“More than 73% of the world’s dictators are currently being sponsored through the military assistance provided by US taxpayers.”
Not long after last year’s ‘Nuclear Posture Review’, in which top American officials insisted world peace depended upon a massive nuclear rearmament program, and after two major nuclear strike false alarms in Hawaii and Japan, US media is now instilling further panic with two new rumors: that of a long-range North Korean missile strike, and that of a Russian ‘doomsday’ nuclear torpedo attack on the US coastlines.
This could be surmised from the nuclear paradox. It tells us that nuclear armament incentivizes the nuclear armament of existing geopolitical competitors, while at the same time incentivizing interventionism against non-nuclear states through increasing their perceived costs of resistance.
The beneficiaries in this seemingly zero-sum game? Arms manufacturers, of course, but also US uranium producers, who in a complete coincidence are currently agitating for protection from foreign competition.
“A recent clampdown by the Libyan coastguard means fewer boats are making it out to sea, leaving the smugglers with a backlog of would-be passengers on their hands. So the smugglers become masters, the migrants and refugees become slaves.”
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/14/africa/libya-migrant-auctions/index.html
“What has been the outcome of this 16-year quagmire in Afghanistan? The nation-building war that Bush, Obama and now Trump continue to wage has destabilized neighboring Pakistan further.”
Read more: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=9242
“Trump hasn’t forfeited America’s global leadership. On the world stage, his is a new flavor of the same dish. America is still playing the futile role of global cop, still reigns as the only superpower with a globe-straddling military presence and is still picking fights in distant regions remote to US national-security interests. The fact that it is Donald Trump at the helm of all this is fooling observers into thinking more has changed than actually has.”
Read more: https://nypost.com/2018/01/17/the-myth-of-trumps-global-retreat/
“Barack Obama left office as the first two-termer in American history to have been at war every single day of his presidency. In his last year alone, U.S. forces dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven different countries. Trump blew past that tally nine months into his tenure. Indeed, this putatively ‘isolationist’ president has deepened entanglements on every battlefield Obama left him, ramping up airstrikes, kill-or-capture missions, and civilian casualties.”
Read more: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/donald-trump-flaunts-dangers-presidential-power
“From the United States’ point of view, the National Security Strategy document highlighted how China and Russia are trying to shape a new geopolitical environment in the region, which contrasts sharply from Washington’s aims and interests. It pointed out that while Russia is trying to advance its position as the leading political and military power broker, China is pushing ahead with a ‘win, win’ economic policy.”
Read more: http://www.atimes.com/article/make-trade-not-war-chinas-daring-plan-middle-east/
“Recent reports suggest the US is considering a ‘bloody nose’ strike — highly visible but materially limited — on North Korea to make a statement, and that President Donald Trump’s secretaries of state and defense are the key figures holding him back. Experts have panned the idea of a strike on North Korea with near unanimity, but the Trump administration has consistently touted the use of force as a potential tool.”
“The strategy, the first such document to be issued by the Pentagon in roughly a decade, represented an historic shift from the ostensible justification for US global militarism for nearly two decades: the so-called war on terrorism. ‘Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security,’ Mattis said in his speech, which accompanied the release of an 11-page declassified document outlining the National Defense Strategy in broad terms. A lengthier classified version was submitted to the US Congress, which includes the Pentagon’s detailed proposals for a massive increase in military spending.”
“U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis raised the matter in an exchange with reporters after unrelated meetings in the Indonesia capital with senior government officials. He made clear that while the U.S. sympathizes with Turkey’s concerns about border security, Washington wants the Turks to minimize their military action inside Syria.”