Thursday 18th of April 2024
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democratic hypocrisy….

June 7 was a bad day for Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS). During the ninth Summit of the Americas, a young man declared to him what he is: an assassin and puppet of the White House, instigator of the coup in Bolivia. He said that Almagro cannot come to give lessons on democracy when his hands are stained with blood.

 

In another room at the summit in Los Angeles, Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to be doing no better: several journalists rebuked him for using freedom of the press to provide cover for the murderers of journalists and for sanctioning and excluding certain countries from this meeting. “Democracy or hypocrisy?” could be heard over the loudspeaker that day.

 

by Rosa Elizalde

 

In reality, this stormy summit began with a large diplomatic stumble for the United States, when several Latin American presidents announced that they would not participate in the summit because of the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as dictated by the White House, while the U.S. State Department still claims the open and unrestricted nature of the meeting’s call. Its website says, “Throughout, the United States has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate, our commitment to an inclusive process that incorporates input from people and institutions that represent the immense diversity of our hemisphere, and includes Indigenous and other historically marginalised voices.”

Hypocrisy seems to be the glue of this summit, and mainstream U.S. media and analysts declared the June 6-10 meeting a failure before it even started. On June 7, the Washington Post assured readers that “This week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles will be remembered for its absences rather than its potential agreements,” focusing its attention on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was the most mentioned political figure in U.S. networks and media on June 7 and 8, even more than U.S. President Joe Biden, according to statistics from Google Trends. Richard N. Haass, who was the adviser to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and director of policy planning for the State Department, summed up the disaster superbly in a tweet: “The Summit of the Americas looks to be a debacle, a diplomatic own goal. The U.S. has no trade proposal, no immigration policy, and no infrastructure package. Instead, the focus is on who will and will not be there. Unclear is why we pressed for it to happen.”

As can be expected of a meeting for which the invitation list had not been declared just 72 hours before it began, apathy seems to dominate the debate rooms, to which almost no one goes, according to witnesses. Even so, the United States government did not miss an opportunity to secure the appearance of participation by the civil society groups on which it bets, and it met with the envoys from Miami, paid for by USAID, and awarded them with more money. During the summit, Blinken promised a new fund of $9 million to support “independent journalism” to those who already receive $20 million a year for promoting “regime change” in Cuba.

This political pageantry is happening in what is essentially a bunker, because the Los Angeles Police received more than $15 million to police the summit and militarise a city famous for its homelessness and belts of poverty. The U.S. Democratic Party elite, meanwhile, remain out of touch with the reality of their own country, shaken by daily massacres, increasingly powerless to meet the expectations of citizens, and with most decisions and legislative projects stalled. They are replicating the clichés of the Monroe Doctrine—America for the Americans—and demonstrating what appears to be a commitment to isolationism with respect to Latin America.

The United States rarely takes into account the differentiating features of its Latin American neighbours: cultural, linguistic, religious, and traditional—in short, those that grant and promote a genuine way of understanding life and its miracles. It might seem incomprehensible at this point, but the U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America is articulated and carried out from exclusively ideological approaches, with simplistic decisions that end up harming everyone—including and especially the United States itself.

Defying the storm, the People’s Summit for Democracy has been installed at the doors of the meeting of the friends of the White House. Sponsored by some 250 organisations, most of which are local unions, the counter-summit is marching through the streets of Los Angeles on June 10, whether or not the authorities, who have done everything possible to silence the alternative meeting, give permission. But the media blockade is not having the expected success. Almagro and Blinken have gone viral on social media for reasons beyond their control, and they will not be the last to prove firsthand what the outrage of the excluded looks like.

Written by Rosa Elizalde. Article from Counterpunch.

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/storms-at-the-summit-of-the-americas/

 

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rotten doctrine......

 

BY Vijay Prashad

 

This month, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organized the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies.

At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning a visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.

Down the road, over a hundred organizations hosted a People’s Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful.

At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponization of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.

Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the U.S. government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine.

In order to assert this preposterous claim on the entire planet, the United States has pursued a policy to “weaken” what it sees as “near peer rivals,” namely China and Russia.

 

In July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — along with Monthly Review and No Cold War — will produce a booklet on the reckless military escalation by the U.S. government against those whom it sees as its adversaries — mainly China and Russia. It will include essays by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, and John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective. In the vein of that booklet, No Cold War has also produced Briefing No. 3, “Is the United States Preparing for War with Russia and China?” on Washington’s sabre-rattling and alarming march toward nuclear primacy.

 

The war in Ukraine demonstrates a qualitative escalation of the United States’ willingness to use military force. In recent decades, the U.S. launched wars on developing countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Serbia.

In these campaigns, the U.S. knew it enjoyed overwhelming military superiority and that there was no risk of a nuclear retaliation. However, in threatening to bring Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the U.S. was prepared to risk crossing what it knew to be the “red lines” of the nuclear armed state of Russia. This raises two questions: why has the U.S. undertaken this escalation, and how far is the U.S. now prepared to go in the use of military force against not only the Global South but major powers such as China or Russia?

Military Force to Compensate for Economic Decline

The answer to “why” is clear: the U.S. has lost in peaceful economic competition to developing countries in general and China in particular.

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2016 China overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. As of 2021, China accounted for 19 percent of the global economy, compared to the U.S. at 16 percent. This gap is only growing wider, and, by 2027, the IMF projects that China’s economy will outsize the U.S. by nearly 30 percent.

However, the U.S. has maintained unrivalled global military supremacy — its military expenditure is larger than the next nine highest-spending countries combined. Seeking to maintain unipolar global dominance, the U.S. is increasingly substituting peaceful economic competition with military force.

 

A good starting point to understand this strategic shift in U.S. policy is the speech given by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on May 26. In it, Blinken openly admitted that the U.S. does not seek military equality with other states, but military supremacy, particularly with respect to China:

“President Biden has instructed the Department of Defense to hold China as its pacing challenge, to ensure that our military stays ahead.”

However, with nuclear armed states such as China or Russia, military supremacy necessitates achieving nuclear supremacy — an escalation above and beyond the current war in Ukraine.

 Pursuit of Nuclear Primacy

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. has systematically withdrawn from key treaties limiting the threat of use of nuclear weapons: in 2002, the U.S. unilaterally exited  from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; in 2019, the U.S. abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty; and, in 2020, the U.S. withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. Abandoning these treaties strengthened the U.S.’ ability to seek nuclear supremacy.

 

The ultimate aim of this U.S. policy is to acquire “first strike” capacity against Russia and China — the ability to inflict damage with a first use of nuclear weapons against Russia or China to the extent that it effectively prevents retaliation.

As John Bellamy Foster has noted in a comprehensive study of this U.S. nuclear build up, even in the case of Russia — which possesses the world’s most advanced non-U.S. nuclear arsenal — this would “deny Moscow a viable second-strike option, effectively eliminating its nuclear deterrent altogether, through ‘decapitation.’ ”

In reality, the fallout and threat of nuclear winter from such a strike would threaten the entire world.

This policy of nuclear primacy has long been pursued by certain circles within Washington. In 2006, it was argued in the leading U.S. foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs that “It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.” 

Contrary to these hopes, the U.S. has not yet been able to achieve a first-strike capacity, but this is due to development of hypersonic missiles and other weapons by Russia and China — not a change in U.S. policy.

From its attacks on Global South countries to its increased willingness to go to war with a great power such as Russia to attempting to gain first strike nuclear capacity, the logic behind the escalation of U.S. militarism is clear: the United States is increasingly employing military force to compensate for its economic decline. In this extremely dangerous period, it is vital for humanity that all progressive forces unite to meet this great threat.

 

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Global South remained gripped by a never-ending debt crisis, the United States bombed Iraq despite entreaties from the Iraqi government for a negotiated agreement. During that bombing, the Libyan writer Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih penned a lyrical poem, “Nafaq Tudiuhu Imra Wahida” (“A Tunnel Lit by a Woman”), in which he sang, “A time has passed, and another time has not come and will never come.” Gloom defined the moment.

Today, we are in very dangerous times. And yet, the despondency of al-Faqih does not define our sensibility. The mood has altered. There is a belief in a world beyond imperialism, a mood that is not only evident in countries such as Cuba and China, but equally in India and Japan, as well as amongst the hard-working people who would like our collective attention to be focused on the actual dilemmas of humanity and not on the ugliness of war and domination.

Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian, journalist and commentator, is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the chief editor of Left Word Books.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/20/the-lethality-of-the-global-monroe-doctrine/

 

 

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