Hungary snubs US senators – ambassador
RT | February 19, 2024
Senior Hungarian officials have refused to meet four US senators who arrived in Budapest on Sunday, Washington’s envoy to the country has said. The American lawmakers are attempting to press Prime Minister Viktor Orban into speeding up approval of Sweden’s accession to NATO.
The delegation sought to meet a range of senior government officials and representatives from the ruling Fidesz party, US Ambassador David Pressman stated. The Hungarians declined, however, despite the group being “the most senior US bipartisan congressional delegation” to visit the country in recent years, the diplomat added.
The senators intend to submit a joint resolution to the US Congress that would condemn Hungary for alleged democratic backsliding, the Associated Press reported. Thom Tillis, one of the visiting lawmakers, urged Orban to speed up Sweden’s accession, claiming at a news conference that doing so would be “a great service to freedom-loving nations worldwide.”
Chris Murphy, another delegate, called the boycott “strange and concerning” and identified Orban as standing in the way of the ratification. Hungary is the only NATO country yet to approve Sweden’s membership of the US-led military bloc.
“We are wise enough about politics here to know that if Prime Minister Orban wants this to happen, then the parliament can move forward,” Murphy said.
Orban addressed the issue of NATO expansion during a rally on Saturday, saying Budapest and Stockholm were on a path to “rebuild trust.” A vote could happen during the parliamentary spring session, he suggested.
The prime minister previously cited Swedish criticism of his government and Hungary’s democratic credentials as the main reasons for skepticism among lawmakers in Budapest. NATO approved Sweden’s bid to join in June 2022.
The anti-Hungarian US resolution will criticize Orban for maintaining good relations with Russia and China, according to AP. Budapest has “resisted and diluted” the EU sanctions imposed on Moscow, the text reportedly states.
Orban is a vocal critic of the Western approach to the Ukraine crisis. He has argued that the arming of Kiev and the restrictions on Russia have failed to end the bloodshed and have caused major economic harm to the EU. He has also resisted Ukraine’s push to join NATO and the EU.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said it was “not worth trying to exert pressure on us, because we are a sovereign country,” as he expressed general approval of the American visit on Friday.
Germany swims or sinks with NATO
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | FEBRUARY 17, 2024
There couldn’t be a better metaphor than what a Chinese analyst used to characterise NATO while commenting on its secretary general Jens Stoltenberg’s recent remark that the West does not seek war with Russia but should still “prepare ourselves for a confrontation that could last decades.”
The Chinese commentator compared Stoltenberg to a firm of undertakers, “a store owner of coffin and casket, which makes no money in peacetime. As an undertaker, NATO needs conflict, bloodshed for earnings. So it spreads fear and panic in order to ensure its member countries continue to contribute military funding.”
Stoltenberg’s remark appeared in an interview with German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag on Feb. 10, soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s famous interview with Tucker Carlson where the Kremlin signalled that Russia did not refuse and is not refusing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Stoltenberg spoke for the Pentagon, no doubt.
Moscow, having reached an unassailable position in the war, is not interested in a full-scale war to realise its objectives, as eventually, the West will have to co-exist with Russia. Putin’s interview with Carlson was timed carefully — with hardly a fortnight left for the war to enter its third year.
Putin’s “message” that Russia is open to dialogue caught Washington off guard. For one thing, the bandwidth of the Biden Administration is dominated by the Israel-Palestine crisis. On the other hand, the two-year anniversary of the war is marked by a signal battlefield victory by Russian forces in the strategic eastern town of Avdiivka, a gateway to Donetsk city, and effectively on the front line ever since 2014 when the conflict in Donbass started.
All attempts by Russian troops to liquidate the big Ukrainian base in Avdiivka threatening Donetsk city had failed so far. Avdiivka is key to Russia’s aim of securing full control of the two eastern Donbass provinces — Donetsk and Luhansk. Its capture not only boosts the Russian morale but also consolidates Donetsk as a major Russian logistics hub for further westerly operations in the direction of the Dniepr river.
In political terms, it underscores that all along the almost 1000-km frontline, Russian forces are presently advancing. The Ukrainian military suffered a rout in Avdiivka.
Biden’s re-election bid will be bumpy if such distressing news keeps appearing from Ukraine highlighting the gravity of his foreign policy disaster, as NATO stares at another humiliating defeat after Afghanistan. Donald Trump is relentlessly challenging Biden on the issue of Russia-Ukraine and on NATO. Contrary to earlier prognosis, the US election has turned into one of the most influencing factors in the Ukraine conflict.
The path in the US Congress towards a military aid package for Ukraine is uncertain. The main obstacle all along was the House of Representatives, where Republicans have a majority. Apart from the Republican Speaker of the House being not in any hurry to table the bill passed by the Senate, the Congress is also about to shift back towards domestic fiscal policies, so that the foreign aid bill might simply fall down the list of priorities in the legislative agenda.
Meanwhile, the hearing in the Supreme Court on Trump’s candidacy signals that the talk that he might be debarred from running for the presidency is only wishful thinking. That means, if Trump maintains his lead in the South Carolina primaries on 24th February, the Republican race will be essentially over and he will be the party’s presumptive candidate. Trump has also widened his lead over Joe Biden in the polls.
The flow of finance to Ukraine is already ebbing and there is a pall of gloom among Ukraine’s cheerleaders in Europe after having discovered finally that Kiev is not winning the war. The West’s proxy war without a clearly set war goal means that there is no exit strategy, either.
A Trump victory would badly expose the European partners. Plugging the funding gap by Europe is going to be highly problematic. The US has so far committed €71.4 billion, more than half of it in the form of military aid. Number two is Germany with €21 billion, followed by the UK with €13.3 billion. Norway comes fourth. The paradox is, while the three largest European donors are all NATO members, it is only Germany who is a member of the European Union.
And Germany is not big enough to fill the gap left by the US on its own. But the biggest obstacle to a common European response is the lack of common ground between France and Germany. The special Franco-German relationship has largely become a historical artefact. The two EU giants are pursuing incompatible economic strategies — on fiscal policy and nuclear energy — and their economies are diverging, and so are their politics and defence strategies.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has reoriented German defence co-operation away from France and towards the US. The power struggle between the EU’s two biggest powers that had its origins in the lack of chemistry between French president Emmanuel Macron and Scholz has turned into an antagonism manifesting as two different visions of the world.
Macron’s concept of “strategic autonomy”, which calls for Europe not to rely on outside powers in vital areas that could give them political leverage, is rubbing against Germany’s historical reliance on the American military umbrella (which France does not require.)
After a meeting with Biden at the White House in Washington on February 9, Scholz said, “Let’s not beat about the bush: support from the United States is indispensable if Ukraine is to be capable of defending itself.” Scholz strongly advocated stepping up military aid to Ukraine, emphasising an imperative need to send out a “very clear signal” to Putin.
As he put it, “We need to show that he (Putin) can’t count on our support waning.” Scholz added: “The support we provide will be on a big enough scale and it will last long enough.” By hyping up the war-like atmosphere, Germany seeks to maintain the relevance and financial stability of NATO through the conflict in Ukraine.
Biden responded to Scholz purring like a cat showing pleasure. Biden will next host Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk for a meeting in Washington on March 12. The US is re-energising its coalition with Germany and Poland for the next phase of Ukraine war. France stands outside looking in, while Britain lies in coma.
Simply put, while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s delusion is that he can win this war, NATO’s delusion is that it will do whatever it takes. But the undertaker’s money is running out and further business depends on prolonging the war.
The veil has come off the western narrative — this war was never about Ukraine. The enemy image of Russia has become the cornerstone of NATO’s very existence and function.
Certainly, taking orders from an undertaker is not in Germany’s interests. The noted German editor Wolfgang Münchau wrote recently about “a general disorientation in Germany that accompanies the geopolitical and social change” manifesting in the faltering economy, the de-industrialisation that is happening and the absence of a post-industrial strategy for the country as such.
Clearly, European interests lie in shouldering their own defence and making peace with Russia so as to focus attention on the economy. Germans themselves are conflicted over this war. Scholz is not a man of charisma or of big ideas, Münchau noted, and the German public no longer trusts him. But then, there is also “the deeper problem: it is not really Scholz. It is that Germany has become a lot harder to run.”
No chance of diplomatic solution to Ukraine conflict – FM Lavrov
RT | February 14, 2024
The West will not offer a realistic diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict because the US and its allies are still intent on inflicting a strategic defeat on Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
Briefing Russian MPs on his ministry’s work and the current international situation, Lavrov stated that Moscow is “at the advance guard in the fight for a better future,” adding that the Western-dominated system is giving way to a multipolar world.
The US and its allies, however, remain committed to waging a hybrid war against anyone that prioritizes national interests, as evidenced by the continued Ukraine conflict, Lavrov claimed.
There has been a shift in Western rhetoric due to Moscow’s battlefield successes, according to the minister, with officials now focusing on preventing a Russian victory rather than ensuring its defeat. Nonetheless, their core policy of trying to damage Russia remains the same, Lavrov said, meaning the conflict is unlikely to be resolved diplomatically.
“Considering that those who declared a war on us offer no serious proposals and are unwilling to respect our interests and the reality on the ground, getting an agreement at the negotiating table will certainly be impossible. No such scenario is foreseen,” the diplomat stated.
Lavrov insisted that the West had initiated the conflict through its continued quest for “global domination and exceptionalism.” Russia, meanwhile, is working with its allies to dismantle the current system, which it perceives as colonialist in nature, he told the lawmakers.
US President Joe Biden reiterated his Ukraine policy on Tuesday, urging the House of Representatives to adopt a Senate-approved foreign aid package including roughly $60 billion for Kiev. The money will mostly fund arms production in the US and will help Ukraine oppose the “vicious onslaught” by Russia, Biden claimed.
“The United States pulled together a coalition of nearly 50 nations to support Ukraine. We unified NATO; we expanded it. We can’t walk away now,” the leader declared.
If approved, the bill would raise the amount of military assistance provided to Ukraine by the US since the outbreak of hostilities in February 2022 to some $170 billion.
The Vladimir Putin Interview – Part One
Part One: The Genealogy of a Civilizational Power
By William Schryver | imetatronink | February 13, 2024
On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson, a popular American conservative journalist and polemicist, was granted an interview with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The interview — a two-hour-long marathon by American sound-bite / talking-point standards – was broadcast two days later.
It was initially published on Carlson’s website, and was then posted to the X social media platform. The X post alone has tallied ~200 million views. We may confidently assume that the interview video on Carlson’s website has been viewed by several million more.
It is reasonable to conclude that this interview of Vladimir Putin has been seen by a larger global audience than has ever previously watched an interview of a major national leader.
The reactions of the viewing audience have varied greatly. Western media and political leaders have almost universally condemned the interview as nothing more than what they characterize as typical Russian propaganda and mendacity. These same people have excoriated Tucker Carlson as a “Putin puppet” and a “useful idiot” who never should have afforded Putin the opportunity to speak from such a bully pulpit.
Some western political leaders and commentators even proposed to deny Carlson reentry to the United States, to deprive him of the privilege of traveling in the European Union, to sanction him in punitive ways, and even to charge him with espionage and treason.
Others who watched part or all of the interview considered it boring and tendentious.
Yet others — and my sense is that this category comprises the majority — found the interview surprisingly enlightening and came away from it with a favorable impression of President Putin.
I have now watched the video of the interview twice in its entirety, and have carefully read the transcript twice in full, and some parts additional times.
I have also, over the past two decades, viewed and/or read literally hundreds of Putin speeches, interviews, press-conferences, etc.
In my carefully considered opinion — given its context in this period of unprecedented global tensions and what is indisputably a major proxy war being waged by the United States and its NATO allies against Russia — I regard the interview as arguably the single most important such event of the post-Cold War era.
I submit further that, in my estimation, Vladimir Putin is, by a substantial margin, the single most intellectually potent and personally charismatic world leader of the past century. His knowledge and understanding of history, international relations, macroeconomics, and his manifest talent as an extemporaneous speaker are utterly unparalleled among all the national leaders of whom I have been aware over the course of my lifetime.
The interview commenced, much to my surprise and chagrin, with a mendaciously framed and deliberately disingenuous query by Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
The premise of this question is patently false. Putin’s speech of February 24, 2022 makes no mention whatsoever of the threat of a “surprise attack on our country” from the United States or its NATO allies. Carlson claimed it to be a direct quote. No such statement is present in the speech, nor anything like unto it.
At no point in the speech does President Putin attempt to justify the coming “Special Military Operation” on the threat of an imminent attack from the western powers.
Simply put, Carlson invented this quote ex nihilo, and apparently sought to bait Putin into a response which, presumably, Carlson then intended to take advantage of in some fashion.
I was frankly shocked that he had done this. I was immediately aware that the question was built upon a falsehood, for I am extremely familiar with both the major speeches Putin gave in the days preceding the launch of the Russian “Special Military Operation”.
Why did Tucker Carlson do this? Hard to say. But it evoked from Putin a brilliant reply which immediately turned the tables on whatever Carlson’s motivations were for posing a question built upon a lie.
Vladimir Putin: It’s not that the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. I didn’t say so.
Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?
This pointed response disarmed Carlson’s ill-intentions for the time being, and knocked him back on his heels.
Putin then started a “serious conversation” on his terms, and according to his agenda. And what he did first — although it no doubt befuddled a large proportion of his audience — was not only an exhibition of erudition, but more importantly, it was a type of thing one simply does not see in our day and age, although in ancient times it would have been considered entirely normal, and even de rigueur for a great national leader to do precisely what Putin did: present, as it were, the Russian nation’s Letters Patent; its genealogy dating back over a thousand years; its historical bona fides.
Vladimir Putin is the current leader of a great “civilizational power” — a nation whose history stretches back over a millennium, and whose voluminous archives document that history. And, given the fundamental importance of that fact in the context of what is in many respects a civil war taking place in Ukraine, it was imperative that certain elements of evidence be presented as a preface to the eventual discussion of the illegitimacy and demonstrable falsehoods of Ukraine’s presumptuous claims upon portions of the longstanding “Russian nation”.
“Ukraine” is a sovereign polity created in 1991. Its geographic footprint is an artificial construction effected by exogenous powers over the course of the twentieth century. Its origins are a relatively limited and historically ill-defined cultural area previously known as “The Ukraine” — a region “on the outskirts” of its mother nation: Russia.
One needn’t search hard to discover that nineteenth century maps and encyclopedias are perfectly consonant with this reality. In the Chambers Encyclopedia my great-grandfather purchased in 1888, the following map of European Russia appears:
A smaller crop of that map which includes the area crafted into “Ukraine” in 1991 appears below:
And the encyclopedia entry for “Ukraine” reads as follows:
UKRAINE (Slavic, a frontier country or March), the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tatars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The Ukraine was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian Ukraine); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish Ukraine) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised of the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava, and Kharkov.
– Chambers Encyclopedia, Volume VII, 1888 (abbreviations expanded)
But, as it has done in many other regions of the world, the Anglo-American empire, beginning as early as the immediate post-WW2 period, and accelerating in the post-Cold War period, sought to methodically cultivate violent national aspirations among portions of the populace of this region in order to effect a stratagem to weaken its long-time nemesis in Russia.
The western powers focused their nefarious project upon those portions of Ukraine wherein resided the heirs to the German-collaborating Ukrainian nationalists who, in direct affiliation with the Nazi SS formations, had proven to be reliable and particularly ruthless executioners of Jews, Poles, and Russians during the Second World War.
These historical facts are beyond dispute — at least in the realms of the informed. But the highly propagandized people of the so-called “western democracies” are not well-informed, and it is precisely for this reason that Vladimir Putin no doubt felt compelled to expound upon these questions in his lengthy but essential opening remarks in the interview with Tucker Carlson.
Carlson attempted multiple times to interrupt and redirect Putin’s train of thought, but to no avail. He even had the temerity to once again make reference to his initial deceptively constructed question:
Tucker Carlson: … many nations feel frustrated by their re-drawn borders after the wars of the 20th century, and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mention, but the fact is that you didn’t make this case in public until two years ago in February, and in the case that you made, which I read today, you explain at great length that you thought [there was] a physical threat from the West and NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that’s what got you to move. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?
It is NOT a “fair characterization” of what Putin said. In fact, it is emphatically a FALSE characterization of what he said.
And yet Carlson was determined to extract an answer to this tortured misrepresentation of Putin’s own words.
Nevertheless, Putin refused to take the bait, and once again parried Carlson’s disingenuous query:
Vladimir Putin: I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: “Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?” You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.
And then he proceeded to conclude his exposition of the essential historical facts.
I will, in subsequent installments of my commentary on this important interview, highlight multiple additional instances of Tucker Carlson posing ill-formed and disingenuous questions to President Putin, and then examine how Putin skillfully countered these curious attempts to “put words in his mouth”.
Coming up in Part 2: Tucker Carlson himself, along with many other western commentators and state-controlled propaganda organizations (such as Reuters, as seen above), have attempted in the aftermath of the interview to advance the demonstrably false narrative that Putin expressed a desire to negotiate a ceasefire and a mutually acceptable end to the ongoing war. Of course, that is a highly deceptive misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what really happened.
Blood on BoJo’s Hands
Putin’s claim that Boris Johnson scuttled peace deal confirmed by witnesses
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 13, 2024
Former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the mainstream media are hotly denying Vladimir Putin’s claim (in his recent Tucker Carlson interview) that Johnson derailed a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine just a couple of months after the war commenced.
And yet, Putin was merely confirming the statement of David Arahamiya, leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, that was reported in Newsweek on November 27, 2023: Russia Offered to End War if Ukraine Dropped NATO Bid: Kyiv Official.
The German analyst and Former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, Michael von der Schulenberg, also published a reconstruction of these events on November 14, 2023, titled How The Chance Was Lost For A Peace Settlement Of The Ukraine War.
The totality of circumstances and the statements of Arahamiya and von der Schulenberg indicate that an Austrian-style neutrality deal could have prevented this war to begin with, and then—had it been embraced by the the USA and Britain—ended it just two months later.
Since Churchill delivered his June 4, 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, many postwar heads of state have apparently fantasized that their opponents on the international stage are “just like Hitler” and that there can be no negotiated settlement with them.
In BoJo’s case, this shallow, sophomoric notion has apparently resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.
Tucker Carlson reviews Putin interview and reveals what ‘radicalized’ him
RT | February 12, 2024
Following his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, US journalist Tucker Carlson opened up about his experience at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
In an hour-long interview with TV presenter Emad Eldin Adeeb, Carlson addressed why the conversation with Putin did not touch on certain topics, how the US political establishment had reacted to it, and why Washington has failed to understand Moscow, among other things.
Putin the diplomat
Carlson claimed that he had an off-the-record conversation with Putin after their interview, but would not reveal what was discussed, however.
Carlson did say that Putin seemed willing to negotiate with the West about both the end of the Ukraine conflict and a new balance of power in the world. Diplomacy is the art of compromise, and almost everyone “other than maybe the United States during the unipolar period” understands this, Carlson said. But while Putin wants the conflict to end, his position will only harden the longer it goes on, he added.
NATO and Russia
One of the major revelations in the interview for Carlson was that Russia had asked to join NATO – and while then-US President Bill Clinton seemed receptive, his aides pushed against the idea and it ultimately failed.
Since the entire point of NATO was to keep the Soviet Union out of Western Europe, Carlson said in Dubai, “if the Russians ask to join the alliance, that would suggest you have solved the problem and you can move on to do something constructive with your life. But we refused.”
“Go sit in the sauna for an hour and think about what that means,” he added.
The problem with Western politicians
Politicians in the West aren’t setting themselves “achievable” goals, Carlson has argued.
“I have heard personally US government officials say well we just have to return Crimea to Ukraine,” he said. “That’s not going to happen, short of a nuclear war. That’s insane, actually.”
Even bringing up this kind of idea “shows you are a child, you don’t understand the area at all, and you have no real sense of what’s possible,” the journalist concluded.
It’s always Munich 1938
According to Carlson, one of the biggest issues in the US and the West in general is the tendency to reduce everything to the 1938 Munich conference, at which Britain and France sought to “appease” Nazi Germany by giving it a portion of Czechoslovakia.
“The American policymaker historical template is tiny – in fact there’s only one – and it’s a 2-year period in the late 1930s, and everything is based on that understanding of history and human nature. That’s insane,” Carlson said.
How Moscow ‘radicalized’ him
Carlson pointed out that he’s 54 and grew up in an America that had nice, safe and beautiful cities, “and we no longer have them.”
It was “radicalizing” to see Moscow “cleaner, safer and prettier” than American cities, he said, or be reminded of that in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – while in the US, one can’t ride the subway in New York City because it’s dirty and unsafe.
“That’s a voluntary choice,” he said. “You don’t have to have crime, actually.”
Reacting to the backlash
Asked why he hadn’t raised certain topics with Putin, Carlson said he wanted to do the interview because he was interested in how the Russian leader saw the world – and not to inject himself into the discussion.
Most journalists who interview leaders the US dislikes tend to make it about themselves, Carlson added, and since he only cared about the approval of his wife and their children, he didn’t need to virtue-signal.
Asked to comment on former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling him a “useful idiot” for Russia, Carlson laughed it off.
“She’s a child, I don’t listen to her,” he said. “How’s Libya doing?”
Does anybody still believe in Ukrainian victory?
By Uriel Araujo | February 12, 2024
While Moscow is making major investments in defense, Ukraine has stalled (in the battlefield) and so is the American aid package, writes Foreign Policy reporter Amy Mackinnon. “Ukraine will lose – on our present trajectory”, says Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow of the Centre for European Studies, Harvard, interviewed by John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.
According to Ferguson, thus far the US-led West has given Kyiv enough weapons “not to lose, but not enough to win”. In addition, the United States’ “interest” is “clearly waning, particularly “among Republican voters and Republican politicians”, to the point that American aid to the Eastern European country “could be cut off if Donald Trump is reelected president in November 2024”. In this scenario, he says, it is hard to see how Ukraine could possibly win. Furthermore, he claims, the Ukrainians themselves admit that they have achieved a “stalemate” now, and in terms of resources it is “David versus Goliath,” with the latter being, more and more, “the likely favorite.” If Russia is, “to put it very, very modestly”, able to “retain control” of those parts of Ukraine it already does, that will be “the first big defeat of Cold War II, for the West.” Considering all the Western pro-Zelensky propaganda, all the “speeches”, “support” and “pledges” made, if Ukraine “loses”, the West’s credibility will be greatly undermined, Fergunson convincingly reasons.
Meanwhile, should an “all-out multifront assault on Israel” arise, in the Middle East, and the US fails to take meaningful action, then the expert argues, somewhat less convincingly, it would be “surprising” if Xi Jinping “didn’t take the opportunity to add Taiwan to the strategic mix” – and, in the scenario of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, it would be “rather difficult to send another major naval expedition across the Pacific” because of the risk of US-China “hostilities” in this case, which then would mean a “much larger war than anything we’ve seen so far.” What Ferguson fails to acknowledge is that tensions with Taiwan arose after a series of American provocations, and that the current crisis in the Levant and the Red Sea is largely the result of the Western resolve to keep aiding and funding its Israeli ally even in face of the latter’s disastrous and globally condemned ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.
Back to the Ukrainian conflict’s prospects, Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, writes that, at this point, there is “no magic weapon left”, and that Kyiv’s “backers” (on “both sides of the Atlantic”) have “no realistic theory of victory” accounting for “the dire conditions” faced by Ukraine and thus fail to offer “a sustainable framework for war termination on the best possible terms for Kyiv and the West.” In the same spirit, James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe sees no future for Ukraine other than a land-for-peace deal.
Back to the aforementioned Ferguson’s interview, the Scottish–American historian concludes, from an Anglo-Western perspective, that “this is a very dangerous moment in world history”, and “we’ve stumbled into it, partly by forgetting the lessons of Cold War I”, namely that one must have “credible deterrence.” Such deterrence, he laments, has been lost. As I’ve written, the West has no such deterrence against Iran in the Middle East either.
As is often the case, notwithstanding any criticism one may have of the Russian president and of his choices pertaining to Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine, there is something missing in the conversation about the crisis, namely any mention of the Western role in at least partly bringing it about by NATO expansion or, for that matter, any mention of the Western white-washing and support for far-right paramilitary nationalism in Ukraine – which is often neo-Fascist – since the Maidan Revolution, and the role this factor played in the Donbass war (going on since 2014); not to mention the issue of the civil rights of ethnic Russians, Russian-speaking and pro-Russian people in Ukraine since the aforementioned Maidan.
In any case, it is not just into Eastern Europe that Washington has “stumbled”. It is also “stuck”, as I wrote, in the Middle East, where it acts as an undecided declining superpower, “torn”, as it is, according to a recent The Economist piece, “between leaving and staying and cannot decide what to do with the forces it still has in the region.”
In September last year, Former US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates described his country as a “divided” and “dysfunctional superpower”, unable to deter both China and Russia. “Torn”, “stuck”, “divided” – undecidedness could really be a key word with regards to the existential crisis haunting American exceptionalism: Washington seems unable to decide, for example, as Jerry Hendrix (formerly an adviser to Pentagon senior officials) puts it, whether it wishes to maintain its declining naval hegemony, as a sea power, in Mackinder’s terms, or to keep engaging in land wars in Eurasia in its struggle for the “Heartland”. It cannot decide whether to pivot away from the Middle East towards the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) or to “stay” in the Middle East region. It seems to want it both ways always, as materialized in the different versions of the “dual containment” formula – now applied to both Beijing and Moscow simultaneously.
Thus, going beyond the issue of Ukraine, it is about time to acknowledge that the declining American superpower is currently overburdened and overstretched, in Stephen Wertheim’s words; that its policy of “dual containment” makes the world a far less stable place; and that Washington therefore must exercise restraint.
Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Prepare for conflict with Russia in five years – German general
RT | February 11, 2024
Germany should beef up its military to prepare for a potential conflict with Russia in five years’ time, Bundeswehr General Carsten Breuer has argued. He called for a “change in mentality” within German society, insisting that the nation needs to build credible deterrence.
In an interview with Welt am Sonntag published on Sunday, Breuer warned that Germany does not have “endless time” to become war-capable, claiming that the potential of a military confrontation with Moscow is at its highest since the end of the Cold War.
“If I follow the analysts and see what military threat potential comes from Russia, then it means five to eight years of preparation time for us,” he predicted.
Breuer, who serves as the Bundeswehr’s inspector general, claimed that “this doesn’t mean that there will be a war then. But it’s possible.”
The general also did not rule out the reintroduction of some form of mandatory military service in Germany. Breuer noted that the issue is still being discussed, but cited the “Swedish model,” which envisages mandatory military training for most citizens, who then become reservists.
Breuer’s comments come after German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated in November that the country must become “war-capable.” He insisted again in January that Berlin and the whole of NATO should arm itself more actively to be able to “wage a war that is forced upon us.”
However, the German defense chief noted last month that “at the moment, I don’t see any danger of a Russian attack on NATO territory or on any NATO partner-country.”
Also speaking in January, British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps claimed that “in five years’ time, we could be looking at multiple theaters [of conflict] including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.”
Elsewhere, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom stated last month that Stockholm “must be realistic and assume – and be prepared for – a drawn-out confrontation” with Moscow. Defense Minister Pal Jonson echoed that sentiment, saying that “war can also come to us.”
Commenting on claims that Russia might be planning an attack on NATO, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in January that European officials were “inventing an external enemy” to divert attention from domestic problems.
Speaking at UN headquarters in New York the following day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that “no one wants a big war,” especially Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin has also repeatedly dismissed such speculation as “complete nonsense,” insisting that Moscow has “no geopolitical, economic… or military interest” in starting a conflict with NATO.
Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin – Key Statements
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 9, 2024
The first thing that jumped out at me as I listened to the Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interview is that Putin is 100 times more intellectually capable than President Joe Biden. No wonder Biden won’t take his call.
It says a lot that the terrible people who run the United States wanted to prevent Carlson from conducting the interview, and then to hinder it from being made available to the American public.
Many, including Carlson himself, expressed frustration that the Russian President began with a history lesson, going back to the founding of the Kievan Rus state in 882. I suspect this was Putin’s sly way of expressing a salient point that has long struck me about we Americans—namely, while our government is ever keen to send weapons and armies all over the world to police mankind, we find it onerous to sit through a 30-minute history lesson about the people and places we wish to control.
Russia is, in Churchill’s formulation, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” and it has always been governed by an authoritarian state. Nevertheless, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is plenty of evidence that Russia wished to cease living in a state of enmity with the United States.
To me, it seems clear it was the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, and NOT Russia, that wished to maintain this state of enmity, for without it, there would be little justification for the U.S. government to spend hundreds of billions on weapons goodies such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II—a program that started in 1995 and (if DoD accountants are to be believed) has cost U.S. taxpayers about 500 billion.
With Bill Clinton’s NATO expansion in 1997, no less of a Cold War eminence than George Kennan characterized this decision as a Fateful Error that would likely result in precisely the instability and insecurity it was purportedly supposed to prevent.
From the beginning of the Russian crisis that developed in the autumn of 2021—shortly after the Biden Administrations’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation that achieved nothing—I have suspected that administration and the terrible people who advise it did everything in their power to BAIT THE RUSSIAN BEAR into invading Ukraine.
The Administration did NOTHING to defuse the crisis, and it insulted the Russians by sending the imbecilic Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference on February 18, 2022. I suspect that an Austrian-style neutrality deal would have prevented the catastrophe that has apparently gotten hundreds of thousands killed. It has also seemed obvious to me that, since 2014, Ukraine has been the CIA’s favorite pet project.
To to this day, not a single person has been able to explain to me why Russia would consider tolerating Ukraine joining NATO. Since President Monroe outlined his foreign policy in 1823, the United States government has increasingly pursued a policy of zero tolerance of any foreign military alliances or installations in the entire Western Hemisphere.
And yet, this same United States government, which has invaded and bombed dozens of countries since 2001, claims it is perfectly reasonable to propose that Ukraine (whose northeastern border lies 370 miles from Moscow) join NATO. The distance from the Mexican border to Dallas is greater.
Key Putin statements in the interview are as follows:
- On the negotiation process and its failure: “[Talks] reached a very high stage of coordination of positions in a complex process, but still they were almost finalized. But after we withdrew our troops from Kiev… the other side threw away all these agreements.”
- On his last conversation with Joe Biden: “I talked to him before the special military operation, of course… I told him I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away.”
- On the possibility of global conflict: “It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war and a global war will bring all humanity to the brink of destruction.”
- On Russia’s territorial ambitions: “We simply don’t have any interest [in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else]. It’s just threat mongering.”
- Commenting on US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s remark that the US has to continue to fund Ukraine or US soldier citizens could wind up fighting there, Putin said:
This was a provocation and a cheap provocation. Don’t you have anything better to do? You have issues on the border. Issues with migration, issues with the national debt. More than $33 trillion. Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement. Already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end. And realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions. It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational. I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. There are mercenaries from the United States. The bigger number of mercenaries comes from Poland, with mercenaries from the United States in second place and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity to the brink of a very serious global conflict. This is obvious.
See complete interview on Tucker Carlson’s website:
In Carlson Interview, Putin Outlined ‘Concrete Conditions’ for Resolution of Ukrainian Crisis
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.02.2024
In his two-hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson, the Russian president listed Moscow’s conditions for bringing the two-year-old NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine to an end. Now, the ball is in the West’s court, according to Russian international affairs expert Dmitry Suslov.
President Putin has confirmed to Tucker Carlson that Russia favors a “negotiated settlement” to the crisis in Ukraine, saying that it will be up to Kiev and its Western partners whether or not to accept it.
“We prepared a huge document in Istanbul [during peace talks in the spring of 2022, ed.] that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, but not all of them. He put his signature and then said himself ‘we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, [then-UK] Prime Minister [Boris] Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance’,” Putin said, referring to Ukrainian top negotiator David Arakhamia’s bombshell comments late last year about London’s role in sabotaging the Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
“Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them go back to that, that’s all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?” Putin added, hinting Moscow’s readiness to return to the Istanbul format, which reportedly included non-bloc status enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, security guarantees from world powers, restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, accepting Crimea and the Donbass’s status as part of Russia, etc.
Asked by Carlson whether Kiev’s NATO sponsors will be willing to accept a Russian victory in Ukraine, Putin said the alliance should “think how to do it with dignity,” noting that “there are options if there is a will.”
Unfortunately, Putin said, “up until now there has been uproar and screaming about ‘inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia’ on the battlefield. Now they are apparently coming to realize that it is difficult to achieve. If possible at all. In my opinion, it is impossible by definition, it is never going to happen.” In event case, Russia remains “ready for this dialogue,” Putin stressed.
“I think the most important message in Putin’s interview is that Russia is ready for for a political or diplomatic solution of the Ukraine conflict,” says Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics. “But it requires a political will from the United States,” the observer told Sputnik.
“Putin identified the concrete conditions on which Russia would be ready to end the conflict through diplomacy. And this is first, the recognition of the current territorial settlement. Putin bluntly said that it’s up for NATO to look for and to find a form which could be, I mean, not humiliating for them, but accepts the current territorial settlement,” the academic noted. “Putin bluntly again identified the Istanbul communique as the basis to which Russia could return. And that from the Russian perspective, the process could be resumed at any moment.”
“Thirdly, he identified in a very detailed way the condition of denazification and explained what it means, and also, mentioned that it was partly included into the Istanbul communique. So, I think that this is a very important message, that if the United States is ready for serious negotiation on the basis of these conditions, Russia would not hesitate to resume and to start those negotiations,” Suslov said.
Unfortunately, the observer noted, Putin has reason to be skeptical about Kiev’s Western sponsors’ sincerity, given the seemingly unchanging imperative of US geopolitical “hostility” against and “arrogance” toward Russia.
“Putin’s pessimism is explained by his personal experience in dealing with the United States, because [he] has been dealing with actually five American presidents since Bill Clinton. And no matter the personal relationships with those presidents, no matter the party orientation of those presidents, the fundamentals of the US foreign policy remained the same. And the reason is that the US foreign policy is run by foreign policy elites, not necessarily by the president himself. And this is likely to remain so,” Suslov said.
Nevertheless, the observer noted that if Donald Trump, who has expressed a desire to end the Ukrainian crisis and normalize relations with Russia, were to return to power and “bring fundamentally new representatives of the US elites to power…that situation could change.”
“But of course, in this interview Vladimir Putin could not say that he’s hopeful of such a scenario because he would have been immediately accused of interference into the US elections and identifying his preferences. And this is not in Russian interests,” Suslov summed up.
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From the Archives
How Bill Gates Premeditated COVID Vaccine Injury Censorship
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 30, 2021
In 2000, everything about Bill Gates’ public persona changed. He morphed from a hardnosed and ruthless technology monopolizer into a soft, fuzzy and incredibly generous philanthropist when he and his wife launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.1
It was a public relations coup. May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department, in collaboration with 20 state attorneys, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.2 At that time, the company was 23 years old and was ruling the personal computer market. The Seattle Times described the fallout from the antitrust lawsuit:3
“The company barely escaped being split up after it was ruled an unlawful monopolist in 2000 for using its stranglehold on the PC market with its Windows operating system to cripple competitors, such as Netscape’s Navigator Web browser.”
How would the world be different today if the company had been split? Yale law professor George Priest described the antitrust lawsuit as “one of the most important antitrust cases of its generation.”4 In 2002, a court settlement placed restrictions on Microsoft to curb some of its practices for five years.
It was later extended twice and then expired May 12, 2011. The lawsuit had a dramatic effect on “the emergence of an entirely new field called IP (intellectual property) antitrust,” Iowa law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told the Seattle Times.5
Later, large sums donated from the foundation made the news multiple times, including $9.5 million to GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines), a second $7.5 million to GAVI and $6.8 million to the World Health Organization in 2017.6
By June 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Gates Foundation’s donations totaled 45% of WHO’s funding from nongovernmental sources.7 Once mainstream media’s attention was no longer on Gates’ antitrust activities and focused on the philanthropist actions of the foundation, Gates publicly turned his attention to vaccinating the world, long before COVID-19.8
Event 201: A Preplanned Pandemic
In a deep dive into the Gates Foundation’s charitable donations, The Nation found there were $250 million in grants to companies where the foundation held corporate stocks, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi and Medtronic. The money was directed at supporting projects “like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.”9 … continue
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