In 2020, Israel, supported by the United States, began a diplomatic offensive in the Arab world. The goal is evident: containing Iran. As U.S. author Eric Margolis writes, the countries that sign peace agreements with Israel, are “so frightened of neighboring Iran that they would happily have opted for Israeli rule rather than welcome the angry, unforgiving Iranians”.
NATO planners see the tiny Russian exclave of Kaliningrad as a threat to the alliance’s eastern members. In 2019, a top U.S. commander said the Pentagon has a plan for destroying the defenses of Kaliningrad with a non-nuclear missile strike that would match the profile of a nuclear one. But is it NATO or Russia who should feel vulnerable?
The March 2011 Fukushima disaster was the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Its terrifying consequences led some countries to reconsider their attitude to nuclear energy with states like Germany deciding to phase out the technology. However, elsewhere, nuclear power continues to be a major source of electricity supply.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s March 3 speech at the US State Department should be warmly welcomed around the world, especially in Caracas and Tehran…
Through the 1990s, during the terms of US President Bill Clinton, NATO relentlessly and inexorably expanded through Central Europe. Today, the expansion of that alliance eastward – encircling Russia with fiercely Russo-phobic regimes in one tiny country after another and in Ukraine, which is not tiny at all – continues.
Western “big pharma” profit imperative and patent controls inevitably mean that poor countries will always be last on the list to receive supplies of vaccines on a consumer-commodity basis. The wealthier nations are as usual taking the lion’s share. Some estimate that at present rate, it won’t be until 2024 when African nations will be fully inoculated.
The post-WWII United States was at the peak of its soft power. One of its pillars was the American Dream. Every American could expect that his children would be better off – better off in every respect: healthier, longer-lived, better educated, happier, richer – than he was. Seventy years later, this dream seems to be blown to bits.
In the final days of the World War II in Europe, the German command pursued a deliberate policy of successive partial capitulations in the West to bring as many as possible of the eastern military formations westwards and surrender them intact to the British and Americans. It was General Eisenhower how dashed German hopes for a separate peace with the West and facilitated the signing of the final instrument of surrender at the seat of government from where the German aggression sprang: Berlin, captured by the Red Army.
