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China’s support is a game changer for Russia

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | FEBRUARY 6, 2022

During the visit by President Vladimir Putin to Beijing on Friday, the world attention was focused on how far China would go in support of Russia in the latter’s standoff with the US and NATO. From the joint statement issued after the visit, China has given fulsome support to Russia, endorsing Moscow’s demand for security guarantee and its opposition to NATO expansion, the two core issues.

Russia never expected or sought any Chinese intervention in any military confrontation with the western alliance. Russia has the capability to safeguard its sovereignty.

The Chinese support to Russia at the present juncture can still manifest in a variety of ways. Aside China’s backing at the UN Security Council, what really matters most for Moscow would be the myriad ways in which Beijing can mitigate the effect of any harsh western sanctions against by way of transfer of technology, trade, investments, etc. Conceivably, Putin and Xi Jinping have reached an understanding.

Already, a significant step has been taken in this direction during Putin’s visit with the agreement on new Russian oil and gas deals with China worth an estimated $117.5 billion, and China promising to ramp up Russia’s Far East exports. A new 30-year contract to supply 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year to China from Russia’s Far East was signed.

Separately, Russian oil giant Rosneft signed a deal with China’s CNPC to supply 100 million tonnes of oil through Kazakhstan over 10 years, effectively extending an existing deal, which is worth an estimated $80bn. The construction of the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline to China with a massive capacity of 50 bcm annually is also under discussion.

No doubt, Russia is seriously diversifying its markets for oil and gas exports. This will create space for Moscow to negotiate with its European partners. The new deal with Beijing will not necessitate diversion of Russia’s gas exports to Europe, as they are linked to the gas reserves from the Pacific island of Sakhalin, whereas Russia’s European pipeline network sources gas from the Siberian fields.

The ball is in now entirely in the European court — whether to continue to source assured energy supplies from Russia at such incredibly low prices or punish itself by forgoing that option.

While sanctions may inflict some dislocation initially necessitating readjustments, Moscow will cope with it, as past experience shows. With around $640 billion in foreign exchange reserves, Moscow could persevere longer than the Europeans in the energy market.

The big question is about Putin’s decisions regarding the dangerous situation on Russia’s western borders. The short answer is that Putin will not be browbeaten by the Biden Administration’s threat of sanctions.

China does not consider that a full scale invasion of Ukraine is in the Russian calculus but it neatly sidesteps the issue, nonetheless. Putin acts very cautiously, and almost always is reactive. Be it in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria or Ukraine itself, that has been the pattern. Of course, it is a different matter that in all these instances, Putin acted decisively to make sure his objectives were realised.

In the situation surrounding Ukraine, the Biden Administration is forcing Putin’s hands. The latest US and NATO troop reinforcements to Russia’s neighbours—particularly to the Baltic states, in close proximity to St. Petersburg — were completely unwarranted and can only be seen as a calculated act of provocation when there has so far been no evidence of an adequate justification for a major Russian military operation.

Yet, there could be a method in this madness, given the real possibility of risky military operations in Donbass by an emboldened Ukrainian military or even worse, by the nationalist battalions in that region (to whom NATO has secretly provided a large influx of arms in recent weeks.)

In the event of any attack on Donbass, make no mistake, Russian intervention is guaranteed. The legislation under consideration with the Duma in Moscow currently factors in precisely such a contingency. It calls upon the Russian government to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk and, secondly, authorises the government to provide with new weapons to these two “people’s republics.”

A plausible scenario could be that Russia will patiently wait for the Ukrainian provocation. That is, it all boils down to a question of resolve. For Russia, the stakes are exceedingly high and its staying power is far greater than that of its Western adversaries.

There is a big element of brinkmanship here. What is happening in Europe at the moment has turned out to be a huge distraction for the US and as time passes, the Biden Administration would rue that its Indo-Pacific strategy is faltering and it is bogged down. The likelihood of Russia backing off is zero.

Evidently, the North Korean missile testing is already putting enormous strain on the US’ alliance system in the Far East. Unlike Ukraine, the US’ security interests are directly affected. Yet, on Friday, a US-drafted statement condemning Pyongyang crash-landed.

Ironically, China called on the US to be more flexible in its dealings with North Korea and joined six other member countries (including Russia and India) in refusing to sign the joint statement.

China’s ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun later told reporters, “If they do want to see some new breakthrough, they should show more sincerity and flexibility. They should come up with more attractive and more practical, more flexible approaches, policies and actions and accommodating the concerns of the DPRK.”

This is where the US is facing the new reality that its Cold War mentality to isolate China in the Asia-Pacific region and Russia in Europe will not work.

The solidarity between China and Russia reflected in Friday’s joint statement goes far beyond the immediate crisis in Ukraine or the tensions over Taiwan and has an epochal significance heralding a new era in international relations based on a pluralistic world order where the role of the US will no longer be exclusive or defining.

Russia and China have a broad consensus today on almost all core issues related to global strategic stability, which is unprecedented in modern history.

The joint statement mentions the US not less than five times while highlighting the common stance of China and Russia on several key regional and global issues, including the expansion of NATO, the US-led ideological clique in the name of democracy, the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy, AUKUS, etc.

Xi told Putin he is willing to work with him to plan a blueprint and guide the direction of China-Russia ties under the new historical conditions. China has lent support to the fundamental principle of the indivisibility of security that Russia is upholding. In these circumstances, if the US with its zero-sum mindset thinks it can defeat Russia through sanctions, it is being delusional.

Stonewalling the Russian demands is not going to be feasible, either. The challenge facing the Biden Administration will be how to preserve its credibility, especially in the European eyes. For, if Russia is compelled to act militarily to defend its non-negotiable core interests, as it will be at some point, a dangerous escalation may happen.

Is the US ready for an open-ended conflict with Russia? Are its allies game for it? Can they afford it? Will their domestic opinion allow it — war with a thermonuclear nuclear power in Europe to defend ill-defined notions?

A far more judicious course would be to seek a diplomatic formula that takes into account all of these self-evident realities and negotiate some kind of a document that guarantees Russia’s legitimate security needs.

February 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Economics | China, NATO, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Russia & China may be ready to challenge America’s ‘Monroe Doctrine’

By Paul Robinson | RT | February 1, 2022

For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine – asserting a US sphere of influence over Latin America – has been a cornerstone of American policy. But as Russia and China assert their opposition to the US-led world order, American dominance in the region is beginning to look a little shaky.

As the “Russian invasion” scare enters its fourth month, and Russian tanks still fail to roll into Kiev, the parameters of Moscow’s likely response to the West’s rejection of its security demands are becoming a little clearer. Frustrated with what it sees as decades of Western contempt for its concerns, Moscow has demanded that the US offer it security guarantees, including a promise not to expand NATO further to the east. As has become clear through America’s negative response this week, the US has no intention of doing as Russia desires. The issue is now how the Kremlin will react.

Despite hysterical headlines in the Western media about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has categorically ruled this option out. “Our nation has likewise repeatedly stated that we have no intention to attack anyone. We consider the very thought that our people may go to war against each other unacceptable,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev this week.

This is not surprising. Russian officials and security experts have repeatedly made clear that Ukraine is a secondary issue and that their primary concern is a much broader one – the general nature of the international system and of the security architecture in Europe. The idea that failure to achieve agreement on the latter would lead to the invasion of the former was never very logical. Instead of targeting Ukraine, Russia’s response to the current diplomatic impasse is much more likely to be directed at the party deemed by Moscow to be most responsible for the problem, namely the US.

And what better way to do this than to challenge America in its own back yard? Since President James Monroe declared his famous “doctrine” in 1832 – according to which any foreign interference in the politics of the Americas is deemed a hostile act against Washington – the US has fiercely asserted its primacy in both North and South America.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in successive US administrations’ efforts to depose the government of Cuba, as well as the imposition of sanctions on that country for over 60 years. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Washington made it clear that it was willing even to risk nuclear war to prevent potentially hostile weaponry being deployed close to its borders. Meanwhile, elsewhere it has used other methods to undermine or overthrow Latin American governments deemed insufficiently friendly. These include supporting coups and insurgencies, such as aiding the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

But Washington’s ability to bend Latin America to its will appears somewhat weakened. Support for regime change in Bolivia and Honduras has backfired, with members of the deposed governments having returned to power. Meanwhile, China is expanding its Belt and Road Initiative into South America, with seven countries having signed up to join and negotiations under way with Nicaragua to add an eighth. The US is no longer the only player in town.

Russia has now stepped into the mix. In the past few weeks, President Vladimir Putin has held telephone conversations with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all countries with whom Washington has very poor relations. According to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, agreement was reached with all three “to deepen our strategic partnership, with no exceptions, including military and military-technical.”

Asked if this meant deploying Russian troops to those countries, Lavrov’s deputy Sergey Ryabkov failed to rule it in, but failed to rule it out also. “The president of Russia has spoken multiple times on the subject of what the measures could be, for example involving the Russian Navy, if things are set on the course of provoking Russia, and further increasing the military pressure on us by the US,” he said.

A much-discussed extreme option would involve going back to 1962 and placing missiles in Cuba or Venezuela. Given that Russia now has missiles with hypersonic capabilities, this would give it the capacity to strike the US in a matter of minutes, rendering any defense impossible.

It seems unlikely, though, that the Russian government would take such a provocative step unless the US first did something similar in Ukraine or elsewhere close to the Russian border. Even the option mentioned by Ryabkov of some Russian naval deployment to the region is far from certain. “We can’t deploy anything” to Cuba, said former president Dmitry Medvedev this week, arguing that it would harm that country’s prospects of improving its relations with the US and “would provoke tension in the world.”

Still, the threat of such action now dangles in the air. So, too, does the possibility of lesser options, such as additional arms sales as well as economic assistance to enable the Cubans and others to resist American sanctions. For now, we will have to wait and see exactly what “military and military-technical” measures Moscow has in mind. But it is likely that whatever it is will not be to the Americans’ liking. Nor will Russia’s more general support of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Reacting to talk of Russian military deployments in the Americas, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has promised that the Americans would respond “decisively.” This is somewhat ironic, since Sullivan and his peers in the US government seem to deny Russia the right to respond to American deployments close to its borders. But that is by the by. In reality, it’s hard to see what Washington could actually do, short of starting a catastrophic war. Efforts to overthrow the Cuban and Venezuelan government having failed, and economic ties having been almost fully broken, its leverage against those countries is weak.

Washington now has to face the reality that while it remains the foremost power in the world, it can no longer be fully confident of its hegemony even close to home. Its decline is a very gradual process. Nothing very dramatic will likely result from Russia’s latest announcement. It is also possible that Moscow would have decided to cooperate more deeply with Cuba and others even in the absence of current East-West tensions. But had relations been good, one can imagine that the Kremlin might have been inclined not to challenge the US in its own neighborhood.

As it is, the news highlights the fact that pressuring Russia is not a cost-free option from Washington’s point of view and may well rebound to its disadvantage. That’s something that the authorities in the White House could do well to consider.

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.

February 1, 2022 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | China, Cuba, Latin America, Nicaragua, Russia, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

The Experts’ “Zero Covid” Plan Was a Total Failure

By Ryan McMaken – Mises Wire – 01/17/2022

The Chinese regime is doubling down in its “zero covid” strategy. In recent weeks, new covid cases have been detected in several cities. In a world of the more-contagious omicron variant, this is to be expected.

But what has been the Chinese state’s response? It’s more of the same. Lockdowns, travel suspensions, and more. NBC reports:

Tianjin, which detected China’s first community spread of Omicron on Saturday, is rolling out a second round of mass testing on its 14 million residents on Wednesday. …The outbreak has already spread to Anyang, a city in Henan province some 300 miles (482 kilometers) away, prompting a full lockdown …Tianjin officials said at a news conference Tuesday that all bus services to Beijing had been suspended. … On Wednesday, 425 flights were canceled at Tianjin Binhai International Airport, accounting for 95% of all scheduled flights… Tianjin authorities on Sunday ordered citizens not to leave the city unless absolutely necessary. Those who want to leave must present a negative Covid test taken within 48 hours…

It’s hard to believe that anyone still believes that covid will go away if government authorities just “lock down harder.” But China is hardly the only example of how this delusion can win many adherents among the technocrats and the expert class.

After all, let it not be forgotten that much of the world had adopted a zero covid policy early on, and this absurd policy endured for months. In Europe, of course, millions upon millions of people were virtually locked in their homes for months on end. As Philipp Bagus reported from Spain in spring of 2020, one wasn’t allowed to go outside without facing the wrath of state enforcers.

In America, the “experts” frequently spoke out in favor of zero covid, stating that lockdowns could eradicate the disease and that people would have to stay on lockdown until that time. For example, on April 2 of 2020, Anthony Fauci endorsed this idea, stating that social distancing requirements could not be relaxed until there are “essentially no new cases, no deaths for a period of time.” Hawaii explicitly embraced zero covid, and adopted a policy in 2020 based on the idea that public schools would never reopen until there was no longer any “community spread” and “no new cases” were detected over a period of four weeks.

Needless to say, those were totally unrealistic goals. They reflected only the plans of technocrats who were more concerned with living out their bizarre fetishes for lockdowns and border closures than with gaining a better grasp of the situation or with respecting basic human rights. Even Australia—an island nation that could perhaps plausibly hope to actually close its borders—has given up on the idea.

In other words, the “experts” in America wanted to recreate Chinese despotism in America. They adopted a lockdown policy that had already long been rejected. Lockdowns were already expected to bring long term side effects, such as surges in mental health problems—some of the worst of it among the young—now being reported by hospitals. The WHO even concluded that lockdowns ought to be rejected because “there is no obvious rationale for this measure.”

But perhaps the media and government officials were so successful at sowing panic in the general population in the spring of 2020 that the health technocrats saw their chance to try a new experiment in social engineering that they had previously considered unfeasible.

Fortunately, though, by the middle of 2020, it became clear that lockdowns simply weren’t going to be tolerated by much of the general public. Most state and local governments in the US abandoned zero covid rapidly, although the usual totalitarians in the media bemoaned the end of the policy, insisting that the abandonment of lockdowns would drench the non-lockdown jurisdictions in blood. This was predicted for US states like Georgia, and for countries like Sweden—where lockdowns were quickly jettisoned or not imposed at all.

As time went on, it became obvious that the non-lockdown jurisdictions did not fare significantly worse than the locked down ones. Some areas—Sweden, for instance—fared better. Some of the world’s harshest lockdown regimes—such as those in Peru, Argentina, the UK, and New York—also had some of the worst rates of deaths per million.

For the zero-covid crowd, reality got in the way.

Neo-Zero Covid: The Pivot to Vaccines

The zero covid mentality endures, however. The second wave of the zero covid mentality came with the idea that with universal vaccination, covid would disappear.

And, of course, once vaccines began to appear, it was hailed as a magic bullet that would ensure that the vaccinated would be unable to spread the disease. This ideology was expressed in a rant by Rachel Maddow who back in March 2020 harangued her viewers with the “fact” that “virus stops with every vaccinated person.” She continued: “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.”

This was all a complete fabrication. The vaccine never stopped the spread, and with the advent of the omicron variant, it’s now apparently the case that the vaccine doesn’t even slow the spread. The virus is quickly spreading among vaccinated.

It’s no longer possible to even pretend that vaccination prevents transmission. The only argument left to supporters of the vaccine mandate is that vaccines help against serious disease and death. That’s excellent, but it has nothing to do with public health because it’s clear the unvaccinated aren’t the reason the disease has not been eradicated.

And then there is the fact that vaccination has, in part, likely contributed to new covid mutations. This isn’t new with covid. The idea that treatments can lead to new mutations is not new, of course, and it’s long been known that under a variety of situations, leaky vaccines can produce vaccine resistant mutations.

This is also known to occur in the case of covid. For example, in an article for the Journal of Physical Chemistry (December 2021), the authors note “vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral evolution.” And specifically on covid, they write how mutations are often more common in places with higher vaccination rates:

we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations, like those in Omicron, will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution when most of the world’s population is either vaccinated or infected.

This can make things even worse when coupled with other covid mitigation measures. As Vivek Ramaswamy and Apoorva Ramaswamy explained in the Wall Street Journal last week it’s simply not realistic to think vaccines can be constantly adjusted to keep up with new variants. And,

Meanwhile, mask mandates and social-distancing measures will have created fertile ground for new variants that evade vaccination even more effectively. Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all. There are no vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of effort to develop them.

That is, vaccination isn’t making covid go away. The politically correct version of the narrative also completely denies that the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread is even a significant factor in the spread of new mutations. The purveyors of the narrative still insist that only the unvaccinated have any responsibility in the continued existence of the disease. Consider, for example, a recent mainstream media report quoting a doctor who dutifully repeated the political orthodoxy that “Without a large percentage of people being vaccinated, the virus has been allowed to mutate.” Specifically, he further claimed that if “roughly 70% of the population” were vaccinated or naturally infected, this would bring the spread of the disease to a halt through “herd immunity.” But—as the doctor now intones in a forlorn voice—that can’t be achieved because there hasn’t been enough vaccination.

But given his criteria, we should expect places with at least 70% vaccination rates to have halted the spread of disease, right? Not surprisingly, this has not happened. In Portugal, for instance, the fully vaccinated rate—is at 90 percent. In Chile, it’s at 87 percent. It’s 75 percent in France. So, surely the spread of covid has been stopped in all these places? The answer is no. New cases are raging in Portugal, Chile, and France, with all these countries hitting new highs in recent days.

Whether we’re talking about vaccine mandates or lockdowns, it’s clear the zero covid strategy has been an abject failure. They’re still trying it in some places like China where government propaganda is largely unquestioned and where people practice unquestioning obedience to the regime at a scale that makes the all-too-complacent West look downright rebellious by comparison.

Don’t expect the “experts” in any country to give up on their slogans any time soon. But it is clear that reality will eventually catch up with them. Whether or not any respect for human rights remains at the end of it all is another matter.

January 20, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | China, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Is The TAPI Pipeline Finally Ready To Go?

Zero Hedge | January 19, 2022

Submitted by James Durso, Managing Director of Corsair LLC, a supply chain consultancy.

The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline has been long aborning, but its prospects recently got a shot in the arm.

The 1100-mile, $10 billion project has seen numerous delays since the pipeline consortium was announced in late 2014, though the project was first mooted in 1991. Construction started in early 2018 with a projected in-service date of 2021, but halted later that year after workers clearing the route were killed by unknown assailants. Also, the project’s $10 billion cost estimate is a decade old, and an update may cause further delay to the Asian Development Bank-funded effort that is now slated to resume work in September 2022. Turkmenistan will loan Afghanistan the funds for its share of the project, to be repaid from gas transit revenues.

Representatives of the government of Tajikistan recently met officials in Afghanistan, and the Taliban announcement that it will dedicate 30,000 troops to pipeline security may motivate the parties to start construction.

The completed pipeline will allow Turkmenistan to reduce its reliance on its biggest gas customer, China, which has recently taken most of Turkmenistan’s gas exports, though in 2021 the country doubled its gas exports to Russia, which used to be the biggest importer of Turkmen gas until it was displaced by China in 2010. The pipeline will generate additional income that Ashgabat can use to improve services to citizens, a priority after the recent unrest in neighboring Kazakhstan.

But there may be competing opportunities. For example, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan recently signed a trilateral gas swap deal for up to 2 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year. It’s not a large amount – Turkmenistan exports about 40bcm to China every year – but it’s another income stream that should be managed with an eye to future growth. Then there’s the possibility of a connection to the proposed Trans-Caspian Pipeline (TCP) to supply Europe via the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC). Connecting to the SGC would require a 200-mile subsea pipe between Baku and Türkmenba?y, but may face opposition from Iran and Russia on (probably spurious) environmental grounds. Once the politics are resolved, the project would likely be cheaper and carry less of a security burden than the overland TAPI route, and build on the January 2021 agreement between Baku and Ashgabat to jointly develop the Dostluq (“friendship”) oil and natural gas field in the Caspian Sea.

For Afghanistan, the project would provide transit fees of about $500 million per year, along with an annual share of 500 million cubic meters of gas for the first ten years, ultimately increasing to 1.5 bcm per year.

For the Taliban government, a successful project would: demonstrate it can be a reliable partner in a major infrastructure project, employ demobilized Taliban troops so they don’t defect to the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, earn revenue to pay for electricity imports (the country relies on imports for 78% of its power), demonstrate to China it is safe to invest in Afghanistan, and be an opportunity for cooperation with Pakistan despite the dispute over their shared border.

Of course, Kabul will have to figure out what to do with that natural gas, in addition to its one trillion cubic feet of reserves. The U.S.-driven development plan for the country emphasized renewables, like solar and wind, and the U.S.-funded $335 million Tarakhil Power Plant near Kabul, which relied on expensive, imported diesel fuel, is now used as a back-up facility when hydropower and imported power aren’t available. An International Finance Corporation-sponsored 59-megawatt gas-to-power plant in Mazar-i-Sharif would have boosted the country’s current total domestic generation by up to 30 percent, but can it be revived under the Taliban?

And time is of the essence as Uzbekistan recently reduced its power exports by 60%, possibly due to increased domestic demand as winter sets in, possibly to nudge Kabul (or the UN) to start paying the $90 million owed to power suppliers in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran.

For Pakistan, the pipeline would help solve the country’s persistent energy shortfalls, such as the deficit between current gas production of 4 Billion Cubic Feet per Day (BCFD) against demand of 6 BCFD. By 2025, gas production is expected to fall to less 1 BCFD due to depletion of gas reserves while demand increases to 8 BCFD.

And Pakistan won’t have to wait to 2025 for an economic impact: Between 2008 and 2012, 40 percent of Pakistan’s textile sector moved to Bangladesh, one reason being the uneven supply of gas and electricity.

Then there’s Pakistan’s view of its regional interests and its endless search for “strategic depth.” The pipeline would be an independent source of revenue for Afghanistan, just when Pakistan feels the Taliban government should be beholden to it. And India would be able to increase the share of gas in its energy mix from 6.5% to 15%, possibly encouraging more trade between Kabul and New Delhi. To Islamabad, it will add to an already bad outcome: the ungrateful Taliban still aren’t helping Pakistan isolate the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, while India is expected to be the world’s fastest growing economy in 2022, according to the World Bank.

They say “all politics is local” and that may be the case here. One Pakistani observer, Hina Mahar Nadeem, noted the country’s gas shortfalls have a silver lining – for the interests that control the import of expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG). Accordingly, TAPI and the much-delayed (mostly by U.S. sanctions on Iran) Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline are a threat to their economic and political power.

In late 2020, Pakistan and Russia signed a deal to complete the 700-mile Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline, to move LNG from Port Qasim (Karachi) to Kasur, in the Punjab. Pakistan may be treating with Russia to balance against China, or maybe the deal was decided on strictly dollars-and-cents terms. Regardless, this project may crowd out attention and funding for Pakistan’s phase of TAPI.

A richer energy mix and pipeline transit revenues would strengthen Pakistan as it negotiates new efforts with China under the umbrella of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Pakistan’s leaders will need to strengthen their position vis-à-vis China while demonstrating to Beijing they are a reliable partner that will develop energy resources that can accommodate China’s projects. But first, those leaders must take on entrenched business and national security interests to successfully support TAPI, despite the economic benefits to its neighbors. But this assumes the country’s leaders aren’t captive (willing or otherwise) to their business confederates and the securicrats.

For India, TAPI would add to the country’s energy mix, propelling its impressive economic growth. India is the world’s third-largest energy consuming country, and has doubled energy use since 2000, with 80% of demand still being met by coal, oil and solid biomass. TAPI gas would allow India to use less coal, helping it meet its COP26 carbon emission goal, and satisfy increased energy demand by 2030 of 25% to 35% according to the International Energy Agency.

India has built a connection for TAPI at Fazilka at the Indo-Pakistan border in the Punjab region, a location on the border with Pakistan that may be subject to cross-border attacks by Pakistan-affiliated groups. Will Pakistan or its proxies be able to resist attacking such a key piece of infrastructure if India-Pakistan relations fail to improve?

For India, the best approach may be “wait and see” if the U.S. threatens sanctions against TAPI partners, whether the Taliban can prove they know how to govern and secure the country against the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and how serious is the announced Russia-Pakistan pipeline deal.

Where does this leave Turkmenistan?

It, too, should take it slow. It is no longer 2014, and it now has opportunities for increased swaps with Iran and Azerbaijan, and further opportunities with Iran may blossom if Tehran and Washington can secure a nuclear deal. The opportunity to connect to Europe via the TCP/SGC may present more revenue with fewer security concerns, or iffy partners like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Also, Washington needs to clear the way regarding sanctioned officials in Kabul, though the acting minister of defense, Mullah Muhammad Yaqub, who declared “I am directly responsible for and overseeing the security of the TAPI project” hasn’t been sanctioned by Washington… yet.

Washington might get behind TAPI in the wake of the recent deployment of Collective Security Treaty Organization peacekeeping troops to Kazakhstan, which has increased Russia’s clout in Central Asia. Increased revenue for Ashgabat that can be directed to services for its citizens may prevent the public unrest that gave Moscow an opening to intervene, and Turkmen leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow may not need much convincing in this regard.

But it may serve Ashgabat well to ask Washington for a blanket sanctions exemption for all project principals and suppliers, and any government officials in the mix, to make it clear who bears responsibility if the project again fails to launch. If this happens, it will be a shabby way to treat ally India, and in Pakistan it will be interpreted as U.S. revenge against the country for supporting the Taliban.

The “push” of increased regional influence for Moscow and the “pull” of clean energy for ally India will hopefully make Washington green-light (or get out of the way of) the long-delayed project.

January 19, 2022 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Afghanistan, China, India, Russia, Sanctions against Iran, Tajikistan, United States | Leave a comment

Cover-up, deception and our chief Covid advisers

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 13, 2022

MORE evidence of a damaging cover-up by top British and American scientists of the laboratory origin of the Covid-19 virus has emerged in emails released in the US under Freedom of Information laws.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, and Sir Jeremy Farrar, a former senior member of the advisory body Sage and boss of the powerful Wellcome Trust research fund, are among those mentioned.

The emails show that as far back as February 2, 2020, Farrar knew the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unlikely to have arisen naturally. He suggested to Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s ‘Covid czar’, that it may have evolved ‘accidentally’ from a SARS-like virus in human tissue in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

But he was told by Dr Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health: ‘I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voicers of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’ Dutch virologist Dr Ron Fouchier (who has subsequently claimed that the Covid pandemic proves the necessity for animal research) wrote that ‘further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’.

The following month Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a letter published by the Lancet dismissing as ‘conspiracy theories’ claims that Covid-19 had a laboratory origin. The signatories included two other Wellcome scientists.

Farrar has subsequently continued to claim that ‘the best scientific evidence available’ is that the virus crossed from animals to humans.

The Lancet letter set back by more than a year official discussion around the lab origin of the pandemic – vital information for governments globally in deciding how best to respond.

Farrar was also involved in initiating a World Health Organisation inquiry, subsequently dismissed as a ‘whitewash’, which cleared the Wuhan lab of involvement. He wrote to Collins and Fauci on February 5, 2020:

Francis and Tony

Couple of things

*I spoke again with WHO this morning. I believe they have listened and acted. Let me know if you agree.

At the WHO meeting next week they will set up the Group who will ‘look at the origins and evolution of 2019n-Cov’

They have asked for names to sit on that Group – please do send any names

We can have a call this week with a core group of that to frame the work of the Group including – if you could join?

I think this puts it under the umbrella of WHO, with action this week and into next

With names to be put forward into the Group from us and pressure on this group from you and our teams next week.

*The team will update the draft today and I will forward immediately – they will add further comments on the glycans

Does that sound reasonable to you?

Jeremy

(‘Glycans’ is a reference to glycosylation, a key feature of the genetic modification that made a bat virus capable of infecting human cells.)

The email followed an urgent February 1 teleconference, involving both Vallance and Farrar, called to discuss how to respond after WHO declared Covid a global health emergency on the previous day.

Farrar issued a note warning that ‘information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps’. It went to Fauci and Vallance, copied to six others including Paul Schreier, chief operating officer at Wellcome.

The call centred on a document entitled ‘Coronavirus sequence comparison’ and was triggered by a note from immunologist Kristian Anderson of the Scripps Research Institute in California saying that the virus had features which might make it look as if it had been genetically engineered.

In addition, Fauci drew attention to a November 2015 article written by Ralph Baric, an immunologist based in the US and long-term recipient of funds from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The paper was described in the email as ‘Baric, Shi et al – Nature Medicine – SARS gain of function’. Shi Zhengli is the scientist who became known as ‘batwoman’ through her research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘Gain of function’ is the term used to describe laboratory modification of viruses to alter their transmissibility and infectivity. The US government banned such research in 2014 because of concerns about the dangers it could present to human health, such as we have seen with SARS-CoV-2.

Fauci is alleged to have circumvented the ban by paying for work initiated in America to continue at the Wuhan institute.

The case against him was further strengthened this week by the release of documents showing that in 2018 a US Defense Department agency refused to fund the same research on safety grounds. The documents also reveal concern over the suppression of potential treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and about the mRNA vaccines.

The revelations of cover-up and deception at the highest level call into question whether the UK Government should continue to take advice from Farrar and Vallance over the handling of the pandemic response.

If it had been known that research by US and Chinese scientists gave rise to the pandemic, would governments worldwide have put their trust in the lockdown and mass vaccination policies that have proved so damaging? Especially when promoted by scientists such as Fauci who were among those funding the research.

Farrar, who was a member of Sage from the start of the pandemic, left the advisory body in October, saying he wanted to devote more time to the Wellcome Trust.

As Paula Jardine has described in TCW Defending Freedom, even as the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed by the Chinese government as far back as January 23, 2020, Farrar appeared at a press conference convened at the World Economic Forum in Davos by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), promoting the idea that dramatic interventions of social control might be the only way to control a pandemic pending the development of a vaccine.

Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser since March 2018, is former president of research and development at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmith Kline (GSK). It was announced last June that he is to oversee the new National Science and Technology Council ‘to put science and technology right at the heart of policymaking and strengthen the way we work across government to reinforce the position of the UK as a science superpower’.

January 16, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Covid-19, UK, United States | Leave a comment

Last Chance Saloon: best chance to ease East-West tensions cannot be missed

By Tony Kevin | Pearls and Irritations | January 7, 2022

We are at a crunch point now in Russia-US relations. Their high-level talks starting next week will be closely observed by China, Russia’s de facto strategic ally. The coming days and weeks will determine the shape of world security for decades to come.

On Monday, January 10, vital Russia-US talks will start in Geneva. Russia’s delegation will be headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and the US by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

These are ‘precursor’ negotiations – ‘talks about talks’, in the old strategic arms limitation treaties (SALT) terminology. Russia is driving the pace. The US is in reactive mode, trying unsuccessfully to slow things down, to trim Russia’s sails. So far they are not succeeding.

Russia’s best-case scenario for Monday is this. Successful precursor talks will be followed soon after by substantive detailed Foreign Minister level negotiations, led by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, with participation of top military brass from both sides. Russia will seek to secure detailed US-Russia agreements on mutual security guarantees in Europe.

Unusually, Russian drafts of these agreements were handed over by Russia to the US and at the same time made public on December 17. Russia will want to achieve these solemn written mutual commitments, as well-summarised by Patrick Lawrence in Consortium News on December 28.

NATO will cease all efforts to expand eastward, notably into Ukraine and Georgia.
NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missile batteries in nations bordering Russia.
An end to NATO military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
The effective restoration of the treaty covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The US abandoned the INF pact in August 2019.
An ongoing East-West security dialogue.

These desired agreements would be backed up by early NATO-Russia negotiations to achieve corresponding agreements at that level. Finally, the two presidents would formally seal the deal.

Russia’s worst-case scenario: that if the US fails to negotiate towards this complete package – if the US tries in its usual way to equivocate, delay, or cherry-pick Russia’s proposed deal – Russia will terminate the talks.

Russia-US and Russia-NATO relations would then enter the deepest of deep freezes since the worst years of Cold War One. Russia would focus its economic and diplomatic resources entirely on relations with the East and South – backstopped by the Belt and Road Initiative of its reliable friend China. Russia would effectively stop trying to dialogue with US and NATO Europe and call the US bluff on enhanced sanctions. On the now highly militarised Russia-NATO frontier, armies, navies and tactical intermediate range missile forces (sufficient to destroy most of Europe and European Russia) would confront each other. Risks of East-West war by provocation or accident would be far greater than in the years 1989-2014, before the sharp deterioration in East-West relations brought about by the illegal 2014 Ukraine coup.

These present talks instigated by Russia are thus really the Last Chance Saloon: the last opportunity maybe for decades to pursue relaxation of East-West tensions – ‘détente’, in the old nearly — forgotten word of late Cold War One. Russia has had enough of years of creeping security deterioration and has drawn its red lines. These are not in my view ‘ultimatums’ though they do demand major military pullbacks by the US and NATO not matched by Russia, because almost all Russian forces are within Russian territory. In my view these proposed written agreements would enhance European and global security if achieved.

In 2021, Russia decided that it has had enough of decades of Western duplicity and creeping aggression, as persuasively analysed by Marshall Auerback in The Scrum, December 1, 2021.

Russia has seen how under successive US presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, a strategically destructive pattern of US and NATO behaviour had emerged since 1999, when President Bill Clinton welshed on the solemn though unwritten 1989-91 agreements between Reagan and George H.W. Bush with Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe following the reunification of Germany.

As the West offered soothing words and prevarications, NATO expanded, first with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1999. There were further large expansions in 2004 and 2009, bringing NATO right up against Russia’s Western frontiers. Provocatively, NATO then listed Ukraine and Georgia as candidates for NATO membership. The West successfully engineered an anti-Russia ‘colour revolution’ in Ukraine in 2014 and nearly succeeded in doing so in Belarus in 2020. It continued even to try to subvert Russia itself through lavish funding of anti-government human rights NGOs. Military and naval manouevres and build-ups continued on Russia’s Western approaches.

An angry Russia saw every expansion and interference as Western betrayals and as violations of its sovereignty and strategic depth. Russia was initially too weak to do anything about it. As Putin rebuilt Russian strength and morale, Russia began to fight back: first in Georgia in 2008, then in Crimea and East Ukraine in 2014, and in Belarus since 2020.

World events have now decisively turned in Russia’s favour. The global strategic balance is shifting. China firmly has Russia’s back, as seen in recent statements by President Xi Jinping and China’s Foreign Minister. China has repelled Western regime-change pressures in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and around Taiwan. Iran has joined the Belt and Road initiative. The West was expelled from Afghanistan. Syria has somewhat stabilised.

Russia and China see now that they are stronger against their common Western adversary if they stand together. Important non-Western powers and groupings such as India, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN are quietly adjusting their diplomacy to suit. The Quad is dead in the water, and AUKUS is a diplomatic joke.

In publishing these draft treaty texts, Russia is appealing to the world outside the Atlantic alliance to see that its cause is just, and in accordance with the five principles of peaceful coexistence proposed by China to the non-aligned world in 1954.

These five principles as articulated by Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai first appeared in the Sino–Indian Agreement signed in April 1954, and subsequently at the Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations, which Indonesia hosted one year later. These principles are mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in the internal affairs of others, equality for shared benefit, and peaceful coexistence. These are very much the stated principles of current Russian foreign policy.

Quite suddenly, the West is on the diplomatic defensive. Its years of salami-slice aggression against Russia and China are now coming to an end.

For years since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the West used the vital consensus agreed by Reagan and Gorbachev, that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, as cover for creeping aggression in Eastern Europe, violating and weakening Russia’s sphere of security.

Now, with the Russian initiative last week for the UN Security Council P5 to reaffirm the Reagan-Gorbachev doctrine, with which the Western nuclear powers had perforce to agree, the tables have been turned.

Putin is in effect telling the West now: we all agree that none of us can allow military conflict between us to escalate to nuclear war. But we and China are strong enough now to defeat you in non-nuclear conflicts close to our borders, if you should be foolish enough to instigate such conflicts. These are the military facts of the matter: Russia could easily occupy Ukraine and China could easily occupy Taiwan. And you, the US and NATO, could not stop this without risking nuclear war.

Putin has no wish to invade Ukraine but he is determined to stop now the erosion of Russia’s security. The new harder and more confident tone in Russian diplomatic language is unmistakable. A confused West has not yet worked out how to respond. Urgent talks have taken place between Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and between the US and NATO. One hopes that Biden has been preparing the ground for a prudent Western accommodation. A wise old owl, he can smell the coffee.

Putin is now holding the strongest negotiating cards. My betting — indeed my hope — is that Russia will achieve its demanded mutual security guarantees in Europe in coming weeks.

International security – Australia’s security — will be greatly strengthened if he succeeds.

Much could still go wrong. There are troublemakers in the Western bloc whose careers depend on maintaining East-West tensions at just below the level of war. They will try hard to subvert and derail Russia’s goals.

In Australia there is almost complete public ignorance of this subject matter. Be prepared for massive disinformation in coming weeks from the US-fed think tanks like ASPI and our mainstream media, and a hysterical whipping-up of alleged threats of imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. This propaganda offensive is already under way.

Australia sadly no longer has the intellectual resources for an informed and balanced public discussion of these momentous developments. Ignorance and groundless fears of Russia prevail. Dissenting voices such as mine have been marginalised and almost silenced.

One might hope there is more reality-based knowledge in our national security community. But if there is, they are not telling the public. I fear that there too, ignorance and prejudice have taken hold. We are leaving the strategic thinking on Russia to our Big Brother.

I expect this article to be either mocked or ignored. But let us see how events develop in coming weeks.

Tony Kevin is a former Australian senior diplomat, having served as ambassador to Cambodia and Poland, as well as being posted to Australia’s embassy in Moscow. He is the author of six published books on public policy and international relations.

January 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Australia, China, NATO, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Kazakhstan turns into graveyard for US diplomacy

A Pentagon-funded bio-lab near Almaty, Kazakhstan, has become focus of attention for its research on “dangerous pathogens”

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JANUARY 9, 2022

The Kazakh Ministry of Health issued an innocuous disclaimer today denying social media reports about the seizure of a “military biological lab near Almaty by unidentified people.”

According to Tass news agency, the social media had speculated that specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab as “a leak of dangerous pathogens” occurred.

The carefully worded press release by the Kazakh ministry clarifies: “This is not true. The facility is being protected.” Period.

The intriguing report highlights the tip of an iceberg which has implications for public health and holds serious geopolitical ramifications.

Since the late 1990s, when it came to be known that the US was steadily establishing and building up partnerships in biological research with several ex-Soviet republics, Moscow has repeatedly alleged that such cooperation posed a threat to Russia.

These biological research facilities were originally envisaged as part of the so-called Nunn-Lugar Biological Threat Reduction Program to prevent the proliferation of expertise, materials, equipment and technologies that could contribute to the development of biological weapons.

But Moscow suspected that the exact opposite was happening — in reality, the Pentagon has been sponsoring, lavishly financing and providing technical assistance to these laboratories where “under the guise of peaceful research, the US is building up its “military-biological potential.”

In a sensational statement in October 2018, Major General Igor Kirillov, the commander of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops went to the extent of disclosing a discernible pattern of the network of Pentagon labs being located near the borders of Russia and China.

The US-Kazakh partnership in this field dates back to 2003. Kazakhstan has been an interesting “hotspot” for infectious disease occurrence and surveillance due in part to its history, geography, and its diversity of host species. Kazakhstan has long maintained an infrastructure and tiered network for infectious disease surveillance since the time of the Tsars.

The US-funded research projects centred on studies involving select agents including zoonoses: anthrax, plague, tularemia, highly pathogenic avian influenza, brucellosis, etc. These projects funded researchers in Kazakhstan, while project collaborators in the US and UK mentored and guided these researchers to develop and test their hypotheses.

It has been a “win-win” arrangement. The Kazakh institute staff got trained in modern diagnostic and data management techniques, and did research work with lavish external funding, while the Pentagon obtained through such labs valuable inputs for US covert biological weapons programs with military application specifically directed against ethnic groups in Russia and China.

The unassumingly-named Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty figuring in the Tass report was originally planned in 2013 with the US investing $102 million in a biosecurity lab to study some of the most deadly pathogens that could potentially be used in bioterrorism attacks.

Rather than locating the new facility in some obsecure tract of land in Nevada, the Pentagon deliberately chose a site near Almaty to securely store and study the highest-risk diseases such as plague, anthrax and cholera.

The rationale was that the lab would provide gainful employment to talented Kazakh researchers and get them off the streets, so to speak — that is, discourage them from selling their scientific expertise and services to terrorist groups who may have use for biological weapons!

But the CRL, now operational, is anchored on institutional cooperation between Kazakh government and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency under the the Pentagon, which is tasked with protecting “US National Security interests in a rapidly evolving, globalised threat environment to enable a greater understanding of our adversaries and provide solutions to WMD threats in an era of Great Power Competition.”

By the way, Germany also has a similar arrangement under the rubric German-Kazakh Network for Biosafety and Biosecurity, which is co-managed by the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology (a military research facility of the German Armed Forces for Medical Biological Defence.)

Why is Kazakhstan a sought-after partner? Simply put, the country provides unique access to ethnic Russian and Chinese groups as “specimen” for conducting field research involving highly pathogenic, potential biological warfare agents. Kazakhstan has 13,364 km of borders with its neighbouring countries Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Is China indifferent to all this? Far from it. Beijing Review featured a report sourced from BBC Monitoring in 2020 conveying China’s concerns in the matter. As recently as in November last year, a Russian commentator wrote that these bio-labs are virtual Pentagon bases and demanded an international inquiry. He highlighted that the Kazakh ministry of education and science “now works mainly on Pentagon research programmes.”

How could Kazakhstan, a CSTO member country, have got away with such conduct? This needs some explaining.

Paradoxically, these biological labs are living examples of something sinister that has been going on which everyone knew and no one wanted to talk about — namely, the extensive penetration of the decadent Kazakh ruling elites by the US intelligence.

This penetration has been going on for years but significantly deepened as the 81-year old former president Nurusultan Nazarbayev’s “hands-on” leadership began to loosen and his family members and cronies increasingly began moonlighting (under the patriarch’s benevolent gaze, of course) — something akin to Yeltsin years in Russia.

Sadly, it is a familiar story. The Kazakh elites are notoriously corrupt even by Central Asian standards and the parasitic elites have preferred to keep their loot in safe havens in the western world . Unsurprisingly, they are hopelessly compromised to the US intelligence. It’s as simple as that.

Most certainly, Moscow sensed that popular disaffection was building up and the ground beneath the feet of Nazarbayev, a close friend of Putin, was shifting. But it did not — or more likely, would not — interfere since the US was operating through powerful comprador elements who happened to be the ageing patriarch’s family members and associates.

Given the clan affiliations in that part of the world, Moscow probably felt it prudent to keep its counsel to itself. An added factor would have been the fear that the US might manipulate the ultra-nationalist forces (as happened in Ukraine) to inflict harm on the vulnerable 3.5 million ethnic Russian minority (18% of the population.)

Above all, the fact of the matter is that Nazarbayev cronies held the levers of state power, especially over the security apparatus, which gave Washington a decisive edge.

But things have dramatically changed this past week. Nazarbayev may still have some residual influence but not good enough to rescue the elite who subserved US interests. President Tokayev, a low-profile career diplomat by profession, is finally coming on his own.

Two of Tokayev’s decisive moves have been the replacement of Nazarbayev as the head of the National Security Council and the dismissal of the country’s powerful intelligence chief Karim Masimov (who has since been arrested along with other unidentified suspects as part of a probe into “high treason.”)

Indeed, Washington has much to worry about because, at the end of the day, Kazakhstan remains an unfinished business unless and until a colour revolution can bring about regime change and install a pro-West ruler in power, as in Ukraine. The current turbulence signified an abortive attempt at colour revolution, which boomeranged.

Unlike in Afghanistan, the CIA and Pentagon are not in a position to “evacuate” their collaborators. And the torrential flow of events has shocked the Washington establishment. Kazakhstan is a large country (two-thirds the size of India) and sparsely populated (18 million), and the CSTO forces who moved in are well-equipped and led by a tough seasoned general who crushed the US-backed insurgency in Chechnya.

The Russian forces have taken with them the advanced Leer-3 electronic warfare system, which includes specially configured Orlan-10 drones, jamming devices, etc. Borders have been sealed.

The mandate for Russian forces is to protect “strategic assets”. Presumably, such assets include the Pentagon-funded labs in Kazakhstan.

January 9, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception | China, Kazakhstan, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Neocolonialism haunts Horn of Africa

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JANUARY 5, 2022

Chinese foreign ministers have traditionally marked the new year by visiting the African continent. Wang Yi’s 2022 African tour begins with Eritrea against the backdrop of the US strategy in the Horn of Africa to gain control of the strategically vital Red Sea that connects Indian Ocean with the Suez Canal.

Eritrea and China are close friends. China was a supporter of the Eritrean liberation movement since the 1970s. Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki, the veteran revolutionary who led the independence movement, had received military training in China. More recently, Eritrea was one of the 54 countries backing China’s Hong Kong policy (against 39 voicing concern in a rival Western bloc) at the UN General Assembly in October 2020.

Last November, Eritrea signed an MoU with China to join the Belt And Road Initiative. Neighbouring Djibouti is already a major participant in the BRI. So is Sudan along the Red Sea coastline.

Central to regional cohesion in the Horn of Africa is the relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It has been a conflict-ridden troubled relationship but China, which also has close ties with Ethiopia, is well-placed to meditate reconciliation.

One common view is that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pulled off a stunning victory in the conflict with US-backed Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) with the help of armed drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran. But civil wars are won on the ground. And the politico-military axis between Ethiopia and Eritrea to take on the TPLF proved to be the decisive factor. China encouraged the rapprochement between Addis Ababa and Asmara.

Effectively, the two leaderships understood that they have a congruence of interests in thwarting the TPLF which is an American proxy to destabilise their countries and trigger regime changes. (Read the analysis in CounterPunch titled Ethiopia Conflict by US Design.)

Washington is mighty displeased that China’s influence in Djibouti is on the rise and resents that the Marxist regime of Isaias Afewerki keeps the US at arm’s length.

The Horn of Africa is of great strategic importance, and Ethiopia sits at its heart. Destabilise Ethiopia and impact the whole region; install a dictatorial expansionist ethnocentric regime (TPLF); sow division and poison the atmosphere of mutual understanding and cooperation that is being built within the region — this is the neocolonial agenda.

President Uhuru of Kenya, speaking at Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inauguration had said, “Ethiopia is the Mother of African independence… for all of us on the continent, Ethiopia is our Mother… As we know, if the Mother is not at peace, the family cannot be at peace.”

The US is going for the jugular veins of the Mother of post-colonial Africa. An analogy would be destabilising India to gain control of the South Asian region, the difference being that Ethiopia is the only African country never to have been colonised.

The widespread revulsion among Afghans all over the continent is palpable over the US using its TPLF proxy to destabilise Ethiopia. Their collective cry is “No more” — no more colonialism, no more sanctions, no more disinformation, no more lies by the CNN, BBC, etc. The cry resonates widely amongst the Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Somali, Kenyan, and friends of Ethiopia.

The paradox is, Ethiopia today has a democratically elected government after decades of thuggery under the TPLF that ruled with an iron fist for over 30 years with US backing. The Tigray people actually add up to only 5% of Ethiopia’s population but such details were irrelevant to Washington so long as the government in Addis Ababa obeyed its diktat.

There is also a religious sub-text. The Tigray people are Christians whereas the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia is the Oromo, native to the region of Ethiopia and Kenya. They are a Cushitic people who have inhabited the East and Northeast Africa since at least the early 1st millennium. The Oromo people have a glorious history of forced resistance to religious conversion, primarily by European explorers, Catholic Christians missionaries.

Broadly, the resistance ideology is embedded in the Oromo collective memory. Abiy Ahmed is the first ethnic Oromo to become prime minister. Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed is an extraordinary politician, far-sighted and deeply committed to his country’s plural identity national sovereignty.

In geopolitical terms, Washington would see many advantages in the destabilisation of Ethiopia as it would trigger a multi-vector regional conflagration, as happens when multi-ethnic nations unravel — such as the former Yugoslavia or today’s India or Russia. And neighbouring countries would be inevitably sucked into ethnic wars such as Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya — and even Egypt and Persian Gulf states.

The fact that the UAE, Turkey and Iran — improbable allies — are supporting Abiy’s desperate effort to preserve Ethiopia’s sovereignty and national cohesion and helped boost his military campaign to ward off another attempt by the US-backed TPLF to capture power speaks volumes.

In this matrix, while the US aims to dominate the hugely strategic Horn of Africa, “Plan B” will be to be the spoiler by throwing the region into turmoil so that China is also a loser. The point is, the Western world has no answer to China’s BRI.

China and Ethiopia have a strong political affinity and deep economic bonds, and Ethiopia is one of China’s top five investment destinations on the African continent. Beyond investment, relations extend to trade, infrastructure finance and other areas. Economic engagement with China has provided Ethiopia with many opportunities.

Curiously, even prior to the advent of the BRI, China was already a major financier of Ethiopia’s infrastructure. Chinese investment in the manufacturing sector — incidentally, one of the Abiy government’s focus areas currently — has contributed to the country’s economic transformation and diversification and to job creation.

A recent report by the well-known London-based global think-tank ODI titled The Belt and Road and Chinese Enterprises in Ethiopia estimates that China’s BRI “has the potential to open up new development pathways through infrastructure development, stimulating investment and job creation and promoting economic transformation… BRI can be an engine for growth and development. However, this is not a given…”

The ODI report, dated August 2021, concludes, “Chinese investors are concerned regarding economic and political uncertainty in Ethiopia. Political uncertainty has to do with domestic conflict and political instability, which may affect not only investors’ profitability, but also their personal safety and the safety of their assets. The economic challenges relate to high production and transport costs and the difficulties of accessing foreign exchange, which is a problem for virtually all Chinese businesses in the country. The challenges identified by Chinese investors could pose a threat to the sustained development of China–Ethiopia economic cooperation.”

Simply put, if there is mayhem in Ethiopia, the locomotive of China’s BRI in the vast regions of the Horn of Africa and East Africa can be potentially slowed down if not derailed. That is the least the US can do faced with the grim prospect that it has no alternative offer to make to the African nations to counter the BRI.

If the BRI locomotive chugs along unimpeded, the entire Western neocolonial project in Africa in the 21st century is threatened with extinction. The existential angst shows in the Biden Administration’s announcement on New Year’s Eve terminating Ethiopia’s access to the US duty-free trade program under the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA “amid the widening conflict in northern Ethiopia.”

President Biden had threatened in November already that Ethiopia would be cut off from the AGOA because of alleged human rights violations in the Tigray region. Biden spoke up in sheer despair in anticipation of Wang Yi’s working visit to Ethiopia on December1!

January 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Africa, China, Ethiopia, Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, United States | Leave a comment

China introduces “AI prosecutor” that can automatically charge citizens of a crime

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2021

While in the West mostly speech and movement of people are policed through automated “AI” censorship and surveillance systems, in China, work appears to be well under way to create a machine that would act as an AI-powered prosecutor.

The product, which has already been tested by the busy Shanghai Pudong prosecutor’s office, is able to achieve 97 percent accuracy in charging people suspected of eight criminal acts, researchers developing it have alleged.

According to the South China Morning Post, the cases that the “AI prosecutor” is allegedly highly competent in handling involve crimes like credit card fraud, dangerous driving, gambling, intentional injury, obstructing officials, theft, but also something called “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

The last one is considered particularly “problematic” since its definition, or lack thereof, can cover different forms of political dissent.

And now the plan is to introduce a machine that would be given decision-making powers, such as whether to file charges, and what sentence to seek on a case-to-case basis.

That, said Professor Shi Yong, who heads the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management lab that is behind the project, is a marked difference between this and other “AI” tools that have already been in use in China for years. One of them is System 206, whose tasks are limited to assessing evidence, the danger a suspect poses to the public, and conditions under which they may be apprehended.

But the tech behind the new artificial prosecutor looks to be at the same time far more ambitious, and advanced. What has been disclosed is that it can be run on a desktop PC, processing 1,000 traits extracted from case description filed by humans, and based on that press a charge.

It’s unclear if the database of 17,000 cases spanning five years used to train the algorithms is enough to consider the project as true AI – and if the same result can be achieved by rule-based algorithms.

Either way, not all human prosecutors are thrilled about having some of their workload replaced in this way – although precisely this has been given as the motive for developing the tech.

“The accuracy of 97 per cent may be high from a technological point of view, but there will always be a chance of a mistake. Who will take responsibility when it happens? The prosecutor, the machine or the designer of the algorithm?,” one Guangzhou-based prosecutor noted, speaking on condition of anonymity.

December 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | China, Human rights | Leave a comment

Russia explains why it vetoed climate change resolution at UN

RT | December 13, 2021

Russia has vetoed a draft UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution, linking climate change to security threats. Russia’s ambassador to the body claimed the document would have set a dangerously one-sided approach to future conflicts.

The UNSC voted on the draft resolution, tabled by temporary members Ireland and Niger, on Monday. The proposal, co-sponsored by over 100 nations, called upon the UN secretary-general to make climate-related risks “a central component” of conflict prevention, while “incorporating information on the security implications of climate change” to make the council “pay due regard to any root causes of conflict or risk multipliers.”

While the draft was supported by the majority of UNSC members, it was vetoed by Russia, with another permanent member, China, abstaining. Among the temporary invitees, India was the only country to vote against the draft. Between them, the three countries are home to close to 40% of the world’s population.

Explaining the decision to sink the resolution, Russia’s Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia said the document would have imposed an extremely one-sided perspective to deal with conflicts, while potentially enabling the UNSC to put any country on its agenda under the guise of climate-related issues.

“We object to the creation of a new branch in the council’s work that asserts a generic and an automatic link between climate change and international security, turning a scientific and socio-economic issue into a political issue,” Nebenzia said during the meeting.

The proposed document was effectively “coercing the council to take a one-dimensional approach to conflicts and threats to international peace and security, i.e. through the climate lens,” Russia’s mission said in a separate statement.

We recognize the range of complex and intertwined challenges, including the impact of climate change, natural disasters, poverty, poor local governance that is mostly rooted in the colonial past, and terrorism threats that are an intolerable burden for some countries and regions. All those situations have their own specific characteristics.

The mission also noted that the draft was not actually as universally supported as its sponsors tried to present it, stating that the “penholders of the document were pushing it through without readiness to discuss the root causes of challenges” that the “vulnerable countries” are facing.

“As a responsible member of the United Nations and its Security Council, the Russian Federation along with India and China does not share such an approach imposed by the Western nations that have already made a significant number of countries expecting assistance believe in it,” the mission stressed.

Ireland has already voiced its displeasure over the demise of the draft resolution, with the country’s mission at the UN blasting the veto powers of permanent UNSC members as “an outdated tool, for what we think is an outdated perspective.”

“A historic opportunity to recognize climate change as contributing to conflict has been vetoed for now, but the consensus of international opinion is more than clear,” Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said.

December 17, 2021 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | China, Russia | Leave a comment

Forget China, was it CEPI’s bio-spooks who locked down the West?

By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | December 15, 2021

IT is nearly two years since the world turned upside down and a sequence of unprecedented lockdowns and quarantines in the name of public health and safety were imposed across the West.

The narrative of the still unfolding story of Covid-19 is familiar to all of us, with China the chief bogeyman of the tale. But is that right?

In this drama has something really important been overlooked? Namely, the role of a powerful, self-appointed supranational organisation, set up 2017, called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Members of CEPI’s board and scientific advisory committee have been, and still are, key actors in global and national responses to the Covid-19 virus. Its mission? To ‘create a world in which epidemics are no longer a threat to humanity’.

At the start of 2020, all eyes were glued on China. The communist government had dutifully notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) on New Year’s Eve 2019 of its concerns over a small cluster of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’.

Three weeks later, when the death toll stood at 17, the CCP was sufficiently alarmed to order the home confinement of nearly 12 million mostly healthy people who were unfortunate enough to reside in the outbreak city, Wuhan.

Having fingered as the culprit a relative of the SARS virus that claimed 774 victims in 2003, the Chinese determination to contain the self-evidently nastier 2019 co-variant at all costs was made plain to the world.

The scenes broadcast out of China nightly on the TV news were surreal, but strangely familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with vintage sci-fi. A nightmare amalgamation of The Andromeda Strain and The Hamburg Syndrome was unfolding in real life, right before our eyes.

Here, a man falling down dead in the street. There, men in white hazmat suits walking through empty Chinese thoroughfares equipped with Ghostbuster-esque backpacks blowing smoke in a desperate attempt to fumigate the invisible peril out of existence.

Knowing that the Queen’s own men at the Porton Down chemical and biological defence establishment long ago discovered that fresh air and sunlight, two commodities already in short supply in Chinese cities, are the most potent of disinfectants, it seemed a strangely futile spectacle. What on Earth were they trying to do? Death apparently lurked around every corner.

As the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed on January 23, 2020, the global elite were busy congregating at their annual networking fest, the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (where CEPI had been founded three years earlier by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust global charity organisation, and the World Economic Forum).

Next day, a little-noticed press conference was convened in Davos to discuss the SARS-like, closely-related, but definitely novel, SARS Wuhan coronavirus.

Appearing in front of about 30 reporters were Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and board member of CEPI; Richard Hatchett, chief executive of CEPI, and Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, one of three companies being funded to develop a coronavirus vaccine. A Chinese reporter asked the panel if there was any historical precedent for the lockdown.

Hatchett said: ‘One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.

‘There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in US cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.

‘The challenge of course is that it is very difficult to sustain these interventions, as they impose enormous cost and they also can produce enormous anxiety among the affected population.’

The ‘we’ Hatchett was referring to was the US Department of Homeland Security where, as an official, he had helped develop the US pandemic preparedness plan in 2005 and 2006 during the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak, which Farrar had discovered in Vietnam.

Hatchett continued: ‘At that time, we looked at how could you have those interventions implemented in a way that maximised their benefit and minimised the cost and we developed an approach that we called “community mitigation” interventions and CDC (the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) published guidance on this several years ago.

‘There is a literature which I would certainly encourage Chinese authorities to review and certainly I would be happy to talk to them about that, although that’s not my current job.’

There was no need to encourage the Chinese authorities to review the literature. CEPI already had a man in Beijing, Dr George Gao, the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control, but also member of the CEPI scientific advisory panel. The community mitigation approach the Chinese adopted in Wuhan was straight out of the 2006 US Homeland Security pandemic playbook.

Gao, like Farrar, completed his PhD at Oxford University before conducting post-doctoral work under Sir John Bell, the controversial Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, holder of several extranumerary positions and multiple interests, not least as chair of the global health scientific advisory board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

An expert on coronaviruses, Gao served on CEPI’s first scientific advisory committee in 2016 and was a player in Event 201, the pandemic simulation hosted in October 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health – discussed here by Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In all probability, Gao is the old friend Farrar was referring to when he said on Desert Island Discs that he had had a phone call on December 31, 2019 – the day the Chinese authorities reported the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak to the WHO – to alert him that China would release the genome of the new virus on January 10. As things stood on New Year’s Eve, the virus had yet to cause any deaths, although it was making a few people very ill.

By January 17, another CEPI scientific adviser, Dr Christian Drosten, had conveniently developed a PCR test from the genetic sequence posted online by the Chinese, which the WHO advised laboratories could be used as a diagnostic test for Covid-19.

This was almost two months before the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Following a visit to Wuhan by the WHO in February 2020, led by its assistant director-general Dr Bruce Aylward, the world was being encouraged to adopt what were now being called Chinese measures.

‘China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease,’ said Aylward. ‘It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work.’

The Chinese government, with its own Big Brother infrastructure, had its own reasons for going along with that. But the response plan is in reality far more complex, and has a much darker background in the West.

The Yellow Brick Road that passes through CEPI and Beijing leads right back to the US Department of Homeland Security, and its 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.

The response plan is in reality an American scheme, with its origins more than decade and a half earlier and against a backdrop of bioterrorism concerns. Uncle Sam is the wizard behind the curtain, not acting in the West’s interests at all.

December 15, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | CEPI, China, Covid-19, DHS, Gates Foundation, Human rights, United States, WEF, Wellcome Trust | Leave a comment

Space: The U.S. Has Questions for Russia, Which Has More for the U.S.

By Vladimir Kozin – Member, Russian Academy of Military Sciences, Moscow, November 22, 2021

On November 15, 2021, the Russian Ministry of Defense carried out the successful destruction of the discontinued and decommissioned national spacecraft named “Tselina-D”, which was put into orbit back in 1982. The head of the Russian Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, confirmed that the Russian Aerospace Forces had indeed successfully destroyed this satellite with pinpoint accuracy.

The fragments formed after knocking down this spacecraft do not pose any threat to either orbital stations or other satellites, or generally speaking to the space activities of any state. This is well known to all space powers that have fairly effective national technical means of verification and control of outer space, including the USA.

After the destruction of the named satellite, its fragments moved along trajectories outside the orbits of other operating space vehicles, have been under constant observation and monitoring from the Russian side and are included in the main catalogue of the space activities.

Prediction of any possible dangerous situations calculated after each orbital movement over the Earth has been made in connection with the accompanied debris and newly discovered fragments after the destruction of the “Tselina-D” satellite with operating spacecraft and the International Space Station or ISS “Mir”. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that the ISS orbit is 40-60 km below the fragments of the destroyed “Tselina-D” satellite and there is no threat to this station. According to the results of the calculation of any possible threats, there are no approaches to it in the near future.

Earlier, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, said that Russia’s test of an anti-satellite system used in this case jeopardized the safety of space research.

Moscow corrected his untenable judgment. “This event was carried out in strict accordance with international law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and was not directed against anyone,” the Russian Foreign Ministry official spokesperson said. Russian Foreign Ministry also repeated that the fragments formed as a result of the test do not pose a threat and do not interfere with the functioning of orbital stations, spacecraft, as well as the entire space activities in general.

Washington has clearly forgotten that Russia is not the first country to hold such actions. The United States, China, and India have the capabilities to destroy spacecraft in space, having previously successfully tested their own anti-satellite assets versus their own satellites.

Precedents of destruction

They were announced by the named states at the relevant time.

In January 2007, the PRC conducted a test of a ground-based anti-missile system, during which the old Chinese meteorological satellite “Fengyun” was destroyed. This test led to the formation of a large amount of space debris. It should be noted that on November 10 of this year, the ISS orbit was corrected in order to avoid the wreckage of this Chinese satellite.

In February 2008, with the interceptor missile of the United States sea-based missile defense system “Standard-3”, the American side destroyed its “USA-193” reconnaissance satellite that had lost control at an altitude of about 247 km. The launch of the interceptor missile was carried out from the Hawaiian Islands area from the U.S. Navy cruiser Lake Erie, equipped with the Aegis combat information and control system.

In March 2019, India also successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon. The defeat of the “Microsat” satellite was carried out by the upgraded “Pdv” interceptor.

Earlier, the USSR has called, and now Russia has been calling for space powers for decades to legally consolidate at the international level a ban on the militarization of outer space by preventing an arms race in it and refusing to deploy any strike weapons in it.

In 1977-1978, the Soviet Union held official negotiations with the United States on anti-satellite systems. But as soon as the American delegation heard about Moscow’s desire to identify potential types of hostile activities in space that should be banned, including similar systems in question, it initiatively interrupted them after the fourth round of talks and decided not to participate in such a negotiation process anymore.

A fundamentally important clarification: since that time, Washington has not held and does not intend to hold such negotiations with any state in the world.

Moreover, the updated draft of an international treaty on the prevention of the deployment of weapons in outer space proposed by Moscow and Beijing is regularly blocked by Washington at the UN and at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Back in 2004, Russia unilaterally committed itself not to be the first to deploy weapons in space, and in 2005, a similar commitment was made by the Collective Security Treaty Organization member states involving a number of nations of the former USSR.

In total, since the beginning of the space age, which began with the launch of the first artificial satellite called “Sputnik” by the Soviet Union in October 1957, Moscow has jointly or independently put forward about 20 different initiatives in the international arena to prevent an arms race in outer space.

Alas, all of them were successfully blocked by the United States and its NATO partners. Anthony Blinken seems to have forgotten about it.

Washington also ignores the recognition of the American Center for Strategic and International Studies, located in the American capital, whose report in April 2018 recognized that “the United States remains a leader in the use of space for military purposes.”

Against this background, Russia is implementing a purposeful and adequate policy to strengthen the country’s defense capability, including in the space sphere, taking into account, among other things, many additional circumstances.

X-37B with specific tasks

What are they? Russia takes into account that the United States is taking concrete practical steps to steadily increase its combat strike space potential.

Work is actively underway to create a space-based missile defense network, develop and operate systems with ground-based, sea-based and air-based interceptor missiles, electronic warfare, directed energy weapons, including testing an unmanned reusable space shuttle X-37B, which has a spacious cargo compartment on board. It is claimed that such a platform is capable of carrying a payload of up to 900 kg.

It is currently carrying out its sixth long-duration orbital flight. His space brother, who made his fifth flight in space in 2017-2019, continuously flew in spacet for 780 days.

Officially, the United States claims that this unmanned spacecraft performs the tasks of running-in technologies of reusable space platforms. At the same time, initially, when the X-37B was first launched in 2010, it was indicated that its main function would be the delivery of certain “cargo” into orbit. Only it was not explained: what kind of cargo? However, all these messages are just a legend to cover up military tasks that this device has been performed in space.

On the basis of the existing military-strategic space doctrines, specific tasks are prescribed for the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon.

Among them are made as conducting operations in space, from space and through it to contain conflicts, and in case of failure of deterrence – to defeat any aggressor, as well as ensuring the protection and preservation of vital interests of the United States together with allies and partners. It is obvious that in order to carry out such operations, the Pentagon will need special reusable platforms in space, which indicates a promising process of its further militarization by the Pentagon without any restrictions.

According to some military experts, the plausible purpose of this device is to test technologies for a future space interception, which allows inspecting alien space objects and, if necessary, disabling them with anti-satellite systems with various functions, including with ‘hit-to-kill’ kinetic characteristics.

This is confirmed by the statement of the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force, Barbara Barrett, who in May 2020 told reporters that during the current sixth X-37B space mission, a number of experiments will be conducted to test the possibility of converting solar energy into radio frequency microwave radiation, which later can be transmitted to Earth in the form of electricity. It is very questionable explanation.

So, what has this device actually been doing and continues to do in space for so many years? Obviously, since this space platform was created by the Boeing Corporation with direct participation in its financing and development by the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, and it is operated by the U.S. Air Force, the tasks of the X-37B are by no means related to the peaceful exploration of outer space.

Some experts believe that such devices can be used to deliver missile defense and anti-satellite systems. Yes, it is not excluded.

It is noteworthy that the operation of this American spacecraft for a long time has caused concern not only on the part of Russia and China, but also on the part of some U.S. allies in NATO regarding its possible role as a space weapon and a platform for delivering space strike weapons, including nuclear warheads to be housed in X-37B cargo compartment.

A special experiment

The X-37B can perform up to ten secret tasks.

One of them fulfilled recently should be mentioned in particular.

It is noteworthy that in the twenties of October 2021, the separation of a small spacecraft at high speed from the fuselage of this “shuttle”, which does not have the ability to conduct radar surveillance, was recorded from the X-37B that is currently moving in space, which indicates that the Pentagon is testing a new type of space-based weapon. It is obvious that this kind of activity of the United States is not compatible with the stated goals of the peaceful use of outer space.

The separation of the named space object was preceded by the maneuvering of the X-37 the day before.

From October 21 to 22, the separated space vehicle was located at a distance of less than 200 meters from the X-37B, which subsequently performed a maneuver to move away from the separated new spacecraft.

Based on the results of processing objective information, it was found that the spacecraft was stabilized, and no elements were found on its body characterizing the presence of antennas that could provide the possibility of conducting radar surveillance. At the same time, the facts of the approach of the separated new spacecraft with other space objects or the performance of orbital maneuvers have not been revealed.

Thus, according to the Russian side, the United States conducted an experiment to separate a small spacecraft with high speed from the X-37B, which indicates the testing of a new type of space-based weapon.

Such actions of the American side are assessed in Moscow as a threat to strategic stability and are incompatible with the stated goals of the peaceful use of outer space. Moreover, Washington intends to use outer space as an area for the potential deployment of space-to-space weapons against various objects in orbit, as well as in the form of space-to-surface weapons in the form of space-based strike weapons that can be used to attack from space various ground-based, air-air-based and sea-based targets located on the planet.

Current U.S. space policy

Since 1957, all American presidents, without exception, have been actively engaged in the militarization and weaponization of outer space. In recent years, the most notable breakthrough in this direction has been made by the ex-Republican President Donald Trump.

On March 23, 2018, he approved the updated National Space Strategy. On June 18 of the same year, he gave a specific instruction to the Pentagon to create a Space Force as a full-fledged sixth brunch of the country’s Armed Forces, while emphasizing the undesirability to have Russia and China as leading nations in space. On December 9, 2020, the White House additionally announced a new National Space Policy. On December 20, 2019, the beginning of the creation of the U.S. Space Force was announced.

In these military-strategic doctrines, three fundamental views of the American military-political leadership on the use of outer space for military purposes have been publicly announced.

First, it was proclaimed that the United States intended to single-handedly dominate in space.

Secondly, it was stated that they should maintain “peace from a position of strength” in outer space.

Thirdly, it was stated that space in Washington’s views is becoming a potential arena for military operations.

These military-strategic doctrines, according to Washington are as reactions to the “growing threat” in space stemming from Russia and China.

The Pentagon will develop four priority areas of space activities to achieve the stated goals while countering the identified threats, potentials and challenges: (1) ensuring integrated military dominance in space; (2) the integration of military space power into national, joint and combined combat operations; (3) the formation of a strategic environment in the interests of the United States, as well as (4) the development of cooperation in outer space with allies, partners, the military-industrial complex and other ministries and departments of the United States.

The space strategy and policy of the current American administration led by President Joseph Biden is not much different from the space line followed by President Donald Trump.

After Joseph Biden took office as president in January this year, the United States continued to develop several types of space strike weapons, including in accordance with twelve programs for the use of outer space for military purposes, when six of them provide for the creation of various types of such systems, and on the basis of six others that will control for the orbital space grouping on the ground.

The Pentagon’s intelligence and information assets in space continue to be updated in full, as well as the financing of military space programs. For the fiscal year 2021, allocations for these purposes are set at $15.5 billion.

Some pro-Western Russian experts are in favor of developing some compromise proposals with the U.S. side on military space issues on the grounds that the United States is not ready to negotiate on military space issues. Such ideas pose a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation, if accepted.

And here’s why.

Various actions carried out so far by Washington on the militarization and weaponization of outer space indicate that the current American military and political leadership does not consider space to be the universal heritage of mankind, for the regulation of activities in which, obviously, agreed international legal norms and rules of responsible behavior are to be adopted.

The United States has long seen a diametrically opposite perspective – the transformation of outer space into a zone of active hostilities.

In fact, the United States has already created an enlarged Space Force with ambitious offensive tasks.

At the same time, such force relies on the active-offensive doctrine of deterring any potential adversaries in outer space, borrowed from the American strategy of nuclear deterrence, which provides for the first preventive and preemptive nuclear strike.

If in 2012 Washington announced the creation of the “Chicago triad” – a combined combat mechanism in the form of a mix of nuclear missiles, anti-missile components and conventional strike weapons, then it is quite obvious that the United States is purposefully creating a multi-component “quattro” strike assets, when another essential military tool is added to the “Chicago triad” – that is space strike weapons.

It is obvious that during official consultations with the United States on the issues of strengthening strategic stability, it is impossible to ignore all factors and described circumstances that are related to outer space. It is necessary to avoid a selective, that is, a separate approach to solving the multifaceted problem of arms control – while downsizing one type of weapons, but giving a boost to the development of other types of arms, that, at the initiative of the American side, is still in a deadlocked position.

November 26, 2021 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | China, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

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The New Baghdad Pact

By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017

A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.

The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue

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A Pentagon-funded bio-lab near Almaty, Kazakhstan, has become focus of attention for its research on “dangerous pathogens”

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