Shia-governed portion of Iraq,
By Pepe Escobar posted with permission The Middle East is the key to wide-ranging, economic, interlinked integration, and peace Under the cascading roar of the 24/7 news cycle cum Twitter eruptions, it’s easy for most of the West, especially the US, to forget the basics about the interaction of Eurasia with its western peninsula, Europe. Asia and Europe have been trading goods and ideas since at least 3,500 BC. Historically,
by Jimmie Moglia for The Saker Blog It is sometimes easier to ascertain the ambiguities, disentangle the intricacies, and recover the meaning of events long past, than it is to recover the logic of events now current. For one, the information industry can easily muddy the waters of the understanding, thanks to their arsenal of weapons of mass confusion. But there is another subtle cause at play. The human mind
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog The Great Recession has exposed “capitalism with Western characteristics” for what it truly is: banker cultural worship, but also banker political governance. The reality that this is the real Western governance model has been thrown into sharpest relief in Europe: I hypothesise it’s because its government (the EU) is so much newer than in the US or almost everywhere else. It is also
