It is important to focus on Southeast Asia and East Asia in a broader geopolitical context. China, North Korea as well as Russia are potential targets under Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, involving the combined threat of missile deployments, naval power and pre-emptive nuclear war.
We are not dealing with piecemeal military endeavors. The regional Asia-Pacific military agenda under the auspices of US Pacific Command (USPACOM) is part of a global process of US-NATO military planning.
US military actions are carefully coordinated. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Asia Pacific region. In turn, the planning of military operations is coordinated with non-conventional forms of warfare including regime change, financial warfare and economic sanctions.
While a World War Three Scenario has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years, military action against Russia and China is now contemplated at an “operational level”. U.S. and NATO forces have been deployed in essentially three major regions of the World:
- The Middle East and North Africa. Theater wars and US-NATO sponsored insurgencies directed against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism”
- Eastern Europe including Poland and Ukraine, with military maneuvers, war games and the deployment of military hardware at Russia’s doorstep which could potentially lead to a confrontation with the Russian Federation.
- The U.S. and its allies are also threatening China under President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”.
- Russia is also confronted on its North Eastern frontier, through the deployment of NORAD-Northcom
- In other regions of the World including Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, US intervention is geared towards regime change and economic warfare directed against a number of non-compliant countries: Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua.
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In his monograph Rise of Empire, the libertarian journalist Garet Garrett (1878–1954), lays out a blueprint for how Empire could possibly be reversed as well as the reason he believes reversal would not occur. Garrett was in a unique position to comment insightfully on the American empire because he’d had a front-row seat to events that cemented its status: World War II and the Cold War. World War II America already had a history of conquest and occupation, of course, but, during the mid to late 20th century, the nation became a self-consciously and unapologetic empire with a self-granted mandate to spread its ideology around the world.
A path to reversing Empire
Garrett identifies the first five components of Empire:
- the dominance of executive power: the White House reigns over Congress and the judiciary.
- the subordination of domestic concerns to foreign policy: civil and economic liberties give way to military needs.
- the rise of a military mentality: aggressive patriotism and obedience are exalted.
- a system of satellite nations in the name of collective security;
- and a zeitgeist of both zealous patriotism and fear: bellicosity is mixed with and sustained by panic.
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Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader cut his baby teeth on the milk of fear and hatred towards the United States as did his father Kim Jong-il. Those emotions were generated from what has been referred to as the “Forgotten War” waged during the early 1950s by the US against North Korea with UN backing that robbed the lives of more than five million Koreans as well as 40,000 US soldiers. Its aim was to eradicate the Communist regime supported by Russia and China.
“If we let Korea down, the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one place after another,” said President Harry Truman.
Memories of the devastation have been indelibly etched on Kim Jong-un’s DNA, his fears amplified by the US invasion of Iraq and its role in ousting the Muammar Gaddafi regime from Libya; interventions which occurred after both countries had relinquished their WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programmes.
Yes, we can easily dismiss the stubborn and belligerent stance of Kim Jong-un as that of a madman but there is method in his madness. He is operating in survival mode.
As the Russian President Vladimir Putin and others have pointed out, he would rather his people eat grass than succumb to sanctions, no matter how crippling. Indeed, his people have resorted to consume grass and roots during the 1994–1998 famine when starvation was common in rural regions. Hundreds of thousands (by some accounts millions) died from hunger.
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This was no “deeply philosophical address”. And hardly a show of “principled realism” – as spun by the White House. President Trump at the UN was “American carnage,” to borrow a phrase previously deployed by his nativist speechwriter Stephen Miller.
One should allow the enormity of what just happened to sink in, slowly. The president of the United States, facing the bloated bureaucracy that passes for the “international community,” threatened to “wipe off the map” the whole of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (25 million people). And may however many millions of South Koreans who perish as collateral damage be damned.
Multiple attempts have been made to connect Trump’s threats to the madman theory cooked up by “Tricky Dicky” Nixon in cahoots with Henry Kissinger, according to which the USSR must always be under the impression the then-US president was crazy enough to, literally, go nuclear. But the DPRK will not be much impressed with this madman remix.
That leaves, on the table, a way more terrifying upgrade of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Trump repeatedly invoked Truman in his speech). Frantic gaming will now be in effect in both Moscow and Beijing: Russia and China have their own stability / connectivity strategy under development to contain Pyongyang.
The Trump Doctrine has finally been enounced and a new axis of evil delineated. The winners are North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. Syria under Assad is a sort of mini-evil, and so is Cuba. Crucially, Ukraine and the South China Sea only got a fleeting mention from Trump, with no blunt accusations against Russia and China. That may reflect at least some degree of realpolitik; without “RC” – the Russia-China strategic partnership at the heart of the BRICS bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – there’s no possible solution to the Korean Peninsula stand-off.
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Amply documented, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey are in possession of nuclear weapons which are deployed under national command against Russia, Iran and the Middle East.
Following the failed July 2016 military coup in Turkey, the media reported on Turkey’s nuclear weapons stored and deployed at the Incirlik airbase.
The US National Resources Defense Council in a February 2005 report confirmed Turkey’s deployment of 90 so-called tactical B61 nuclear weapons, some of which were subsequently decommissioned
The stockpiling and deployment of tactical B61 in these five “non-nuclear states” are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with “NATO strike plans”, these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the “non-nuclear States”) could be launched “against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran” ( quoted in National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005, emphasis added)
In 2016, press reports including Deutsche Welle confirmed the deployment of Turkey’s 50 B61 nuclear weapons out it Incirlik air force base. But this has been known for years. It took the media ten years to acknowledge that Turkey (a non-nuclear State) possesses a sizeable nuclear arsenal.
There was however some confusion in the media reports as to the nature of the nuclear bombs stored and deployed at Incirlik. They are B61 gravity bombs [of the bunker buster type] with nuclear warheads, with an explosive capacity of up to 170 kilotons (up to 12 times a Hiroshima bomb).
The accuracy of the numbers of bombs quoted in the media reports remains to be acertained. Some of the bombs were decommissioned. Some of them may have been replaced with a more recent version including the B61-11.
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“Secret” documents, recently declassified by the Reagan presidential library, reveal senior White House officials reengaging a former CIA “proprietary,” The Asia Foundation, in “political action,” an intelligence term of art for influencing the actions of foreign governments.
The documents from 1982 came at a turning-point moment when the Reagan administration was revamping how the U.S. government endeavored to manipulate the internal affairs of governments around the world in the wake of scandals in the 1960s and 1970s involving the Central Intelligence Agency’s global covert operations.
Instead of continuing to rely heavily on the CIA, President Reagan and his national security team began offloading many of those “political action” responsibilities to “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) that operated in a more overt fashion and received funding from other U.S. government agencies.
But secrecy was still required for the involvement of these NGOs in the U.S. government’s strategies to bend the political will of targeted countries. If the “political action” of these NGOs were known, many countries would object to their presence; thus, the “secret” classification of the 1982 White House memos that I recently obtained via a “mandatory declassification review” from the archivists at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.
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On September 8, the same day that President Trump signed a bill into law that suspended the debt ceiling and enabled unlimited federal borrowing, the national debt reached and exceeded $20 trillion for the first time in U.S. history.
It’s not as though it was much better before Friday, however, as the debt ceiling has been sitting comfortably at approximately $19.8 trillion since March. However, as a result of President Trump’s deal with the Democrats that raised the debt ceiling and also provided federal aid to the victims of the recent hurricanes, the Treasury Department was able to begin immediately borrowing money following months of being forced to use “extraordinary measures” to avoid exceeding the debt ceiling.
Under President Trump’s deal with the Democrats, the federal government will not have any spending cap until December 8, when a new debt ceiling will be in put in effect.
President Trump taunted Republicans following his deal with the Democrats with a tweet in which he ultimately blamed the GOP for forcing his hand and compelling him to reach across the aisle. “Republicans, sorry, but I've been hearing about Repeal & Replace for 7 years, didn't happen! Even worse, the Senate Filibuster Rule will never allow the Republicans to pass even great legislation. 8 Dems control – will rarely get 60 (vs. 51) votes. It is a Repub Death Wish...”
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The article below entitled Who is Osama bin Laden? was drafted on September 11, 2001. It was first published on the Global Research website on the evening of September 12, 2001.
Since 2001, it has appeared on numerous websites. The original September 11, 2001 posting became one of the most widely read articles on the internet, pertaining to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Since then it has been carefully “recategorized” by the Search engines. It no longer appears in the top pages of google.
The Global Research website was launched 16 years ago on the 9th of September 2001.
The original post of this article was among the first articles published by Global Research.
The original url was:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
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The president of South Korea Moon Jae-in is currently in Vladivostok for the East Asian Economic Summit (EEF), chaired by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. September 6-7.
A high level North Korean delegation has also been sent to Vladivostok.
President Moon Jae-in was slated to meet Vladimir Putin shortly after his arrival on September 5 (local time).
The holding of the Moon-Putin talks had been requested by Moscow following a prior meeting at the Blue House in Seoul between president Moon Jae-un and Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation (SCRF). .
The Republic of Korea’s presidential office confirmed that Patrushev also held talks with his counterpart Chung Eui-yong, director of the Blue House (Cheongwadae) National Security Office for President Moon Jae-in.
While the Moon-Putin Vladivostok talks have been officially confirmed, in all likelihood, the two delegations (North and South Korea) will also meet behind closed doors, with president Vladimir Putin potentially playing a historic role in promoting a bilateral DPRK-ROK understanding, with a view to averting a US led war.
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On the basis of reports in Jerusalem Post, Wall Street Journal, and other sources, the Zero Hedge news site not only documents and headlines on August 29th, “Israel Threatens To Bomb Assad’s Presidential Palace” but makes clear that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally informed Russian President Vladimir Putin of this intention during his meeting with Putin in Sochi on August 23rd, and that Netanyahu said there that Israel will do this unless Putin stops Iran and Shiites generally from defeating Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other Sunni fundamentalist organizations who are trying to take over Syria.
Israel’s Arutz Sheva International News also banners on August 29th, “Putin to Netanyahu: We won’t rein in Iran … he will not act against Tehran,” and reports that:
“Iran continues to threaten Israel’s existence, and it funds terror organizations and missile plans,” Netanyahu told Putin. “Wherever ISIS disappeared, Iran has taken over. Iran is already on its way to taking control of Iraq, Yemen, and in many ways has already taken over Lebanon.”
Whereas Netanyahu can accept the Sunni groups ISIS or Al Qaeda taking over Syria, he cannot accept continuance of Shiite Iran’s alliance with Syria and defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria.
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