On April 29, 2020, a 16-year-old African American boy was involved in what institutional staff decided was a dangerous confrontation at a ‘for profit’ child prison run by a politically connected healthcare firm.

The child threw a piece of bread and was crushed to the ground, pleading for air, until his breathing stopped, and he went into cardiac arrest in a full George Floyd moment, one behind locked doors.

About the same time, four African Americans were found hanging in trees, all ruled suicides by police.

There is a tie in here, which we will be developing but first we will look at this Michigan case and gain perspective on a trend in not just racist abuse but in the wider area of child abuse, child imprisonment and human rights violations that are now a part of American society at every level.

From Newsweek:

“A Michigan Department of Health and Human Services investigation found that a teen in the care of Lakeside for Children died after staff members restrained him by putting their weight on his chest and abdomen.

Sixteen-year-old Cornelius Frederick, a ward of Michigan, died on May 1 at a local hospital, following an April 29 encounter with staff members at Lakeside For Children after he threw a sandwich. In response, several staff members approached the teenager and restrained him, Capt. Craig Habel of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety confirmed to MLive.com. Habel said when staff realized the teen was unresponsive, they called for emergency responders who arrived and discovered he was in cardiac arrest.

According to the executive summary released by MDHHS, “multiple staff participated in this restraint and several were observed on the video with their weight on [Frederick’s] chest, abdomen and legs, making this an unsafe and excessive restraint.” The summary also says the restraint was not part of the treatment plan for the teen, that the staff members reacted “significantly disproportionate” to his behavior and that no one else among other staff, nurses or supervisors stepped in to stop or correct the restraint.

The MDHHS investigation determined 10 violations connected to the facility, including that the staff present waited “approximately 12 minutes” after Frederick was removed from the restraint to call 911, despite policies instructing that emergency responders be called immediately. Additionally, no one administered first aid to the teenager.

The failure to call for paramedics was despite Frederick being “limp and unresponsive,” and concerns over his “coloring and pulse,” the summary said. The nurse in charge who failed to act was fired from her job, the summary said.”

We have seen this before with George Floyd and so many others but these weren’t police, these were “treatment specialists” at a “youth academy,” one of hundreds that warehouse uncounted numbers of American children who will become the next generation of American adults. Good luck with that.

Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo Michigan is run by Sequel Youth Services, a company that runs dozens of prisons for children around the US as part of an industry that is never reported on, never investigated and that almost got away with murder, but not this time.

You see, three staff members at Lakeside Academy are facing charges in the killing of a child in their care.

The business of America, as much as anything else, is to lock Americans up and to pass laws criminalizing everything. Is this an oversimplification?

Nearly 40 percent of Americans have a criminal conviction of some kind and a vast number, no one knows for sure, are imprisoned or under some aspect of supervision and loss of rights beyond that of normal Americans who are watched all day every day and who enjoy fewer rights and freedoms with every election.

Since 9/11, Americans have increasingly been reclassified as “potential suspects” by not only militarized police but by an internal investigative capability fueled by runaway budgets for the NSA and Homeland Security and, worse still, by regimes that hand out bulk contracts for billions to fake companies set up overnight by political contributors.

Feeding this cycle, always, is the controlled press and a seemingly endless cycle of “incidents,” mass shootings and bombings, that are never really investigated, except, of course, by governmental organizations that have the most to gain by the continuation of these same tragic events.

With America pushing $30 trillion of debt, there isn’t any sector of society that is safe from being thrown into the grist mill of the police state for profit but the most sinister of all is the game being played against America’s children by the same type of people who profit from terrorism and war.

What isn’t known, what isn’t asked about, is the war on America’s children. How many children are “under restraint,” either heavily medicated, watched and “hospitalized” or are in a “corrections environment” for behavioral issues?

With the meltdown in America, millions denying science, millions more addicted to a mix of internet porn and hoaxterism, parenting falls to the wayside. Add to the mix millions more Americans of every socioeconomic level medicated with legal cannabis or alcohol and millions more addicted to opiates and methamphetamine, a generation of young Americans has been tossed out with the trash as it were.

There is no one to notice, not with what is going on.

Monuments are toppled, stores looted, while the media, as usual, does everything to stir the pot. While the “bread and circuses” of street theatre keep John Q. Public both entertained and polarized, what goes on behind the scenes, does so with impunity. So, what does go on?

It is no secret that militarized police exist to, if that John Q. Public were asked, “keep down dissident and unreliable elements of the public.” The racket there, of course, is to create the conflict and then provide the cure, a cure that never cures but only inflames, a war on crime for profit that parallels the equally fake war on drugs for profit that has pushed tens of billions of dollars to politically aligned contracting firms.

The war on terror was much the same, the dollar figures however higher by a decimal point.

It is this environment that has produced the most shameful of all efforts, that of profiting on the breakdown of American society by incarcerating children en masse, locking them up, drugging them, “suiciding them” and, as has been the case over and over, trafficking them for sex as well, all done within an ever more bloated bureaucracy of fake social welfare.

We remind those who have forgotten of the Franklin Affair and the real story behind the scandal at the Presidio, at that time the headquarters of the US Army’s psychological warfare capability.

As early as the 1980s and before, children were being trafficked from day care facilities, from “youth homes,” the precursors of today’s “gulag archipelago” of “academy-prisons” to the child brothels of Washington DC or to the political elites of the US. In an attempt to end investigations into real abuses that have progressed to present day, those involved in this pattern of abusing institutionalized youth were, according to sources, responsible for creating the hoax known as “Pizzagate.”

While trafficking children isn’t new, it is the political mechanisms tied to these scandals of the Reagan and Bush 41 presidencies that gave license to what we may well be seeing in this one lone incident in Kalamazoo Michigan.

A child drugged by his captors can’t fight back, can never testify to abuse and, simply by existing, becomes a business asset for an industry that runs secret prisons for imaginary terror suspects. Here, however, no rendition flights are needed, no street kidnappings, simply friendly judges, useful and corrupt social workers and government officials and a disinterested public.

Will a single killing be taken as the isolated incident which it obviously is not or will something be done?

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Secret US bio laboratories are strewn across multiple countries in Africa, Asia, and even Europe. This is a global problem that is the attention of various media outlets as of late.  More and more frequently, the numerous articles published on this issue voice questions such as: what secret programs (even supported by the country they are located in) are these US military bases pursuing? What if they are concocting a biological weapon to be used on their opposition, and are they the ones behind this entire coronavirus pandemic in the first place?

Emerging from recent discussions on whether the coronavirus is natural or artificially altered, comes information that CDC biologists from the US have been conducting unstable experiments on bats, which nearly all sources agree, trace back to the origin of the virus. They were raising and incubating entire colonies of bats, infecting them with deadly viruses, to study how the carriers of many infections handled them, and how infections can spread. The NCBI website has actually published three scientific works on the experiments carried out by CDC biologists involving infected bats, who have significant populations in South Africa, Egypt, Turkey, and across Asia. The first scientific work on this topic was published in 2015, while the latest – in 2020. In particular, these experiments by CDC biologists and the Pentagon were a joint effort involving colleagues from the Ministry of Defense (sic!) were conducted in 2017, while research on bats passing the infection to people was partially mentioned in March 2020. The results of completed experiments were similar: bats carry viruses, never get sick themselves, but can pass them on to humans.

We know that the USAID’s (who has undeniable ties with the Pentagon and CIA) EPT program was launched in 2009. It was to support United States monitoring and laboratory opportunities in the chosen nations for studying wildlife and people coming in contact with animals, to discover new and already known virus agents, that can present a serious threat to people’s health. In Asia especially this program took root in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, and China. In China, for instance, partners of this program were chosen by the government program of the Wuhan institute of virology, and the American non-government organization – EcoHealth Alliance. The specifics of what the Americans were into in Wuhan can be partially found in several scientific works posted on the NCBI website. Of course, the true secrets behind such deals are never made public. Thus, China became a complete doormat for American biologists testing viruses.

However, many countries have been manipulated in such a way. US military bio laboratories work on creating bacterial weapons in the Ukraine, stated Renat Kuzmin from the Oppositional Platform for Life. He thus confirmed, as did Ukrainian political figure Aleksander Lazarev the criminal activities of 15 bio labs sanctioned by the Pentagon on Ukrainian soil. Kuzmin noted that they are carrying out intelligence measures, as well as creating bacterial weapons and testing several harmful diseases on Ukrainians. Ukrainian MPs Victor Medvedchuk and Renat Kuzmin sent a formal complaint to the UN for US bacterial labs illegally functioning on Ukrainian soil. In recently increasing wave of protests against the activities US bio labs in Ukraine, experts note that in 2001, the US declined to sign an international protocol naming 33 microorganisms as potential agents of biological warfare, suddenly finding 37 articles that were not in the interests of the United States, obviously creating a loophole for themselves to continue secret bio weapon work on foreign soil.

The media has repeatedly published material proving a number of incidents with dangerous viruses and toxins, leading to the death of innocent citizens in countries unwittingly hosting secret US bio labs. A significant amount of such materials has been on a US bio laboratory named the Lugar Research center (Alekseevka, Tbilisi), confirming the concerns about illegal US activities in Georgia. Secret experiments are being conducted at the facility. Some research is even done on people, who are isolated in special units and subsequently infected with the most dangerous diseases. “The proof of this lies in the experiments carried out in this bio lab directed towards using insects as carriers for highly dangerous biological agents, and infections, as well as equipping weapons with poisonous substances and infected agents,” read a statement on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation’s website.

Since 2008, the Pentagon has created nearly a dozen bio labs in Armenia. Reports in local media reveal that the research involves pathogens that have long been studied by DARPA as potential bio weapons: anthrax, brucellosis, plague, African swine fever and tularemia. Armenia is a country that has witnessed sparks of mutating viruses over the past ten years, that have also spread through all of Transcaucasia, giving the Pentagon sufficient proof of concept of how bio weapons might work naturally, both on Russia’s southern border as well as in Iran. Pentagon bio laboratories in Armenia employ a number of US military contractors, the foremost of which being CH2M Hill, which has already spent $50 million from DTRA in 2018. CH2M Hill is famous for organizing bio labs in Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan and southeast Asian countries. CH2M Hill’s sub contractors have expressed significant interest in Black&Veach, which runs US bio labs in Ukraine, Germany, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. Namely, the Battelle Memorial Institute and Southern Research Institute. Both companies are old partners of the Pentagon and CIA. Between 1952 and 1996, the Battelle Memorial Institute acquired 11 US army contracts and still conducts research and tests with the use of extremely toxic chemical substances and pathogenic bio active substances. One of Battelle’s joint operations with the CIA is Clear Vision in 1997 and 2000, while low caliber bomb with anthrax was constructed as part of the operation to study the spreading principles of the virus after an explosion. This shines a light on the data from a partially classified presentation of the US Minister of Defense in 1981, where the economics of the three scenarios of possible biological attack in a big city are laid out. 16 simultaneous attacks using infected yellow fever mosquitos through the air and aerosol attacks with spraying tularemia will lead to minimal losses. If 625,000 deaths occurred, the Pentagon would lose 29 cents per person.

This is why the activities of secret US bio labs located in numerous nations worldwide as well as proof of private company’s involvement such as CH2M Hill, Battelle, Metabiota and a number of others conducting research on dangerous anthrax bacteria, tularemia, hemorrhagic fever and a whole range of harmful viruses cannot go on unnoticed, and should be presented to the international public.

Vladimir Platov, Middle East expert, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Observed from outer space, the United States is in a revolutionary turmoil. Fires are burning, thousands of people are confronting police and other security forces. There are barricades, banners, posters, and there is rage.

Rage is well justified. Grievances run deep, through the veins of a confused and socially insecure population, in both cities and the countryside. Minorities feel and actually are oppressed. Indeed they have been disgracefully oppressed, since the birth of the country, over two centuries ago (see my latest report carried by this magazine).

There are some correct words uttered and written; many appropriate sentiments are expressed.

And yet, and yet… It looks like a revolution, it feels like a revolution, but it is not a revolution. It definitely is not! Why?

***

An expert on Communist China, a man who spent many years living and writing books about the most populous country on Earth, Jeff Brown, recently voiced something that immediately caught my attention. He described, accurately, on his China Rising Radio Sinoland, what has been taking place in his native country, United States:

“Protests in the USA, land of Marlboro Man will come to nothing because there is no solidarity, no vision, nor guiding ideology to unite the people in the common struggle against the 1%. Just ask the Black Panthers and Mao Zedong.” 

This is precisely when ‘guiding ideology’ is desperately needed! But it is nowhere to be found.

For years and decades, the US (and European) elites and their mass media, as well as their educational plus ‘entertainment’ outlets, have been systematically de-politicizing the brains of their citizens. Pornography, consumerism, and sitcoms instead of deep, philosophical books and films. Massive – often booze and sex-oriented – travel, instead of roaming the world in search of knowledge, answers, while building bridges between different cultures (even between those of victims and victimizers).

Results are increasingly evident.

Citizens in the Western countries were told that the ideologies, particularly the left ones, became “something that belongs to the past,” “something heavy,” unattractive, and definitely not ‘cool.’ Western masses accepted it easily, without realizing that without the left-wing ideologies, there can be no change, no revolution, and no organized opposition to the regime, which has been plundering the world for several hundreds of years.

They were told that Democrats are representing left-wing, and Republicans, right-wing. Deep inside, many felt it is rubbish. There is only one right-wing political party in the US – Democrat-Republican one. But it was better for the great majority just to ignore its own instincts and swim with the flow.

***

It went so far that most of the people in North America and Europe reached the point when they were not even able to commit themselves to almost anything, anymore, from the Communist movements to marriages and relationships. I recently described this occurrence in my book “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism.”

There are many explanations for this. One of them: regime created society built on extreme individualism, selfishness, and shallow perception of the world. To organize, to commit, actually requires at least some discipline, effort, and definitely great dedicated effort to learn (about the world, a person, or a movement) and to work hard for a better world. It is not easy to become a revolutionary when one is positioned on a couch, or a gym, or while banging for hours every day into a smartphone.

The results are sad. Anarchism, consisting of countless fragmented approaches, is increasingly popular, but it will definitely not change the country.

When leaders of the ‘revolutionary commune’ in Seattle were approached by sympathetic journalists and asked about their goals, they could not answer. These were, undoubtfully, people with good intentions, outraged by racism, and by the killing of innocent people. But do they have plans, strategy, an organization to overthrow the system which is literally choking billions of lives on all continents? Definitely not!

On June 11, 2020, RT filed a report about the situation in Seattle:

“A few different organizations have different demands, and no one speaks for everyone, but everyone’s trying to get together,” Simone clarified, implying that the much-discussed list of “demands” that have circulated for the past few days don’t represent the wishes of the entire community. However, there are a few lines of commonality running through the settlement.

“Everyone’s upset. We all came here in unity, just over the fact that cops need accountability,” he said, declaring that his decision to join the demonstration was about “trying to send a message and get accountability held.”

“Now we’re here – let’s get the dialogue going,” Simone continued, unwilling to commit to taking over other precincts, expanding the Zone, or any of the ambitious demands made by others in the group.”

***

Russian Bolsheviks had it clear, and the same could be said about their followers. Before the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution, they spent years and decades educating people all over their vast country. Some of the greatest thinkers and writers, including novelist Maxim Gorky and poet Vladimir Mayakovski, were participating in the “project.” Even simple peasants were easily grasping the reality of their dismal existence while getting inspired by some of the greatest minds of their nation. If not for the Cold War and West’s brutal interference, the Soviet Union would survive and thrive until this day.

The same could be said about the great revolutionary struggles of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, where hundreds of millions of tremendous works of philosophy, fiction and poetry have been distributed, for free, to both peasants and workers, who easily understood and got inspired by them. In China, in the 1930s, the entire so-called “Shanghai School of Cinema” was born, a true socialist-realism movement that helped to educate the Chinese public about the state in which it was forced to exist.

Big and successful revolutions were constructed and then supported by the educated urban and rural poor, who were awaken and consequently outraged by their position in the society.

***

The rebellion in the United States is strategically shallow. There are no great leaders, no cultural figures leading it, no extraordinary educators.

Without any doubt, there are clear reasons for rage and resistance. Racism is one tremendous one.

And, there are other ones: US society, in general, is tired as it is depressed. As it is confused. The country is robbing, literally looting the entire Planet. It tortures people in various countries. Rainforests are burning in Indonesia, Brazil, and Congo to satisfy demands for more palm oil and other raw materials. US citizens are consuming as no other nation under the sun does. They entertain themselves, often living frivolous, empty lives. And yet, almost no one seems to be happy there; no one satisfied.

People know something went essentially wrong, but they are not sure precisely what it is. Or, who should really be blamed?

There is an acute lack of solidarity. And everything is happening impromptu.

Are the ‘members of the majority’ in the US truly kneeling because they are in unison with the oppressed minorities and the brutalized non-Western world? Or are they “trying to save their own skin,” and at the end, keep the status quo intact, as has happened in Australia and their basically insincere “We Are Sorry!” 2008 movement?

There’s no strong “front,” there is no revolutionary program.

It appears that the country is not ready, not prepared, for a huge job of re-defining itself.

Insecurity is due to the lack of free medical care, education, and subsidized housing. Most of the people are in debt. Depression is, at least partially, due to overconsumption of intellectual and emotional junk. There is plenty of fundamentalist religions, but almost no discussion about how to improve life in this world.

Segregated, atomized, and otherwise, fragmented society seems to be unable to give birth to a truly compassionate, egalitarian national project.

Many US citizens see themselves as “victims.” Ethnic minorities definitely are. Are the others, too? Who is the victim, and who is the perpetrator? On which side of the scales sits a regular middle-class family, compliant and, by global comparison, heavily indulged in overconsumption? So far, there is no open discussion on this topic. In fact, it is being avoided by all means.

There seems to be at least some consensus that 1% of the richest is to blame, as well as the entire corporate and political system, and also banks. But what about the majority; those individuals who keep voting the system, those who are making sure to ignore imperialism, racism, inequality?

Many questions should be asked, particularly now, but they are not. The very uncomfortable questions they are.

But without asking them, without searching for honest answers, there is no way forward, and no true revolution possible.

The neo-liberal system created entire nations that cannot think independently and creatively. US is definitely one of them. People were bombarded with propaganda slogans that they are free, enjoying liberties. But when the day to act arrived, there has been nothing substantial in terms of new, revolutionary ideas. Just one enormous void. Nothing that could inspire the nation and the world.

The outrage over the brutal police killing propelled millions of people to the streets. The mood has been truly rebellious, revolutionary, geared for big changes.

But then, nothing!

Revolution is being postponed. Postponed for how many years?

The truth is – there are no shortcuts. Those who sincerely want to change the United States will have to follow the revolutionary formula from other countries. The formula is mainly based on education, knowledge, and determined, selfless work for the country and the world, called “internationalism.”

Unless the US comes up with an absolutely new strategy, formula, but right now, frankly, it seems to be extremely far from coming up with it!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s the creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that has penned a number of books, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Donald Trump is finished. He’s gone halfway to destroying the office of President of the United States. The “deep state” he swore he would eradicate, they’re massaging the shoulders of truth killer Joe Biden as if to ready him like a has-been boxer about to emerge from a sweaty arena tunnel of American politics. But nobody is talking about the 2020 endgame. If all the world is a great big geopolitical stage, what does the final act promise?

A lingering pandemic still grips the world. The economic knockout punch is still cocked back ready to be unleashed by a bruiser of a market equalizer. Meanwhile, gut-punched by with trillions more in public debt, a flabby, out of shape U.S. economy is revealed most strangely. Images of protests all over the nation, bloody streets, clouds of tear gas, and strangled persons of color are painted on a canvas that shows the poverty, despair, and hopelessness of the multitude previously hidden. CNN and Fox have been so focused on the Trump show, they’ve missed the medieval peons of America, the millions scratching out an existence while billionaires coddle the fat, careless, middle class. Anybody sitting ringside at this one can smell the coming defeat. Trump has already thrown the fight even before round one, and the bookmakers are about to collect.

In November Donald Trump will not even make it one minute before being smashed to the canvas by former Vice-President Joe Biden. The way this dog and pony show was meant to end was preordained before Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2016. Trump, weary of the White House and “almost” having to work for a living, will not even make the effort to dodge the mystery punch that takes him down. Biden won’t break a sweat, at least not until it’s his turn to be the heavyweight champion. Then, by New Year’s Eve 2021, the bookies standing behind the liberal order’s punch drunk slugger will collect. When America’s economic bubble bursts this time, the new president will blame Trump, then a redux of 2008 and the Great Recession will happen. Only this time they’ll create trillionaires instead of billionaires.

The world is about to be fleeced. Just in case you’re not a political-sports analyst who’s paying attention. Trump and Co. have been playing Tweet for profit in the market almost four years now, but the billions they’ve banked will seem like longshot bets when the banksters and hedge fund owners start taking over more than a million U.S. small businesses, what’s left of freehold private property, retail, manufacturing, and public sector contracts for everything from mail shipping to chicken farming to supply Walmart stores. I know, the fight prediction is starting to sound fantastical and impossible, but trust me, it’s get’s much worse. You can sense the scope of the coming carnage in this New York Times story about Trump’s Federal Reserve plan diversion, which pretends to help small businesses. Let me quote here from the report, to give you an idea of the scope of the coming scam:

“Publicly traded firms that employ about 8.1 million people — roughly 26 percent of all employment at tracked publicly traded companies — are all or mostly excluded from direct government relief, based on an analysis by Samuel Hanson, Jeremy Stein and Adi Sunderam of Harvard, along with Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago.”

Now, we begin to understand why the Trump administration has refused to give Congress and the people an accounting of who is on the receiving end of the government’s taxpayer-backed small-business assistance grants and lending, which is more than $500 billion. But, what’s interesting about this, and diabolical on a level never seen before, is what some of this money will be used for.

To better understand what is about to take place, all one has to do is think like a mafia kingpin for a moment. In modern business capital is protection. To create a protection racket, all any mafioso has to do is restrict the flow of capital. Or, in the case of the U.S. government’s PPP program, “protect” one business while at the same time killing another. Take, for example, the real estate investment trust (REIT) Ashford Hospitality Trust, which the Washington Post said received government assistance through loans that were, at the time, legal. Here’s where things get a little tricky because some of these loan recipients were required by law to return monies if they did not fall into the guidelines of the new regulations. But the Trump administration’s refusal to release PPP and other financial records, essentially covers up which companies got what.

For the sake of my report, Ashford Hospitality Trust is as good a case as any to prove my points. As anyone who can read or watch TV knows, the travel sector has been hit harder than almost any other by the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Ashford Hospitality Trust is into hotels. The trust’s biggest investors bear mentioning here, Vanguard Group, Renaissance Technologies, and BlackRock are notoriously greedy when it comes to running other people out of business. I won’t get into these funds and their histories, but Renaissance was a top contributor to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. This hints at my constant reference to “good cop and bad cop” politics in the U.S. But let’s get back to hotels and Ashford Hospitality.

According to this recent (PDF) Ashford Hospitality Trust portfolio report, the trust controls 24,842 rooms at various hotels/motels across the U.S. The list of hotels controlled ranges from the independents like the Residence Inn Phoenix Airport to the luxurious Ritz Carlton Atlanta. Now, let’s consider what happens if the Trump administration props up the businesses like Ashford Hospitality Trust (and by proxy Vanguard Group and others) while at the same time failing to help competing hotels. In a world of capitalist greed based on growth, can you visualize how the liberal order may be planning to extend its failed model? A takeover, worldwide, complete. This will buy another decade or two. And we will pay for our enslavement.

Out of the confusion, under the table, and even right in front of our eyes, the war for the last ingots of gold on planet Earth is being waged. I’ve said this many times, but I can honestly say I never truly believed it would happen. Or rather, I hoped and prayed it would not. Democracy, freedom, a peaceful prosperous world, these were the things all of us were taught to strive for. Now we see that there is no system in place for any of that to happen. Pirates and privateers sail every coast, and dirty fighters will sell out any contest, for the last drop of profit to be directed to those who have always ruled. Not even a revolution can solve the situation. Someone will figure out how to profit from that too. Our dismal failures are “home to roost” as the saying goes. On a longshot, maybe some candidate invests a few billion to become a write-in savior, but those with billions have their candidates already.

The Tulsa, Oklahoma Rally for Trump that there was so much fuss over, this was the bell sounding the opening and final round of the Trump versus Biden fake circus. Almost nobody showed, and the worst president ever was furious. “The Donald” will soon retire to his senior playboy lifestyle, only billions richer, while one of the destroyers of Ukraine takes up the title belt, to finally end democracy once and for all. The liberal order will go on, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Not even Putin. Gridlock is the legacy of humanity. The endless wars, financial or real, will go on until profit is impossible on a barren, used up rock spinning through space. The sad thing is, there’s not even a contender on the horizon. No one will put on the gloves to battle even pitiful aging politicians bought and paid for by soulless promoters. And that’s the final bell on COVID-19.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Donald Trump suffered a triple whammy whacking this week with his big Tulsa rally a horrible flop, a district judge ruling that the devastating Bolton book cannot be recalled, and Attorney General Barr’s apparent attempt to fire Southern New York District Attorney Berman as a political move to block any new criminal charges being brought against the Trump empire.

The dust has not quite settled on Trump’s summer election campaign rally, in what he thought would be a safe Red State from which to draw a large crowd for a show of strength. The goal was also an attempt to bury the US COVID failures as a campaign issue by using Trump supporters so duped that they would be thrilled to tell journalists that the virus was a hoax.

Always a man for big round numbers, Trump allowed his campaign to throw out a one million number for those wanting tickets, brash by even Trump’s standards. At the end of the day, the Tulsa fire department, the official counter, gave the magic number which included 2000 who arrived late and 400 staffers or workers, for a 6200 total.

Trump had bragged when leaving Tulsa that the crowds were huge (they were not) and that he had been looking at a full arena, plus an overflow crowd outside for 100,000 supporters. With this outlandish claim, he politically pulled the pin on a media hand grenade and put it in his pocket.

By midnight, a grandmother was taking credit for ‘punking’ the rally by organizing TikTok teens to reserve huge numbers of tickets and then be no shows. Trump’s campaign manager was on the firing line, since Trump is known for firing people to place blame on them.

He countered that he had ‘punked’ all the teens, expecting them to do this so the campaign could gather their profiles for the supercomputers to analyze data, since both sides in the 2016 election spent record amounts of campaign money doing voter analysis.

By late afternoon, VT was finding Twitter images of an empty street outside the rally venue, followed by video of the outdoor stage being taken down. Inside the rally, the photos gave us a feeling of a partially filled hall, where it appeared that organizers made the best of it by bunching people together for tight shot photographs, not showing the empty seats around the hall and in the rafters.

There were a lot of red MAGA hats, but none of the entertainment festivities you would normally see at a major rally. For instance, the band was missing. And the worst was yet to come…Trump’s speech, or an attempt to do one anyway. Maybe he was out of practice or in partial shock due to the low turnout.

It seemed to me that he tried to overcompensate with an almost endless tirade against his political and social enemies that droned on for almost two hours. The big shocker was his own caricature of last week’s ‘feeble’ performance at West Point, when he used two hands to take a sip of water and walked down the exit ramp like a 90 year old person. He never should have mentioned it at the rally.

We found lots of photos and video of bored attendees, yawning, and yes…even walking out, leaving during Trump’s speech. The takeaway at the end of the day was to see Trump exiting his helicopter on the White House lawn, an openly exhausted and downtrodden man looking like someone had just given him terrible news.

Meanwhile, his political problems are piling up. His attempt to bury the focus on COVID has backfired, with many states that opened too early or fought lockdowns beginning to report their highest numbers of COVID cases.

Trump, always overplaying his hand and forgetting that the office of president is not a make believe reality TV show, thought he could dismiss the COVID issue by saying that the case numbers had risen because we were testing more.

From a health policy perspective, his statement blew up in his face, while staffers tried to cover for him, stating that Trump had just been joking. Their attempts at humor backfired, with the public becoming indignant that Trump and his campaign workers would joke about a pandemic that has killed 120,000 people, one where the president is on record for calling it a hoax, and then saying another day that it would all just go away. Such statements you would expect to hear from a child, not the President of the United States.

While this fiasco was unfolding, two more bloopers had joined it to make a three ringed circus. A district court judge ruled that he could not stop the publication of John Bolton’s book, as 200,000 advance copies had been distributed, with no feasible way to pull them all back, plus an online version was circulating, which VeteransToday already has a copy, to our own surprise.

But the judge added a poison pill to his ruling in that, if the final security review ruled that there was classified material in the released version, then Bolton would forfeit the $2 million he was paid for the book and possibly lose the movie rights to it, which is usually a bigger paycheck.

Bolton appears to be in a rare situation of being simultaneously the most hated and most loved man in Washington, temporarily. Almost no one thinks he had done any of this for the benefit of his country, as he is viewed as being possibly the most egotistical person in Washington, which is really saying something for a city swarming with self-absorbed politicians, handlers and swindlers.

Some constituents are grateful for his eyewitness revelations about our reality TV president bluffing his way through policy after issue in affairs of state with the help of his Twitter toy. Congress might try to get Bolton to testify but there is a debate on this, as the congressmen and women are extremely busy now and a long drawn out hearing would add to their workload woes.

The Trump administration has another storm cloud gathering from the fiasco of Attorney General Barr, who is fast securing his record as the most politically in the bag Attorney General in US history. Last Friday night, he issued a statement that at the request of the President, he had fired the Southern New York district attorney Berman, the one whose office has been investigating Trump and family’s business operations, including his defunct fake charity.

This issue was the Trump regime wanting to stop any new indictments involving the Trump ‘pretend-a-empire’. VT feels his empire is a house of cards of overextended loans, which has been financially supported by those using him as their tool.

Trump undercut Barr’s statement before midnight by saying that he knew nothing about it. When the US attorney heard the news, he refused to resign, stating that had been appointed by the district court and would not leave until the Senate confirmed his replacement. Barr then came back and said that he was fired for insubordination. This continued until Barr saw he was being savaged in the press, primarily about lying that the President had ordered him to fire Berman.

By Saturday morning, Barr was backpedaling at full speed and looking for a way out of his jam. It appears he quickly arranged with DA Berman to appoint his assistant DA as his replacement, with a promise that the AG’s office would not attempt to interfere in any of their ongoing investigations. While Berman might have this promise from Barr, he does not have it from Trump, a man who increasingly looks like one terrified of facing his legal problems without presidential immunity.

And last, another huge crack is opening in Republican ranks. There is open discussion among Trump haters that, if Trump loses the November election, the Republican Senate must also be replaced with Democrats to effectively investigate Trump’s activities.

Those Republican Senators expect Trump to try to help them in their states, while hinting that such a visit might doom their reelection chances. Politico has been following the shifting political wins and had this revealing quote.

“It’s a terrible situation,” said one of these Republican strategists, who said one solution is for candidates to give speeches before the president arrives to avoid being photographed together. “If you’re onstage in a MAGA hat smiling wide, the Democrats will make it an ad in a second.”

America’s youth are also going to play a key role in the election. They have had a lot of free time on their hands, but even those too young to vote will be manning phone lines and doing field work, which history shows triggers a lifetime of higher interest in politics.

I predict that Donald Trump is going to leave his mark on America, but it is not going to be the mark of a Great Man that he wanted. That said, the electronic vote flipper IT people could make a lot of money in making sure Trump does not lose in November.

Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Following Trump’s first formal rally of the 2020 election, ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ report that the president is furious with his staff and in particular his election team: only one third of the anticipated attendees showed up to a huge amphitheater. (Apparently, many deliberately bought tickets with no intention of attending…) Many devotees may have stayed home for fear of catching the Corona virus, however, the fact that they didn’t take advantage of the outdoor ‘overflow’ area either, suggests Trump’s support may be eroding. Since he was elected, I have often thought he would eventually resign. Here is what I wrote on April 18, 2018, on my website:

I’m going out on a limb here, but as of two days ago, I’m beginning to think that Donald Trump will resign rather than be impeached or removed for incapacity under the 25th amendment.

It’s hard to imagine him sitting down with Mueller.  With his volatile temper, I believe he will throw in the towel alleging that Washington cannot be reformed and that he is not going to allow the hard work of a lifetime in business to be thrown away for a ‘basket of ungratefuls’.”

The United States has changed more in the two years since that post than at any period that I —- with my limited eye-witness experience — can remember. Civil war is openly recognized as a possibility, as the Democratic Party continues to sacrifice its progressive wing to the dictates of Wall Street. With 16% of the population leading the way on the back of Martin Luther King — and increasingly, the Black Panthers — the United States is being dragged kicking and screaming toward the social democracy that has ensured decent lives for Europe’s working class since the end of World War II.

Since that time, the world has been America’s oyster, as the saying goes, but that time is over as it witnesses White Supremacist workers abandoning Donald Trump for failing to deliver.

The latest book on the Trump White House, in stores today, having survived a judicial challenge, is by the former National Security Advisor and uber-hawk, John Bolton, and it is the most authoritative of the steady stream of tell-alls by former Trump staff and government officials, all of which have questioned his fitness for ‘the highest office in the land’. As someone who was ‘In the Room Where it Happened’ Bolton, no white lily, emphasizes Trump’s anti-social, but also, his unpredictable personality, and it was like living inside a pinball machine. I believe that rather than risk another embarrassment such as the one in Tulsa Oklahoma, on the weekend when Black America remembers the destruction of a ‘Black Wall St’ by white mobs in 1921, Trump will ‘go with his gut’ and resign.

He will say something like:”Why should I be stuck in this swamp, when I could be building beautiful buildings in sunny Istanbul — and even frigid Moscow”, leaving America’s White Supremacists to pick up the pieces of their campaign to ‘take America back’ to the time of their unchallenged rule.

The early twenty-first century saw the culmination of an Americanized world. But a hundred years after Western efforts to stop the Russian Revolution in its tracks were defeated in the White Russian Civil War, of 1917 – 1923, America’s black population has not only come into its own, it has empowered the non-Caucasian world majority of eighty-four over sixteen.

Should Trump throw in the towel, Attorney General William Barre is the ‘Musketeer’ least likely to survive. As he fires the Attorney General of New York’s famed ‘Southern District’ who is investigating Trump’s tax returns and other ‘hot button’ issues related to the presidency, a perfectly-timed article, describes him and his brothers as famous bullies at a New York private prep school. Meanwhile, America’s allies will worry less about Barre’s mockery of its vaunted ‘rule of law’ than about National Security under the other two, Secretary of State Pompeo and John Bolton.

A President who listens to his gut is unlikely to ‘stick around’ indefinitely on a sinking ship, nor will he be concerned with the reaction of his gun-toting base, as American cities and towns seek to reform their police forces amidst America’s long-overdue racial reckoning.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

After Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, his desire to pursue the America First strategy by not only reshaping the internal political landscape but also changing the existing world order in line with US interests became readily apparent.

The US leader began to show that his view of what US national interests were differed completely from that of his predecessors. He decisively severed ties with numerous intergovernmental organizations, established with the aid of the United States, and rejected the very principles of multilateralism. Instead of employing a multilateral approach and championing democratic values, the White House chose to use the upper hand it had gained after the collapse of the USSR to its advantage and to ignore UN demands whenever they did not align with US national interests, thus showing a tendency to behave in an openly authoritarian manner on the domestic as well as international fronts. Donald Trump’s approach to running the government started to resemble that prevalent in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, when proponent of liberal internationalism Woodrow Wilson was no longer President (starting in 1921) and Washington began to pursue isolationist policies that took into account only US interests until the start of the Second World War.

Earlier, before Donald Trump came to power, the White House had essentially relied on appointing individuals loyal to the US administration to key positions in various international organizations to ensure they pursued policies favorable to Washington by, for instance, attacking opponents of American democracy. Bribery, corrupt practices and Washington’s puppet NGOs were also actively used by the United States as tools to apply pressure on leaders of certain international organizations and to influence these institutions. In fact, recently, a study by the European Center for Law and Justice in Strasbourg revealed that nearly a quarter of the 100 judges who had “served on the bench of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the period 2009-2019” had “strong links to George Soros’ Open Society Foundations or to NGOs like Amnesty International and others” funded by it.

However, not all the individuals, hand-picked by Washington, always followed instructions from the White House diligently. As a result, Donald Trump chose to radically change the approach towards certain international organizations by severing ties with institutions that essentially refused to bow down to US pressure.

Very soon after Donald Trump became US President, the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed trade agreement among 12 countries in the Asia Pacific region. He also halted negotiations on establishing an analogous economic union between the United States and the EU, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In October 2017, the Department of State notified UNESCO of the US decision to leave the organization. The same year, the United States announced its withdrawal from the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, adopted earlier by the United Nations General Assembly.  On June 19, 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Permanent Representative to the United Nations Nikki Haley stated that the USA would withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council. The United States also abandoned a number of international agreements, including the Paris Agreement (a landmark accord on climate change) and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e. the Iran nuclear deal). Recently, Washington announced to the world that it was severing ties with the World Health Organization (WHO). The USA then imposed unilateral sanctions (which resembled an ultimatum) against the International Criminal Court (ICC) staff over their investigation into war crimes committed by the US-led forces in Afghanistan since 2003.

Operating more like a businessman concerned with making money rather than a politician, Donald Trump has introduced into the world of politics an approach to business, which can even be described as utilitarian, that essentially neglects the interests of anyone who goes against it. In fact, as far back as 2017, President of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Richard N. Haass described the 45th President’s foreign policy approach as an “adhocracy” (a decentralized, improvisational administration).

On the domestic front, such a utilitarian and nationalistic strategy has yielded some positive results, as anticipated by Donald Trump. After all, Americans, and not the French or Germans, will go to the polls to vote for the next President of the United States. It is, therefore, not surprising that Donald Trump’s approval ratings remain relatively high even today.

However, outside of the United States, the White House’s America First strategy has become increasingly unpopular. And even ardent US supporters, including numerous foreign politicians as well as high-ranking officials from international organizations, have begun to realize that the purely business-minded approach, used by the 45th President of the United States, may mean that, in the nearest future, Washington could demand payment for its support but there is, in fact, little to pay them with. Still, even the United States finds itself in an unenviable position nowadays, with its national debt reaching record levels of about $26 trillion. Hence, Washington also does not have enough money to pay the world, which is why the White House has been cutting its spending on numerous international organizations and military alliances.

At present, it is no longer a secret that the US decisions to suspend financial contributions to WHO and a number of other UN affiliated organizations as well as to impose unilateral economic sanctions against ICC staff are not only direct proof of US intentions to undermine or even destroy international institutions that defy Washington, but also of its openly authoritarian stance, which could, in the nearest future, be accompanied by a show of force. That is why, in its attempts to rein in the ICC and the European Court of Human Rights, Washington is already demanding a blanket immunity from prosecution by international courts for its soldiers, which means they can only be tried for any war crimes, such as deaths of civilians, in the United States.

However, the international community and relatives of innocents who died ought to oppose such moves, otherwise the world will become an unbearable place to live in.

And global communities should not be alone in their disapproval of United States’ policies of this nature, international judges, who are independent from Washington, ought to join their ranks. After all, the main objective of these judges is to ensure justice prevails and the guilty are punished! Hence, the investigation into numerous war crimes committed by the US armed forces and their allies has to continue until a verdict is reached by the international court.

Vladimir Odintsov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

One of the many difficulties in interpreting the statements of United States President Donald Trump is to decide what category to put his many statements (and even more prolific tweets) in.

Is it another thought bubble similar to his pronouncements on a cure for COVID-19 that was more likely to kill rather than to cure those who followed his advice? Is the latest pronouncement said with an eye to his re-election this coming November, to be discarded once that hurdle has been passed?

The answer to that question is perhaps best found by looking at his track record over the past 3 ½ years. There have been many pronouncements in the foreign policy field, but vanishingly small achievements have followed. The much-heralded nuclear deal with North Korea is one of the latest to fall by the wayside with North Korea’s president Kim announcing a resumption of nuclear testing.

Kim’s cited reason was the total absence of any concrete moves by the United States in settling their multiple outstanding issues. Kim noted, with some justification, that Trump’s negotiating technique was to demand concessions from the North Koreans which had to be fulfilled before the US would make any moves itself, such as reducing troop numbers in South Korea, or ceasing its economic warfare on the North.

It is a well-established principle that what a person does is a much more reliable indicator of future behaviour than what they say. Since becoming president, Trump has withdrawn from, or announced the United States’ intention of withdrawing from, a significant number of major treaties. These included, a by no means exhaustive list, the nuclear arms deal with Iran negotiated with the other United Nations Security Council permanent members plus Germany and European Union; the International Postal Union; the Paris climate agreement; the Trans-Pacific Partnership; UNESCO; and the Human Rights Council.

Whatever else these moves may mean; they are not the actions of a country committed to solving international problems in a multi-national format. Given this track record over the past 3+ years there is no basis for believing that they are temporary measures designed only to enhance Trump’s re-election prospects. Rather the attitude has been, “as long as you do what we want, we will stay.”

Given also the lack of any serious opposition to these moves in the US Senate or his putative presidential opposition candidate Joe Biden, it is probably safe to assume that these moves reflect a broader US approach to multilateral relations. That is, “as long as you do what we want we will stay” in any given organisation.

The reaction to unfavourable decisions by international bodies does however go further. The International Criminal Court (that the United States does not belong to) recently announced it was reopening its investigation into war crimes committed by the United States (and its allies) in Afghanistan. One might argue that this is long overdue, given that these alleged crimes have been a feature of the long 18+ years of warfare carried out on that country. This is before one even begins to contemplate the manifest lies on which the original invasion was based.

Trump’s reaction to the ICC announcement was to threaten both the organisation and its investigating staff, implying a military response if they had the temerity to indict any Americans for war crimes. The principles established in the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials are, it seems, but an historical aberration when even the investigation of what are, in reality, well documented crimes, invokes such a lawless and violent response.

It is in this context that one has to look at Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for an arms control treaty with Russia. This is the topic to be discussed at the forthcoming meeting between the United States and Russian representatives at a 22 June 2020 meeting in Vienna.

There are a number of ways to interpret the United States’ sudden enthusiasm for an agreement with Russia. The first and most obvious is that it is that the United States has realised that the modern Russian arsenal, partially detailed in President Putin’s March 2018 speech to the Russian parliament, is vastly superior to anything in the United States arsenal and that gap is unlikely to narrow, little alone close, for the foreseeable future.

The Russian (but United States resident) writer and military analyst Andre Martyanov is particularly scathing on this point, both in his books and all his website.

While that is possibly part of Trump’s motivation, this is far from being the whole explanation. One has only to look at the continuing role of the United States in Ukraine, not to mention the farcical trial of four alleged perpetrators of the shooting down of MH 17 (three Russians and one Ukrainian) to gauge a measure of United States sincerity.

Far more likely a motive is that Trump is using the meeting as part of his much wider campaign of trying to disrupt the burgeoning Russia China partnership that is going from strength to strength. Trump wants a new deal on nuclear arms that includes China, but he is silent on the other nuclear powers (Great Britain, India, France, Pakistan and Israel) all of whom have a similar or greater number of nuclear weapons than China.

China has long since passed the United States as the world’s largest economy in terms of parity purchasing power. It has formed a close and growing relationship with Russia, not only in its huge Belt and Road Initiative (with now more than 150 countries) but in a series of other organisations such as the Shanghai Corporation Organisation and ASEAN that is presenting a radically different model of economic co-operation and development than the exploitative western model that has dominated for the past 300 years.

This threat to the United States’ self-defined role as the world’s dominant power did not commence during Trump’s presidency, and the United States reaction to it will not cease with the ending of that presidency, either at the end of this year or in four years’ time. If Biden wins in November, we may be spared the endless tweets and bombastic behaviour, but it would be naïve to anticipate any significant change in United States foreign policy.

Therein lies the greatest danger to world peace. The likely future trends arising out of the growing might of China and its relationship with Russia have recently been analysed by the imminent Russian academic Sergey Karaganov. His analysis of the developing China Russia relationship and its geopolitical implications was recently published in an Italian outlet and conveniently summarised in English by Pepe Escobar in his article “Russia Aiming to Realise Greater Eurasian Dream”.

Karaganov argues that Russia’s growing relationship with China represents a wholly new non-aligned movement centred in the greater Eurasian landmass. Unlike the British and the later United States models which depended on invasion, occupation and exploitation of the natural resources of the conquered nations, the new Eurasian model is much more likely to recognise the individual rights and aspirations of the participating nations and pursue policies of mutual benefit.

None of which is seen as other than a threat to the United States and the model it seeks to impose upon the world. Trump’s recent gestures towards Russia need to be interpreted in that light. The United States has no genuine interest in the welfare and prosperity of either Russia or China. Rather, they exist as pieces to be used in the United States version of the world chess board, manipulated to try and maintain the old model of Western, and in particular, United States dominance.

The reluctance of a growing number of European countries to subscribe to that version is more apparent by the day. Therein lies the challenge, the prospect for a better future for the countries joining the pivot to the east, and the greatest danger from a desperate United States unwilling to acknowledge that its days of dominance are rapidly disappearing.

As the Indian commentator M.K. Bhadrakumar says: “Trump’s diatribe against the ICC exposes the hypocrisy of American policies, which keeps blabbering about a rules based international order while acting with impunity whenever it chooses, for geopolitical reasons.” He cites examples and then concludes that “America under Trump has now become the rogue elephant in the international system.” That is, with respect, a perfect summation of where we are at present.

James O’Neill, an Australian-based Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The fact that Trump’s call for an in-person G7 meeting in the US in June has been rejected by the member countries of this group has more substance to it than meets the eye, although a major apparent reason for the rejection is the pandemic. If it were just the pandemic, Trump would never have hit back by extending a direct invitation to Russia and even India and South Korea. A direct invitation to Russia was/is meant only to send a message to its European ‘allies’ and Canada, countries that have become extremely weary of their relationship with the Trump administration, and have been taking steps to assert their foreign policy more independently. Their rejection of Trump’s invitation is a potential continuation of the same assertion. On the contrary, Trump’s reaction reveals a deep sense of frustration engulfing the White House over their increasing inability to steer the world single-handedly. Those divisions, not the pandemic, are ripping ‘the West’ apart is also evident from the way Trump had stormed out of the 2018 G7 summit, calling Canada’s leader a ‘weak and dishonest’ person.

Already in March, the G7 ministerial summit ended in almost a squabble over the question of the categorisation of COVID-19, leading the meeting to end in a complete disarray and without a joint statement. Whereas the US wanted to call COVID-19 “Wuhan virus” to specifically target China and thus extend its on-going trade-war to the biological arena, the US’ European and non-European allies still chose to call it COVID-19. European diplomats reportedly said that ‘What the US State Department has suggested is a red line. You cannot agree with this branding of this virus and trying to communicate this’, deliberately projecting China as the sole reason for the spread of the virus. A European consent to call it “Wuhan virus” would have eventually pulled them into the US’ on-going troubled relations with China, a situation that the member countries, particularly those from Europe, have been trying to avoid not only in case of China but Iran as well.

The prevailing troubled relations are, as such, already negatively affecting other areas of US-European ties. Following Germany’s categorical refusal to attend an in-person summit in June, the White House has asked for a substantial reduction of US military personnel stationed in Germany. This also comes against the larger backdrop of US-Germany tussle over the latter’s persistent failure in meeting the threshold of spending 2% of GDP on defence as recommended by the NATO.

According to the new orders, the number of US troop in Germany would be reduced by 9,500 from 34,500 of those that were permanently assigned there. It would also cap at 25,000 the number of American troops in Germany at any one time, downsizing from the current limit of 52,000 troops.

The decision has been taken alongside Trump’s call for inviting Russia to attend the G7 meeting, calling the Russian presence a show of ‘common sense.’

While Trump’s invitation has been criticised by the European countries, even for the US establishment itself, this invitation carries no real substance and is meant to taunt Europe only; for, as far as the Trump administration’s defence strategy goes, Russia remains a ‘malign power’ bent upon undoing the world system controlled by the US.

This move, while apparently reflects US-Germany tensions, carries with it seeds of further distancing between the US and other European and non-European allies. In other words, this move is not only bound to widen the gaps between the US and Germany but the US and other European/NATO allies as well, who are likely to see in these steps a concerted US policy to force them into spending more on their defence and take direct responsibility—a policy direction that would inevitably allow Europe in the long run to regrow its military power and thus turn the world into a truly multipolar system. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was categorical in this regard when she recently said that “Whatever form the G7 meeting takes, a video conference or whatever, I will certainly fight for multilateralism.”

The ‘fight for multilateralism’ is surely rooted in the increasing European assertiveness vis-à-vis its relations with Russia and China. Whereas some European countries and Canada swiftly rejected Trump’s invitation to Russia, the fact remains that Germany is still going ahead with its plans of Nord Stream 2, a project that the US is targeting and has even sanctioned. In fact, Trump has only recently expanded sanctions on this project, signalling the US’ continued obsession with not allowing Russia a major presence in Europe’s energy market. An irony of this new expansion lies in the fact that the new sanctions were proposed only a day after Trump sent Russia an invitation to attend the G7 summit.

While Russia is unlikely to attend the summit under the current circumstances, there is no gainsaying that both Russia and China see in this unravelling of ‘the West’ an opportunity to expand ties with Europe and create new channels of relations that defy the traditional ‘NATO logic’ of necessary hostility.

While Russia is strengthening its presence in Europe through its energy supply lines, China, too, is using the situation created by COVID-19 to strengthen its ties with Europe. In his telephonic conversation with Macron, Xi called for “China-France contributions” to winning the global battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Xi proposed similar things to Germany in his conversation with Angela in the first week of June.

There is as such little gainsaying that political divisions within ‘the West’ are ripping it apart on an unprecedented scale, allowing Russia and China to directly expand their reach in Europe in ways that would leave minimum room for the US to manoeuvre and pushback.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

“I transmit herewith, for the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, the Treaty on Open Skies. I believe that the Treaty on Open Skies is in the best interest of the United States. By engaging all participating States actively in cooperative observation, the Treaty on Open Skies will strengthen international stability. The Treaty also provides an important means of increasing mutual understanding of military forces and activities, thus easing tensions and strengthening confidence and security, not only in the area covered by the Treaty, but in other areas as well.”

So reads the letter of transmission of the Open Skies Treaty from President George Bush, the First, to the US Senate on August 12, 1992.

On May 21, 2020 President Trump stated that the United States of America would withdraw from the Treaty and on the following day, May 22, the American Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, filed the formal withdrawal document, the withdrawal taking effect in six months.

The withdrawal from yet another international treaty by the United States signals not only its contempt for other nations and international law but also confirms that it has completely abandoned diplomacy as a means of achieving political objectives and raised war to state policy. It is a rejection not only of previous Bush’s statement that the Treaty is in the best interests of the US it is also a crude rejection of President Eisenhower’s statement made in 1955 at the Geneva Summit with the USSR where he proposed such a treaty,

“I believe mankind longs for freedom from war and the rumours of war. I came here because of my lasting faith in the decent instincts and good sense of the people who populate this world of ours.” 

The Soviets rejected the proposal at the time due to the fact that the Americans would have obtained more from surveillance of Soviet territory than the Soviets would obtain from flights over the USA. With the changes in the balance of power with the fall of the USSR and the hopes of some at the time to reduce the risk of nuclear war the idea was resurrected and the Treaty was signed by members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact on March 24, 1992, though only coming into effect on January 1, 2002. Thirty-Five nations are now parties to the Treaty, which gives each of them the right to overfly another member’s territory, under agreed terms and conditions, to monitor military activity and capability, though in practice it is the US and Russia that conduct most of the flights.

The benefit to the quest for peace in the world is obvious for it is less likely that a nation would prepare to attack another member state if that state can see what the potential attacker is doing. Surprise is always a key element of military and political strategy in war. The parties to the Treaty were willing to give up the element of surprise in order to ensure peace in the world. It is now clear that the United States has withdrawn from the Treaty, not because of their pretext of complaints against Russia, which no one takes seriously, but because it wants to restore its element of surprise, because it is no longer interested in maintaining world peace, but is intent on world war. No other logical conclusion can be drawn.

The Americans are also threatening to renew open air testing of new nuclear weapons in violation of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed by the USA, USSR and UK in 1963, which prohibits open-air nuclear explosions. That Treaty was a response to the international outcry against the radioactive fallout danger produced by open-air nuclear tests. Some consider it the first international environmental regulation. But President Trump has no regard for the environment whatsoever. Moreover the objective of the proposed tests is not to see if their weapons work. American officials have stated that the tests would be conducted for political purposes, in other words, to intimidate, to threaten the world with what they can do.

The United States has also withdrawn from the treaty with Iran, the Nuclear Forces Treaty regarding placement of intermediate range missiles in Europe, and have placed in doubt the renewal of the START Treaty, which limits deployment of nuclear weapons by Russia and the USA to 1550 each. They continue to develop new types of nuclear weapons, continue to place “tactical” nuclear weapons in their battle formations, and have increased their ability to strike Russia from a line of missile sites close to the Russian border, extending from Poland to Bulgaria, which they claim are for anti-missile defence but are more likely to be used as first strike launch pads for a surprise nuclear attack on Russia. Yet, as they prepare for nuclear war, they demand that China joint the START renewal talks in order to stop China from building up its smaller nuclear forces to a level that will be an effective deterrent against a US attack. The Chinese see through this bluff and refuse to take part since the American strategic doctrine states they will use nuclear weapons whenever and wherever they deem fit and retain their first strike doctrine.

The Russians and some NATO members in Europe have expressed their alarm at this decision and even some members of the US Congress have stated that it raises the risk of war. There will be conferences about it, meetings, as the remaining members, particularly Russia, try to see if anything can be salvaged. But will America’s NATO allies be permitted to accept Russian over flights of their territories when the US has pulled out of the Treaty? I cannot see Canada, for example, which has once again proven its status as a dependency of the United States with its continued illegal detention of Meng Wanzhou and its sycophantic support of the United States aggression the world over in every aspects of its foreign policy and propaganda, allowing any Russian flights over its territory.

The Americans have made noises about reconsidering their position on the Treaty if the Russians admit to alleged violations, but it was an offer designed to be ignored as soon as it was made. The fact is the new reality is that the United States has openly declared itself against peace and for war, despite the occasional glad-hand rhetoric from President Trump. War is now their declared foreign policy.

While Russia continues to push for a diplomatic solution in public the practical question for Russia is what are the Americans trying to hide? What are they up to they do not want anyone to see? What are their intentions? When we begin to ask these questions we lead ourselves into the dark shadows of humanity, the dark reaches of psychopathic minds, and what we see would frighten the gods.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Article VI requires the parties to the Treaty to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures toward complete nuclear disarmament. Trumps actions and decisions are a fundamental violation and negation of that Treaty. But who is to ‘sanction” it for this? What are the consequences? None. There are no mechanisms to enforce these Treaties, except possibly an indictment for war crimes by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for the crime of aggression and conspiracy to commit aggression. But the USA is not a party to the Treaty creating the ICC and the prosecution at the ICC is a handmaiden of the US and the European Union and would do nothing even if the ICC had jurisdiction.

The United States economic power is in decline. It’s conventional wars for hegemony of resources and markets have bankrupted it and failed. The rapidly declining conditions of life for its people have demoralised them. The ruling elites, morally bankrupt and self-interested, are unable to imagine any other way out of the mess they have created except more war. But since they are now weaker in every respect but one, their nuclear arsenal, they will rely on their ability to destroy the world in a nuclear war to try to bring the rest of the world under its domination, to create the first world empire, ruled from Washington, by madmen. For they are mad. They actually think they can win and prosper from a nuclear war, their stockpile of weapons only exceeded by the scale of their delusions.

Attempts to establish a world order in which a dialogue of civilizations is the norm instead of conflict between civilizations are foundering on a crude return to a ”might makes right” attitude against which any attempt to insist on adherence to international law and norms, even common morality, is viewed as a weakness to be exploited.

The question therefore arises as to how nations and peoples can establish the necessary legal mechanisms to survive and flourish when there exist those who oppose any such mechanisms being established.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”