It seems that the US can be considered the only state currently redrawing the entire map of the world for it to better suit the interests of its own political, financial, and military cycles. In fact one can’t help but to be amazed by the maniacal zeal with which the White House advances its agenda upon the international stage. It was this zeal behind the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the stagings of war in Vietnam and on the Korean Peninsula, and the launch of the Cold War against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. Those events were followed by countless wars across the Middle East and North Africa: in Iraq, in Syria. Afghanistan, and Libya. But special interests continue advancing their agenda regardless of the consequences, now pitting the US against North Korea and Iran.

In addition to repeated instances of armed aggression against any state refusing to obey Washington’s dictates, the White House has been engaged in the physical elimination of individual politicians that head undesirable governments. It goes without saying that for a government to fall into this category it’s enough for it to try to defend its own national interests in a bid to ensure the well-being of its people. Those politically motivated assassins have been examined in much detail in a number of media publications, including those featured in the New Eastern Outlook.

By establishing an elaborate network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in various countries of the world, sponsored through a number of off-the-books operations of the CIA, the State Department has been political conflicts in various countries of the world, while being supported by a number of private foundations, including those founded and financed by George Soros. This fact constitutes a gross violation of all international norms, since a great many of these conflicts result regime change often described by the popular euphemism of “color revolutions”. There are several prime examples to consider.

Iran

Last summer, in a letter submitted to the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, Iran would accuse the United States of repeated attempts of taking down the government of the Islamic Republic. This official appeal to the UN appeared to be Tehran’s reaction to repeated attempts by Washington to interfere in Iran’s sovereign political affairs, including Rex Tillerson’s statement made last June at a hearing in the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in which he stated that Washington’s approach to Iran can be summed up in its support of anti-government elements inside Iran, which were aiming at taking power in Tehran. Never before has such a high-profile diplomat officially pledged his support to the staging of a so-called “peaceful internal political transition”, which constitutes a flagrant violation of the Algerian Accords of 1981, signed and ratified by both Iran and the United States. After all, according to existing US-Iranian agreements, Washington promised not to interfere, both directly or indirectly, through the use of political or military force in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The fact Washington was behind the recent demonstrations in Iran is evident by the well-coordinated support that Washington has been providing to the local opposition. The White House has already stated that in the very near future it will allocate yet another billion dollars to support Iran’s “freedom fighters”, while imposing sanctions against the key political figures ruling Tehran. An attempt to make anti-government rhetoric in Iran more popular has also been made by current US president, Donald Trump himself. Using his Twitter account, Trump would urge individual representatives of Iranian society to break away from the “repressive” regime, while tagging his messages with the #IranProtests hashtag.

Netherlands

On the eve of the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, which were due to take place last March, local politicians would voice a concern that the right-wing Party for Freedom was receiving funds from the US. Among the foreign bodies involved in the sponsoring of this party one can find such American conservative organizations as the Gatestone Institute and Freedom Alliance. It is noteworthy that the Freedom Alliance enjoys the support of Robert Shillman, a prominent supporter of President Trump.

It’s been noted that America’s neoconsorvative David Horowitz donated nearly 150,000 dollars to the Party for Freedom, making it the largest individual official donation that year within the Dutch political system, which may seem a modest contribution compared with donations made in the US. It’s curious that by making this donation via a fund overseen by David Horowitz, it violated existing US federal laws, which prohibit such funds from sponsoring political parties.

Ronald van Raak, a deputy of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, on behalf of all Dutch politicians expressed outrage over this instance of foreign interference.

Armenia

The US Embassy in Armenia has been engaged for years in consistent attempts to make the representatives of the local opposition more combative in a bid to prevent candidates that are sympathetic to Russia from coming to power in upcoming presidential election next March. At the same time, the sitting US ambassador to Yerevan, Richard Mills is known for pledging all sorts of US support to the opposition at countless meetings he holds with them.

Venezuela

In recent years, there’s been a mounting number of well-founded accusations against the CIA and the White House due to their attempts to take down the current government of Venezuela. A Venezuelan-American lawyer, Eva Golinger in her interview with teleSUR, shared a number of details about Washington’s role in the staging of the attempted coup d’etat in Venezuela back in 2002 and the possible murder of President Hugo Chavez.

Recently, the Venezuelan Commander-General, Jesús Chourio, announced that US-sponsored mercenaries attempted to pull off yet another coup last year by launching an attack against the military in the city of Valencia. Earlier that year, according to Venezuelan authorities, a helicopter that opened fire at the building of the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Court of Venezuela was hijacked by a policeman suspected of having links with the CIA.

In order to force Venezuelan authorities into changing their policies to satisfy American special interests, the United States introduced harsh sanctions against Venezuela, while providing open support for opposition forces.

Cambodia

Washington has recently come forward with a direct ultimatum to Cambodia, aimed at discrediting its authorities. This step was provoked by Phnom Penh’s decision to dissolve the main opposition party – the Cambodian National Rescue Party. In response, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be as bold as to announce (emphasis added)

As a first step, we will terminate support for the Cambodian National Election Committee and its administration of the upcoming 2018 national election. On current course next year’s election will not be legitimate, free or fair.

End Notes

And list goes on and on, well beyond anybody’s ability to present all of Washington’s sins in a single article. However, it should be added that in a bid to hide from the international community the fact it’s been interfering in elections worldwide on such a scale, Washington unleashed a campaign accusing Russia of the very sort of interference Washington itself has been plying for decades. However, realizing the groundless nature of such allegations against Russia, a number American political figures have come forward to dismiss the charges. Even the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Pompeo has recently been forced to admit that he was in possession of no evidence of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign members.

So wouldn’t it be better for Washington, instead of voicing far-fetched accusations against Russia, to admit its own destructive role in influencing democratic procedures in other states?

Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”   

The America we once knew is gone forever. The 21st century has dawned just as the true light of liberty fades into shadow. The sooner the world recognizes this, the better off humankind will be. RussiaGate, Bill and Hillary Clinton revelations, Donald Trump’s quasi-populist misdirect, and a great nation turned amoral, this and much more forewarn of a cataclysm.

I’ll tell you about the instant I gave up on America ever being great again. When my oldest friend failed to reach me on Skype a few weeks back, a strange reconnect on his device put me in the position of a fly on the wall with he and two other high school friends. At first, I thought my old friend and I were connected as per usual, on a conference call. Then, when I realized I could hear them without the trio hearing me, the real American tragedy unfolded. The realization struck me hard, I’ll tell you. Listening to old pals discuss my new book that debunks many RussiaGate lies, “Putin’s Praetorians” met with nasty and harsh criticism without my chums having even read what is inside. Their obtuse and unfair criticism made me finally realized Vladimir Putin and the Russian people have no chance whatsoever – no chance of ever being friends with the United States of America. Three intelligence college graduates, professional men, demonstrated the utter ignorance of a people. Some of my closest friends shouted in my ears that day; “the propaganda worked – CNN has already won.”I know this is a harsh reality for many of you to accept. Losing hope is not something to take lightly. But get ready, the war will come eventually.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election the hopeful among us considered his victory a successful populist revolt against the Washington swamp of globalists. Trump swore to us he would take on the technocrats and the elites in favor of the “forgotten of America” – and the new president sold himself as a man of the people. However, billionaires are not ordinary people, and we should all have remembered this. Many of us voted Trump just to keep a certified psychopath from winning, but Trump and Clinton are nothing more than symptoms of a far more widespread contagion. Now let me describe the infectious host my country has become, and a bit on how Lady Liberty will finally succumb.

The United States of America is the modern and digitalized Rome. Just why we were not taught this in grade school, it escapes me. After all, we always believed our teachers and trusted them to tell us the truth. The unarguable fact that Americans have been the most privileged people on Earth since World War II. But we were told for decades that our privilege was due to our industriousness, our intelligence, and because God had blessed us. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s this may have really been true. For those who recall that we made stuff back then, and that we conformed more often to our religious convictions, my meaning here is clear to you. We Americans benefitted largely because of our hard work back then, and not sometimes because of brilliant industrialists too.  Then the two Kennedy brothers were shot and killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson and his boys carried us into Vietnam. In the meantime, those of us too young (or chicken) to fight in southeast Asia, we got our fill of Woodstock, a popular anti-war movement and the hippie revolution, and decades of drug culture that nobody talks about much these days. But this component of the American metamorphosis is far too important and massively deep to discuss here. It should suffice those from that era to know, that “I” know what you know. This was the moment the American people dipped themselves in the narcotic of too much self-love and when we began to exceed and excel in moral promiscuity. Today an entire nation is drowning in a sea of vanity that originated back then. We saw this moral lasciviousness when the last President, Barack Obama spat out our “exceptionalism” right in the world’s face. Let’s now take a candid look at this how collectively extraordinary we Americans have been.

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I’ll not even attempt to describe the rise of consumerism in America following WW II, nor can anyone explain in such limited space how the average American benefitted from our role in that war. As the only major nation untouched (literally) by the massive destructive force of the world war, the United States quickly became a nation blessed with a giant middle class. And with this burgeoning middle class came a youth culture that will absolutely melt down when the next big crisis comes. This foreboding moment can be understood if we look at American society’s rise to affluence in the 60’s, 70’s, and even the 1980’s, as compared to the disenfranchised in the country today. But I said I would not delve too deeply into this part of Americanism. What makes the United States even an unique country in modern times is how the world lost while America consumed. Make no mistake about it, the real American exceptionalism cost every man, woman, and child on Earth an incalculable price. Citizens of my country have used fully one-fourth of every resource utilized since World War II, and the ongoing wars and corporate shenanigans perpetuated the damage. Up until the 21st century, the curve of American gluttony rose sharply in between 1900 and 1995. A paper (PDF) entitled; “Consumption of Materials in the United States, 1900–1995”, from the USGS by Grecia Matos and Lorie Wagner discusses this in depth. Here is the short version from the paper on materials use:

“During this century, the quantity of materials consumed has grown, from 161 million metric tons in 1900 to 2.8 billion metric tons by 1995, an equivalent of 10 metric tons per person per year.”

The report details our consumption from many directions including environmental impacts, and so on. Nowhere is our “exceptional” appetite for world resources more prevalent than in our energy use. This report from 2011 shows how America went stark raving mad using coal, natural gas, petroleum ánd nuclear energy after WW II. For comparative purposes, Americans used about 10 quadrillion btu’s of petroleum in 1945, as compared to just over 40 quadrillion btu’s at the peak in 2005-2006. On energy, it’s fair to assert here that all those “energy wars” the so-called conspiracy theorists write about are real news stories, rather than fake concoctions. But let’s forget about American politicians opening up North America for a toxic fracking future for the moment. This Scientific American story points to Americans as the least sustainable society on Earth. From the article Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford tells us:

“The average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.”

The final take here is telling. The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses more than 25% of the world’s fossil fuel resources, by burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas. Another way of looking at our “exceptional” self-destructiveness is to think how many “worlds” it would take to support humanity, if everyone consumed like we do. But this my point is the fact that our addictive and suicidal behavior costs all of humanity. America’s unique exceptionalism will very soon lead to a horrific cataclysm for out sick culture. I’ll frame for you now.

“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

Drugged on the self-aggrandizing drugs of excess, lude and lascivious lifestyles, and utter godlessness, the United States is all set for an apocalypse few in my country see. Before I describe how this cataclysm will likely play out, let me introduce an economic surety. Debt and constricted growth are about to cause a gigantic bubble to burst.

Most readers may not know that the world’s central banks are about to be decimated. The balance sheets of most of these banks have gone from an indebtedness of $6 trillion in 2007 to over $21 trillion today. To make matters worse, the rate of debt expansion exceeds a pace of $200 billion every month. In the UK, the Bank of England prints money on a pace to equal that of the European Central Bank (ECB) and even the Bank of Japan in a hopeless effort of Quantitative Easing (QE) that involves buying the bonds – or debts – of governments and investment grade companies. Subsequently, bond prices have shot sky high, while yields are now at record lows. A further indication is contained in a rather innocentpress release about UBS Wealth Management’s UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2017. According to this news San Francisco and other real estate markets are ripe for a second devastating housing bubble catastrophe. Also included in the report are; Amsterdam, Stockholm, Munich, Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. I could go on and on presenting indicators such as the massive $750 billion dollar trade deficit America runs. But pointing out the reality of America’s $20 trillion dollar national debt is useless for swaying even one typical consumption addict to pay attention. Like my pals who refused to even crack open a book before condemning a friend, most Americans are simply too ignorant and self-involved to give facts a glance. When the lie of CNN or Bloomberg will do, as long as the cheap gas flows, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” slogan is a fairytale. America has not been great in a very long time, and she never will be great again. Now let me show you who knows this.

Like Rome, the heyday of America’s empire was been based on expansion and growth. Propped up with militarism and the legendary military industrial complex, Washington has played Wall Street’s gambit for many decades. The recent villainizing of Russia and her president Vladimir Putin is not about the spread of democracy, it’s about Putin standing in the way of privatizing like that which occurred under Yeltsin. Putin is in a fight against the American supported liberal world order bent on gobbling up Russia’s massive resources to fuel further American (plus EU & British) addictions. Without new markets and resources America will very soon be out of gas – literally. So, assuming I am correct here, what happens when a land of consumer zombies runs out of gas (or food)? This Fortune Magazine article speaks of an education economics bubble about to destroy lives and dreams on a scale never witnessed. The foreboding article touches on but one facet of a fractured American society – the society presidents, senators, and congresspersons swore would benefit from high tech jobs and new age technologies. Now that I’ve painted a small portrait of dread, insert all the twenty-something and thirty-something smart phones you saw in use yesterday in town! You forty-something and fifty-something readers, can you sense the domino effect when the entitled youth cannot get cell service or buy a cappuccino? For further reading on this catastrophe see Zero Hedge and read Ron Paul’s assessment of the imminent doomsday. My conclusion here is pretty short and sweet.

“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” ― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Vladimir Putin is the barometer everyone should watch. And Vladimir Putin has all but given up on reconciliation with the west. This report from World Socialist Web outlines reports that suggest Putin is ramping up in preparations for the coming war. At the recent Sochi meetup, the Russian president had this to offer on Russia’s economy being prepared:

“The ability of our economy to increase military production and services at a given time is one of the most important aspects of military security. To this end, all strategic and simply large-scale enterprise should be ready, regardless of ownership.”

Putin’s recent moves, his ongoing pragmatism during these new crises, and the “all or nothing” approaches of western governments toward Russia tell us all we need to know here. Putin is admittedly testing the capability of Russia’s economy to defend in an all-out war with the west. Read Alex Lantier’s article above, then correlate everything you can find on global defense in the last few months. Putin is only following suit after NATO recently discussed improving infrastructure for war-making. In Moscow the thinkers know once the petro-yuan replaces the dollar, that general chaos will rein in America. And the American globalists know this too. Now imagine a dollar being worth ten cents. Imagine store shelves empty and several million more foreclosures. Imagine Apple not selling iPhones for two months. Visualize what happens in America if another big recession hits now. The kid who was 12 when 2008 rolled around, is now 21 with a college degree and a mountain of student loan debt, working at McDonald’s to pay for an $800 dollar smart phone. Fox News just reported on the 5 dead and 20 wounded in Chicago over the Thanksgiving weekend, and Trump’s policies have been a shot in the arm for Wall Street. If the big bubble bursts the disenfranchised will turn to cannibalism. Putin and the Washington swamp knows this too.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”- John Adams

So, when America does finally succumb to the death throes we’ve seen happening the last thirty years or more… They’ll push the button, you bet they will. Zombies could care less about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Palestine, Syria and Yemen. You unplug the intravenous joy and it’s over. And this is the truth of an America since 1955. Find yourself a cave here on Crete, fort up and get ready. It’s coming.

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.”

A table was set up for two, an advertisement table,a table with a photo of a giant turkey, two elegant plates, and a U.S. flag sticking out into the air.

“Thanksgiving at Angkor Royal Cafe”, a flier read. And: “23rd November… Join us for a traditional Thanksgiving Feast”.

This was at one of the international hotels inSiem Reap, a Cambodian city near the world architectural treasures ofAngkor Wat and the ancient Khmer capital, Angkor Thom.

The same day I read an email sent to me from the United States, by my Native American friends, with a link to an essay published by MPN News, called “Thanksgiving Guide: How to Celebrate a Sordid History”. It began with a summary:

“While millions of Americans prepare this week to get into the holiday spirit, beginning with Thanksgiving, how many are prepared to view the day through an accurate lens? While to many Americans the holiday serves as a reminder to give thanks, it is seen as a day of mourning by countless of others. The truth is: European migrants brutally murdered Native Americans, stole their land, and continue to do so today”. 

The day became an official day of festivities in 1637, to celebrate the massacre of over 700 people from the Pequot Tribe.

In a hotel, I approached a cheerful French food and beverage managerand asked him whether he was aware of what he was suggesting should be celebrated in one of his restaurants?

“Oh I know I know,” he replied, laughing. “It is a little bit controversial, isn’t it?”

“Bit controversial?” I wondered. “It appears more like you are inviting people to celebrate genocide, a holocaust, with free flowing wine and a giant turkey.”

“I am trying to see things positively,” he continued grinning at me. Then he summarized: “So I guess you won’t be joining us tonight? What a pity…”

“What a pity,” I thought, “what a pity.”I won’t get to eat that famous American pie tonightand turkey and who knows what else, just because I am not eager at all to celebrate the massacres and land grabsperpetrated by the Empire.

The manager couldn’t help asking: “Where are you from?”

I knew he would ask. No European would say what I was saying.

“I’m Russian,” I replied.

“Oh I see,” he gave me that ‘I should have guessed’.

“Russian-American,” I added.

*

I’m convinced that the French manager has been sincerely oblivious about what I was stating.He is supposed to be oblivious. There are, after all, ‘our genocides’, and ‘the genocides of the others’. ‘Our genocides’, those that we triggered or committed, should never be discussed. Or more precisely, it is extremely impolite to discuss them.

Most of the people don’t even know about them, including many of the victims. On the other hand, the genocides committed by the others, particularly by adversaries of the West, are widely discussed, publicized, analyzed, inflated and very often even fabricated.

Cambodia is the textbook case of the latter. Here, several decades ago, the U.S. and its allies first supported the hopelessly corrupt and brutal government in Phnom Penh, while triggeringa monstrous carpet-bombing campaign of the Cambodian countryside, mainly near the border with Vietnam. This was supposed to prevent the country from ‘going Communist’, or at least ‘Ho Chi Minh style Communist’. Hundreds of thousands of villagers were murdered by the bombing. Millions were forced to hit the road, leaving their dwellings, as the countryside was converted into a giant minefield, covered by unexploded ordnance.Further hundreds of thousands died from starvation and diseases.Furious, mad from suffering, the people of Cambodia rose against the collaborators with the West in Phnom Penh. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge took the capital virtually unopposed. Recently, deep in the jungle, I spoke to the former Pol Pot’s personal guards. I asked them point-blank whether they knew anything about Communism. “Nothing at all,” I was told. “The U.S. was murdering our families, for no reason. Corrupt elites were selling the country to the West. We were all outraged, and ready for revenge. We would follow anybody calling for revenge.” However, the West is passing the events, to this day, as a “Communist genocide”.

Rwanda is yet another ‘case’ ofa twisted narrative. I made an entire full-length documentaryfilm – Rwanda Gambit – on the subject. There, the West turned the historyupside down, reducing the entire tragedy into a primitive and easy-to-digest narrative of bad Hutus killing good Tutsis. Yet even the former U.S. ambassador Robert Flatten told me that his country groomed, armed and supported the deadly RPF, mainly Tutsi army, which had been, before 1994, raiding the Rwandan countryside from neighboring Uganda, burning villages and killing civilians. While a former Australian lawyer and U.N. investigator, Michael Hourigan, supplied me with information about the downing of the plane, which, in April 1994, killed both the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President CyprienNtaryamira, while on the final approach to Kigali airport. The orders to shoot down the plane were given by the RPF leader Paul Kagame, who was in turn sponsored by the West. This event triggered the terrible bloodletting on 1994. The next year, in 1995, the Rwandan army entered the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and participated in the killing of at least 9 million people, mainly civilians, on behalf of Western governments and multi-national companies, making it the worst crime against humanity in recent history.

In fact, almost all the major genocides committed by the West or its allies in modern history, are ‘silent ones’, including those in Iraq, Syria, Iran, West Papua, East Timor, DRC, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Angola, and dozens of other unfortunate places all over the world.

The gruesome genocides committed by the West all over the world, during the last 2,000 but especially during the last 500 years, are never defined as such; never as ‘genocides’. Throughout history, European countries have been destroying, systematically, most of the cultures on all continents of the Planet, enslaving virtually all the non-white nations, plundering and looting its colonies (read: almost all the non-white nations of the world), while exterminating hundreds of millions of men, women and children. The death toll has been rising, accumulating, to near 1 billion, according to thetestimony of one of my friends, a senior U.N. statistician.

*

I will return to the ‘Cambodian story’ soon, on the pages of this magazine. And I will be returning, again and again, to the genocides committed by Europe and North America, virtually everywhere. Unless the history is understood and acknowledged, the world has no future, and there can be no solutions to the terrible problems that our humanity is facing.

But for now, let me conclude this brief essay by saying that I did not participate in the consumption of turkey and American pies on Thanksgiving holiday, in the Cambodian city of Seam Reap.

My thoughts went to those 700 people from the Pequot Tribe who rebelled, stood firm and died for freedom, almost 400 years ago. These were some of the first fighters against Western imperialism. These were the ‘Americans’ that I admire, this is America that had been terribly damaged but not yet completely destroyed. No overly sugary, sentimental and empty words could fully choke its essence, as no gluttony and food orgies could ever fully silence the screams of the pain of those who died in the hands of the European invaders, during and after the conquest of what has been so cynically christened as the ‘New World’.

 Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images,a writer of revolutionary novel Aurora and several other books. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Now that RT is no longer available on television in Philadelphia, I watch more France 24 than before, when I divided my TV-watching between those two and MSNBC. The difference in offerings never ceases to amaze me, but while ‘Putin’s bullhorn’ tended to focus on non-typical Russian subjects and America’s failings, France’s English language channel concentrates heavily on the Middle East and Africa.

Although many people are vaguely aware of China’s growing presence in Africa, without France 24, we wouldn’t know that it now welcomes African students. The Chinese have long been suspected of being allergic to Black people, but this report suggests that the government has made a decision in favor of color blindness – the students interviewed largely deny having encountered racism. Add to this that the One Belt One Road transportation project linking China and Russia to Europe will also have an African spur, and it becomes clear that in the post American era, Russians, Arabs, Orientals and Blacks are determined to work together.

This may seem like a contradiction with respect to President Vladimir Putin’s oft-heard criticism of multiculturalism, directed at Europe’s efforts to integrate Muslims. (Not to mention President Trump’s efforts to ‘whiten’ America, most recently by declaring that Haitians, who were welcomed on a ‘temporary’ basis after the 2010 earthquake, will have to leave by 2019…) President Putin’s position is that different ethnic groups should live in harmony with each other, each within their own borders. Today’s Russia, or rather the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) includes nine of the fifteen former member states of the Soviet Union, most of whose people are Muslims. (For reasons which are not entirely clear, Russia fought two wars to keep Chechnya under its control, and it has been a hotbed of terrorism. However its policies vis a vis the other Muslim states on its southern border as well as vis a vis a multi-racial world contrast with America’s.

While the US is mesmerized by ‘Russiagate’, Vladimir Putin draws to Moscow — or the Black Sea resort of Sochi — one national leader after another, offering Russia’s mediation in Africa and the Middle East.

Most recently he received Bashar al Assad, as well as the President of Sudan, while the Saudi King (with a 1500 person retinue) was in Moscow in October, Netanyahu having been there in March. Seven rounds of detailed Syrian peace talks involving the opposition have taken place in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, under President Putin’s leadership.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding criticism from readers about a recent article that reflects the current Russophobia, Harpers magazine’s forum on the nuclear clock, which is currently at two minutes to midnight, while evoking a possible nuclear attack by North Korea, informs us that “the Russians have rehearsed the use of nuclear weapons” without mentioning the buildup of NATO troops on its European border to which these preparations respond.

When Americans decry their choice of President, rather than blaming Russia, they should consider themselves lucky that there is at least one adult in the room, and that is Vladimir Putin. However, the Russian could be running a race against time, as he gathers around him the leaders of the majority of the planet.

Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.

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