By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

In Fiona Hill’s recent speech it’s possible to detect the very faint signals of Washington’s policy elite responding to the immense global power shift that is underway. 

I count the advance among non–Western nations toward what we now call a new world order the single most momentous development of our time. 

This turn in history’s wheel will define our century, it is not too much to say. But to listen to the speeches, pronouncements and offhand remarks of the power and policy cliques in Washington you would think there is no such elephant in the room.

And so, I ask: Can I be the only one to wonder whether those shaping and conducting American foreign policy are blind to this immense global shift, or deaf to what the non–West lately has to say to the West, or too stupid to understand events, or in denial, or maybe some of all four?

Blind, deaf, stupid, in gutless denial, this last a subset of stupid: Each of these explanations has its temptations as we assess the cognitive capacities of the elites who sequester themselves inside the Washington Beltway. 

But it has been awfully hard to settle with certainty on the cause of our policy people’s apparent inability or refusal to acknowledge that world history has entered a period of epochal change.

At last an answer to this perplexing question, or a useful suggestion of one. Blind or stupid are not the explanations we are looking for. Deafness and denial are.

I draw these conclusions by way of a speech by Fiona Hill, an over-credentialed foreign policy operative of conspicuous neoliberal convictions. She delivered it last week at a research institute in Estonia, a nation that that sits on the knife’s-edge divide between East and West.

By way of background, Hill is one of those revolving-door people who float on the froth of academic and think tank salaries when not in government. A Russianist by training, she was an intelligence analyst for the Bush II and Obama administrations. 

She then served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council until she turned on Trump during his 2019 impeachment hearings and had a few moments under the Klieg lights. Hill is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and will take up duties this summer as chancellor at Durham, the British university.  

Maybe Hill speaks with a looser tongue now that she will return to her native England. This is hard to say. But I read her speech as a significant expression of the perceptions commonly shared among our policy cliques on both sides of the Atlantic.

It turns out that Hill and her colleagues in Washington and other Western capitals know perfectly well that the non–West’s most influential nations are building a global order that restores the authority of international law and international institutions after decades during which both have been abused or ignored.

I take some comfort, honestly, in knowing that those shaping and executing Western policy are not so blind or stupid as to miss this.

It is cold comfort, I have to add. I conclude from Hill’s remarks that the technocrats, scholars, and political figures who think through and determine U.S.  foreign policy, and by extension the Atlantic world’s, cannot hear those now bringing a new world order into being, and they are in abject denial as to the right responses to this world-turning and profoundly promising undertaking.

‘The Rest’s Rebellion’ 

Hill titled her speech “Ukraine and the New World Disorder,” and subtitled it, “The Rest’s Rebellion Against the United States.” Immediately it is clear she is about to get some things very right and others very wrong. The transcript of this speech is well worth reading. It is here.

To posit that some pre–Ukraine order is to be replaced by a post–Ukraine disorder is to turn the world upside down. To refer to the non–West as “the rest” is hopelessly retro, and in my read Orientalist to the core. 

These errors betray a Western-centric ideology that severely limits the ability of people such as Hill to understand the world as it is. This is what I mean by denial.

At the same time, there are some startling observations in this presentation, given who is doing the observing. Here are a few that are bound to turn the heads of those who have wondered along with me about the blindness, deafness, and so on in Washington:

“The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone.”

And:

“… countries that have traditionally been considered ‘middle powers’ or ‘swing states’ — the so-called ‘Rest’ of the world — seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon.”

And further on:

“… the next iteration of the global security, political and economic system will not be framed by the United States alone. The reality is already something else….”

Remarkable, coming from someone such as Fiona Hill. It makes you wonder about the extent to which a lot of intelligent people in Washington must stifle their thoughts and so seem for all the world stupid.

Captives of an Ideology

On the other side of Hill’s ledger there are misapprehensions and omissions that betray the policy cliques she can be taken informally to represent as captives of an ideology deeply rooted in half a millennium of Western superiority and deeply incapable of accommodating a world based on equality among nations. 

It seems beyond these people to grasp that “the West and the rest” is precisely the binary the non–West proposes to transcend.

Remember when, in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping issued their Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era, which I continue to consider the most significant political document to be published so far in our century? The Russian and Chinese leaders were explicitly anti-anti–Western in that declaration.

Remember when the Chinese Foreign Ministry, this past February, issued its Global Security Initiative Paper, wherein Beijing stated that “the historical trends of peace, development, and win-win cooperation are unstoppable?” Anti-hegemonic powers, yes. Anti–Western, not by any stretch.

Either Hill has not read these papers — perfectly plausible, given the whole of Washington ignored them — or she cannot hear the voices raised in them. Nor does Hill seem to register the elaboration and enlargement of such non–Western partnerships as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. 

The new world order, she told her audience, “is not an ‘order,’ which inherently points to a hierarchy, and perhaps not even a ‘disorder.’”

It is simply wrong, tone deaf. All forms of order are inherently hierarchical? Fiona Hill should travel more often beyond the borders of the West.   

Thankfully enough, Hill goes on to contradict herself on at least some of these points:

“We in the trans–Atlantic community may need to develop some new terminology as well as adapt our foreign policy approaches to deal with horizontal networks of overlapping and sometimes competing structures. …  The regionalization of security, trade, and political alliances complicates our national security strategies and policy planning, but it may also intersect with our priorities in useful ways if we can be flexible and creative — rather than simply resisting and responding when things go in directions we don’t like….”

Again, remarkable. It may be that Hill, who is 57, has chosen an interim that will shortly leave her an ocean away from Washington’s policy circles to speak more candidly than she ever did during her inside-the–Beltway years. While her thinking on this point lies beyond us, those who rotate in and out of power sometimes take such opportunities to say what they would not otherwise dare to say.

Hill’s speech at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn is certainly worthy of interpretation whatever this case may be. I detect in it the very faintest signs that those most intimately involved in shaping U.S. foreign policy will gradually come to understand that pretending the U.S. remains the world’s unchallenged imperium is a game that they can play a little while longer but not forever. 

Most nations we count as non–Western fold their hands as we speak.

Washington’s policy elites still close their ears to what the vast majority of humankind has to say about the 21st century order. They remain in denial. But I don’t think they are blind, after all, to those unstoppable historic trends the Chinese mentioned a couple of months ago.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of  Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Clarity Press. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.  His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

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https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/30/patrick-lawrence-deaf-but-not-blind-on-us-decline/

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YOU KNOW THAT THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS RUN BY A SADISTIC DANGEROUS ENTITY THAT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU AND HATES PEOPLE:

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

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by Jean-Luc Basle

If through Ukraine, the goal of the United States is to dominate the world, there can be no lasting peace, freely consented to by all nations.

A few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in February 1992, the United States declared its intention to no longer tolerate any competitor likely to oppose its vision of the world in a document with an abstruse title: Defense Planning Guidance. The word does not appear in the declaration, but it is hegemony that is in question. The United States intends to be the only masters of the world. It is their destiny. In this scheme, Russia has no place as a sovereign power.

So, should we not be surprised that despite the assurances that would have been given to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not advance an inch to the east, in exchange for its agreement on the reunification of the Germany, NATO aggregated the former nations of the Soviet Empire, apart from Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine.

This last nation is the stumbling block. The United States wants to integrate it into NATO to consolidate its grip on Europe while Russia opposes it for the same security reasons which mean that the United States would never have accepted that Mexico or Canada is part of the Warsaw Pact. We remember the American reaction to the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

It follows that Russia cannot allow Ukraine to join NATO. Vladimir Putin made this known to Westerners during his February 2007 speech in Munich. The United States paid no attention to this, as evidenced by the Bucharest Declaration of April 2008 which formally invites Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. If it were ever to be, Russia's leaders might declare, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, that "from Tallin in the Baltic Sea to Batumi in Georgia an iron curtain has descended across the continent. "

If Ukraine is not a member of NATO de jure, it has been de facto since the Maidan Revolution of February 2014 which ended the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, democratically elected on February 7, 20101. This revolution is a coup hatched by the United States. Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, admitted spending $5 billion to achieve this result during a speech at the National Press Club on April 25, 2014.

We know today thanks to the revelations of Angela Merkel and François Hollande that the Minsk Agreements, supposed to restore calm in the country after the revolution, agreements initialed by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, were just a smokescreen to give Ukraine time to prepare for war. And indeed, from 2014 to 2022, NATO trained the Ukrainian forces. We also know, following the invasion of Russia, that Victoria Nuland expressed concern during a Senate hearing about the fate of the biological laboratories that the United States had installed in Ukraine, fearing that the Russians would have access to American manufacturing secrets.

Modeled on the empire from which they freed themselves, the United States perceived itself as an empire from the outset. In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington describes the nation of which he is president as a “mini empire”. Benjamin Franklin shares this point of view. The Monroe Doctrine confirms this view the nation has of itself. This "manifest" destiny is a fake nose behind which political, economic and financial interests are hidden.

The Mexican-American War of 1848 was imperialist, as was Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan, or the conquest of Hawaii, or the "liberation" of the Philippines which turned into colonization. The aspiration to dominate the world took shape at the end of the Second World War and crystallized after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From imperialist American policy has become hegemonic. It is a mirage, as demonstrated by John Mearsheimer.2

There can be no lasting peace in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world without a renunciation by the United States of its hegemonic vision – a vision that George W. Bush expressed so well when he declared urbi et orbi: “or you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”… the terrorists being destined to disappear. The president of the most powerful nation in the world thinks like a child.

source: Center Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement

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Commenting on today’s attack by Ukrainian UAVs in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed that two days ago Russian forces struck at the headquarters of the military intelligence of Ukraine (GUR). In response, Kiev targeted Russian civilians in Moscow.

The strike on the headquarters of the GUR are confirmed by the footage from Kiev. Traffic was blocked on the Havana Bridge which links Rybalsky Island, where the intelligence headquarters is located, with Podol. The day before, the Russian strike was reported in the area but Ukrainian officials did not confirm it.

Meanwhile, Russian Defence Minister General of the Army Sergei Shoigu held the conference with the leadership of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. He assumed the results of the military operation in Ukraine in MAY, 2023. The most important claims included:

• The Russian military hit another Patriot air defense system in Kiev;
• Over the past month, the AFU lost over 16 thousand servicemen, 16 aircraft, five helicopters, 466 UAVs and more than 400 tanks;
• Russian troops intercepted 29 Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles in a month;
• In addition, 196 HIMARS rockets, 16 HARM missiles were intercepted;
• “Western curators” demand from Kiev to launch a counteroffensive, despite the heavy losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine;
• The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are tracking the ways of supply of Western weapons to Ukraine and are striking at them;
• Large Western arms depots in Khmelnitsky, Ternopol, and Mykolaiv were destroyed in recent days.

READ MORE:

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/05/30/zelenskys-losses-today-2-patriot-systems-29-storm-shadow-missiles-and-all-dead-at-ukraines-military-intelligence-hq-in-kiev/

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FROM Larry Johnson

I invite you to do a thought experiment. Would the Ally invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 have succeeded if Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt had announced they planned to attack the French coast in June? How effective would the Allied force have been if the Germans launched devastating air and missile attacks on the troop assembly points in South East England? You don’t have to be Carl von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu to come up with the answer. The Normandy invasion would have failed. 

[GUS HISTORICAL NOTE: THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM MADE THE GERMANS BELIEVE THAT THERE WOULD BE A LANDING IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS... AS WELL, THE AGGLOMERATION OF TROOPS ON THE ENGLISH SHORES AND HARBOURS, WERE WELL DISGUISED]

So why are Western pundits pinning their hopes on a dramatic Ukrainian success in its highly publicized upcoming offensive when everyday there is news from Ukraine of massive Russian air strikes with missiles and drones on Ukrainian military bases, assembly points and warehouses for vehicles and weapons? Tonight’s Telegram is like the movie Ground Hog day with a new string of reports about Russian strikes across the breadth of Ukraine:

Explosions in Kirovograd region, alarm in central Ukraine

There are explosions in Kiev. According to preliminary information, a swarm of Russian drones strikes critical infrastructure facilities in Kiev and the Kiev region. The air defense is trying to shoot down the wave of attack, unsuccessfully. Local authorities urge everyone to hide in shelters.

The Chernihiv, Cherkasy and Kirovograd regions are also waiting for the arrival of Russian UAVs.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reports explosions in the capital and urges to stay in cover

The Russians are targeting military targets, not civilians, and these attacks are taking a toll on Ukrainian troops and materiel. The mounting casualties in Ukraine also include a growing list of Americans. The guys who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are learning the hard way that Russia is not a bunch of goat herders sporting 50 year old Kalashnikov rifles. The Washington Post produced an article for Memorial Day recounting the deaths of five Americans in Ukraine (sorry, it is behind a paywall). 

Earlier this month, a plane carrying the remains of Marine Corps veteran Grady Kurpasi arrived on U.S. soil, bringing a measure of closure after 13 months of work to bring him home.

In Mobile, Ala., the mother of Cooper Andrews, a retired Marine Corps sergeant killed around Bakhmut on April 19, is fighting to have her son’s remains brought back to the United States.

Memorial Day hits “much harder this year, for obvious reasons,” said Alex Potter, whose husband, Pete Reed, was working as a humanitarian medic in Ukraine when, on Feb. 2, his ambulance was hit by a suspected Russian missile.

Nick Maimer, 45, who had served two decades in the Army, taught English in Spain before Russia’s invasion, he told the Idaho Statesman last year. His “moral compass” guided him to Ukraine, he said. . . .

His death, apparentlyin a building collapse somewhere near the besieged city of Bakhmut earlier this month, was disclosed in a poorly lit video showing Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin.A close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin and his private army have assumed a lead role in the war. In the video, he stands near a lifeless body and taunts the United States. In his hands is a notebook holding Maimer’s Idaho driver’s license and Veterans Affairs card.

The two military officers, crisply attired in blue dress uniforms, ascended the front porch of a single-family home. One clutched a vinyl case containing an ornate white urn and, within, the ashes of Army veteran Andrew Peters.

Andrew Peters, like many other American volunteers in Ukraine, had been affected by the televised images of civilian suffering and by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to military veterans worldwide for help repelling the Russians. . . .

Memorial Day resonates differently this year, he added, with heartache because of his son’s death. But the father knows the situation isn’t quite the same as if Andrew had been killed while in the U.S. military, and he has balked at suggestions from friends that his son’s name should be added to a local memorial that recognizes U.S. troops killed in combat, he said.

I view these men as victims of the U.S. propaganda campaign that portrayed Ukraine as an innocent suddenly attacked, without cause, by the ravaging Russian hordes. That was and is a lie. I give these men the benefit of the doubt that they put their lives on the line to help an underdog without understanding the longstanding NATO effort to weaken and destroy Russia.

If we could go back in time I would have invited these departed souls to watch Andrei Martyanov. Maybe his straight talk could have given them pause:...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y9bdqZgUko

READ MORE:

https://sonar21.com/ukraines-promised-offensive-aint-d-day/

MEANWHILE:

CHICAGO -- It's been a violent and deadly Memorial Day weekend in Chicago with at least 53 shot, 11 fatally, police said.

The shooting victims range in age from 2 to 77 years old, representing every part of the city.

The violence occurred despite a collaborative public safety effort that the new mayor hopes to implement all summer.

In Back of the Yards, a man critically-wounded in the back, and another man was shot in the face in a South Chicago home.

Police said three people were shot while standing on the sidewalk in the 9100-block of South Harper Avenue when someone drove up and fired at around 1:45 a.m.

https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-memorial-day-weekend-shootings-shooting-crime-crimes/13318549/

Shocking video has captured a mob of up to 40 teens viciously beating a trio of off-duty Marines who say they’d merely asked them to stop lighting fireworks on a California beach.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/30/video-shows-off-duty-marines-beaten-by-mob-of-up-to-40-teens/

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Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a ‘bloodbath’ – Orban

The Hungarian prime minister has warned against the much-hyped operation by Kiev’s forces

Everything must be done to avoid a Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces as it would have devastating consequences for Kiev, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.

During an interview with Kossuth Radio on Friday, Orban stated that “even someone like myself with a year-and-a-half experience of military service knows perfectly well... that if I attack, I’ll lose three times more than the one who is on the defense.”

Ukraine likely has a population of “somewhere between 20 to 30 million” at the moment, which is “a fraction” of what Russia has, he said. Russia’s population is over 146 million, according to data from the Federal Statistics Service.

The launch of a major counteroffensive by Kiev in such conditions “would be a bloodbath,” the Hungarian leader warned.

“Even in the best-case scenario [for Kiev], no better result could be achieved... on the battlefield, than what could’ve been reached through negotiations even before the conflict,” he said.

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https://www.rt.com/news/577355-orban-hungary-ukraine-counteroffensive/

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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BY BIG SERGE...

...

So, my current working estimates for losses in the Battle of Bakhmut are some 45,000 for Ukraine, 17,0000 for Wagner, and 5,000 for other Russian forces. 

But perhaps even this misses the point.

Ukraine was losing its army, Russia was losing its prison population.

READ MORE:

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bakhmut-postmortem

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haDrij8046s

The eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was the scene of the largest and most costly battle of the war so far. For more than ten months, the city was under the bombardment of Russian troops, until it fell in May 2023 despite the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians. The documentary follows three young soldiers a few months before the fall of Bakhmut: Vadim Adamov, Mykhailo Alekseenko, and Yuriy Samanyuk. Only one of the three men will survive the second year of the Russian assault on Ukraine.

THE DONBASS CITY OF ARTYOMOVSK WAS THE SCENE OF....

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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 SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4A8dGc-v4