A new mood in the world will put an end to the Global Monroe Doctrine: The Forty-Seventh Newsletter (2023)

       By Vijay Prashad (Posted Nov 27, 2023)

 

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Every day since 7 October has felt like an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, with hundreds of thousands gathering in Istanbul, a million in Jakarta, and then yet another million across Africa and Latin America to demand an end to the brutal attack being carried out by Israel (with the collusion of the United States). It is impossible to keep up with the scale and frequency of the protests, which are in turn pushing political parties and governments to clarify their stances on Israel’s attack on Palestine. These mass demonstrations have generated three kinds of outcomes:

1. They have drawn a new generation not only into pro-Palestine activity, but into anti-war—if not anti-imperialist—consciousness.
2. They have drawn in a new section of activists, particularly trade unionists, who have been inspired to stop the shipment of goods to and from Israel (including in places such as Europe and India, where the governments have supported Israel’s attacks).
3. They have generated a political process to challenge the hypocrisy of the Western-led ‘rules-based international order’ to demand that the International Criminal Court indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli government officials.

No war in recent years—not even the ‘shock and awe’ campaign used by the United States against Iraq in 2003—has been as ruthless in its use of force. Most horrifying is the reality that civilians, penned in by the Israeli occupation, have no escape from the heavy bombardment. Nearly half (at least 5,800) of the more than 14,000 civilians that have been murdered are children. No amount of Israeli propaganda has been able to convince billions of people around the world that this violence is a righteous rejoinder for the 7 October attack. Visuals from Gaza show the disproportionate and asymmetrical nature of Israel’s violence over the past seventy-five years.

A new mood has taken root amongst billions of people in the Global South and been mirrored by millions in the Global North who no longer take the attitudes of U.S. leaders and their Western allies at face value. A new study by the European Council of Foreign Relations shows that ‘much of the rest of the world wants the war in Ukraine to stop as soon as possible, even if it means Kyiv losing territory. And very few people—even in Europe—would take Washington’s side if a war erupted between the U.S. and China over Taiwan’. The council suggests that this is due to the ‘loss of faith in the West to order the world’. More precisely, most of the world is no longer willing to be bullied by the West (as South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor put it). Over the last 200 years, the U.S. government’s Monroe Doctrine has been instrumental in justifying this type of bullying. To better understand the significance of this key policy in upholding U.S. dominance over the world order, the rest of this newsletter features briefing no. 11 from No Cold War, It Is Time to Bury the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1823, James Monroe, then president of the United States, told the U.S. Congress that his government would stand against European interference in the Americas. What Monroe meant was that Washington would, from then on, treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its ‘backyard’, grounded by a policy known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Over the past 200 years, the U.S. has operated in the Americas along this grain, exemplified by the more than 100 military interventions against countries in the region. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and its Global North allies have attempted to expand this policy into a Global Monroe Doctrine, most destructively in Western Asia.

 

Progressive Waves

Despite this repression, waves of popular movements continued to shape the region’s political culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, these movements toppled the military dictatorships put in place by Operation Condor and then inaugurated a cycle of progressive governments inspired by the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and propelled forward by the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The U.S. response to this progressive upsurge was yet again driven by the Monroe Doctrine as it sought to secure the interests of private property above the needs of the masses. This counterrevolution has employed three main instruments:

1. Coups. Since 2000, the U.S. has attempted to conduct ‘traditional’ military coups d’état on at least twenty-seven occasions, with some of these attempts succeeding, such as in Honduras (2009), while many others were defeated, as in Venezuela (2002).
2. Hybrid Wars. In addition to the military coup, the U.S. has also developed a series of tactics to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty, such as information warfare, lawfare, diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference. This hybrid war strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example, against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’ measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In Brazil, the U.S. worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.

 

1. Economic Sanctions. The use of illegal, unilateral coercive measures—including economic sanctions and blockades—are a key instrument of the Monroe Doctrine. The U.S. has employed such instruments for decades (since 1960 in the case of Cuba) and expanded their use in the twenty-first century against countries such as Venezuela. The Latin American Strategic Geopolitics Centre (CELAG) showed that U.S. sanctions against Venezuela led to the loss of more than three million jobs from 2013 to 2017 while the Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that sanctions have reduced the public’s caloric intake and increased disease and mortality, killing 40,000 people in a single year while endangering the lives of 300,000 others.

End the Monroe Doctrine

U.S. attempts to undermine progressive politics in Latin America, underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, have not been entirely successful. The return of left-wing governments to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and Honduras after U.S.-backed right-wing regimes illustrates this failure. Another sign is the resilience of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions. To date, while efforts to expand the Monroe Doctrine around the world have caused immense destruction, they have failed to install stable client regimes, as we saw with the defeat of U.S. projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nonetheless, Washington remains undeterred and has shifted its focus to the Asia-Pacific to confront China.

Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the U.S. government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.

 

Today, the ugliness of the war on Gaza suffocates our consciousness. Em Berry, a poet from Aotearoa, New Zealand, wrote a beautiful poem on the name Gaza and the atrocities being inflicted upon its people by apartheid Israel:

This morning I learned
The English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word غزة or Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then

how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us

Warmly,

Vijay

 

https://mronline.org/2023/11/27/a-new-mood-in-the-world-will-put-an-end-to-the-global-monroe-doctrine/

 

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According to the Israeli media, the July Israeli governmental crisis can be explained by IDF admonitions that Hamas was preparing to launch, from Gaza, “a perfect storm” against Israel.
General Amit Saar, head of the IDF Military Intelligence Research Department, wrote to the Prime Minister on 19 March and 16 July, warning him of an impending Hamas attack. He explained that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran interpreted the domestic debate taking place over fundamental legislative reforms as a sign of Israel’s internal weakness.

General Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, then asked Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off the reforms and focus on the threat coming from Hamas. He was immediately shown the door. However, in view of the uproar that followed his dismissal, the Prime Minister went back on his decision and finally reinstated Gallant in his ministerial functions.

This incident is not disputed. It has been corroborated by the release of Amir Saar’s letters. It gives the lie to the official version to the effect that the alerts sent to the government had not reached the Prime Minister and that, in any case, he was too busy with the West Bank to worry about Gaza.

The possibility of a false flag attack cannot, therefore, be discarded.

This episode is not in dispute. It is today attested by the publication of the letters of Amir Saar. He rejects the official version according to which the alerts sent to the government had not reached the Prime Minister and that, in any case, he was too busy with the West Bank to worry about Gaza.

The question of a false flag attack is raised.

 Gaia Edwards https://www.voltairenet.org/article220071.html  READ FROM TOP. FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW

Cognizant that a Hamas defeat is unlikely, Israel’s prime minister is set on prolonging the Gaza war, primarily to buy time, safeguard his political legacy, and avoid jail time.

The Cradle’s Palestine Correspondent

NOV 28, 2023

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Regardless of how Israel’s brutal war on the Gaza Strip ends, one undeniable outcome seems to be emerging – the potential demise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. 

Beyond the immediate repercussions of the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, Netanyahu’s troubles have deep roots, entwined with his relentless efforts to avoid corruption charges and possible imprisonment. This led him to form the most extreme, far-right government in Israel’s history, indirectly setting the stage for the historic operation launched by the Palestinian resistance on 7 October.

The occupation state’s military and security establishment, while thought to have been caught off guard by the scale of events on 7 October, had sensed the impending volatility in besieged Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and even the territories occupied in 1948. 

The actions of extremist ministers like Finance Minister Bezalel Somotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom Netanyahu shielded to maintain the unity of his fragile coalition government, have inarguably contributed to the brewing crisis.

Amidst the carnage and devastation of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, Tel Aviv’s internal political crisis is seeping into the mini-war cabinet assembled to direct the war. The divergence between Netanyahu and military officials, coupled with his initial refusal to pursue a humanitarian truce and prisoner release initiatives, hints at a crisis rooted in the premier himself.

The prime minister’s desperation to cling to his political immunity and avoid imprisonment has him eager to prolong the war on Gaza. He believes it will give him time to strike an exit settlement—likely under US sponsorship—to avert a fate similar to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s post-Lebanon aggression in 2006. This, despite the thousands of Israeli troop deaths and injuries the conflict has borne.

Netanyahu, fully cognizant that eliminating Hamas is an impossible goal, is nonetheless publicly employing this war objective as cover for other strategically beneficial outcomes he is chasing: control over Gaza’s gas, Palestinian displacement projects to Sinai and Jordan, pushing for direct US-Iran confrontations, and the shedding of his extremist allies. 

Likud’s internal struggle

Banking on Washington’s support amidst President Joe Biden’s preoccupation with the 2024 presidential elections, European sympathy intertwined with Israeli gas needs, and Arab expressions of concern without substantive action, Netanyahu is engaged in a high-stakes gamble.

The potential reoccupation of the Gaza coast, with its gas wealth and strategic location – increasingly perceived by some observers to be Israel’s end game in the war – stands as an additional prize for Netanyahu, whose political standing is increasingly fragile. 

 

Beyond the immediate gains, a resurrection of an old Israeli project – the Ben Gurion Canal from northern Gaza to Eilat – could reshape regional geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics by bypassing Egypt’s Suez Canal.

However, Netanyahu’s paramount concern isn’t just the war’s outcome or a decline in international support. It is the impending split within his party. The Likud Party recognizes Netanyahu as the source of years-long political crises, marked by five unproductive elections since 2019 and deepening political divisions in Israel. 

The prime minister’s legacy now hangs precariously in the balance as the occupation state contends with the multifaceted political, economic, and security repercussions of its Gaza war. 

If anything, Israel’s disproportionate military response against an overwhelmingly civilian population – more than 20,000 Palestinians killed in six weeks – has worsened the occupation state’s security conditions by drawing in the involvement of the region’s Axis of Resistance, prominently from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, but more audaciously from Yemen’s Ansarallah-led forces. 

The growing sentiment within the Likud party is that its viability in power is increasingly contingent on ousting its leader. This conviction gained traction with the recent proposition from opposition leader and Yesh Atid party head, Yair Lapid. Essentially, Lapid offered to participate in a Likud government because Netanyahu did not lead it.

Conversely, Netanyahu’s far-right allies recognize that the current government is their sole opportunity to maintain power and implement their extremist agendas. They use this leverage to coerce Netanyahu into retaining financial contributions to religious parties and institutions, legalizing Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian lands, and concealing crimes against Palestinians—a factor contributing to Al-Aqsa Flood.

Netanyahu acknowledges that the visible involvement of the US in his war could complicate matters further. However, Biden is equally cautious about direct engagement, given the grave threats to and actions against US military bases in Iraq and Syria that are directly correlated to Israel’s escalations in both Gaza and on its Lebanese border.

 

Al-Aqsa Flood also succeeded in postponing the White House’s Israeli-Saudi normalization project and dampening existing ones – at least until a palatable Palestinian settlement is struck. Any US involvement in Israel’s war would significantly boost the interests of its Russian and Chinese adversaries throughout West Asia and beyond. 

Waiting game in Washington 

With the upcoming presidential elections, the incumbent Democrats may struggle to withstand these threats to US regional interests. As public sentiment turns sharply against Israel’s Gaza brutalities, there is rising domestic dissatisfaction with Biden’s continuous requests for military and financial aid to Ukraine and Israel – as his latest appeal for $106 billion demonstrates.

Biden’s challenges are only exacerbated by his already strained relations with Netanyahu’s government. Before 7 October, those tensions existed because the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies refused to even contemplate a two-state solution. Washington sees Netanyahu as a major obstacle to any political resolution in occupied Palestine.

If the Biden administration can lay the foundation for a two-state solution – elusive and improbable as it may be – it could exploit this politically and chalk down a “win.” Netanyahu, on his part, aims to prolong the Gaza aggression until Washington yields to his agenda or until there’s a change in the White House. 

Despite some regional and western actors banking on the war’s outcome opening a pathway to restart talks on a permanent peace settlement, the Israeli army has yet to achieve any substantial victory against Hamas. Despite rising extremism post-Al-Aqsa Flood, voices in Israel still express adherence to the land-for-peace equation, notably articulated by opposition leader Yair Lapid.

Striking a balance between deadlock and opportunity, ongoing efforts aim to guide all parties toward a settlement. However, time is becoming a critical factor for the White House. 

 

The occupation state’s myriad challenges, from confronting threats from West Asia’s resistance axis, and countering Chinese and Russian influence, to overcoming the political liabilities of the Netanyahu government, weigh heavily. Significantly, the potential fallout from a Netanyahu failure looms large, and no geopolitical projects will be able obscure its consequences.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/11/28/netanyahus-end-game-in-gaza-is-his-own-political-survival/

 

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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has declined an invitation by a senior Hamas official to tour Gaza to see the fallout of the relentless Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave. The South African billionaire recently paid a visit to Israel during which he agreed that the country had no other choice but to destroy Hamas.

On Tuesday, Osama Hamdan, a member of the Hamas politburo, told a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon, that the Palestinian armed group would be happy to show Musk “the extent of the massacres and destruction committed against the people of Gaza, in compliance with the standards of objectivity and credibility.” 

Asked by a user on X (formerly Twitter) to comment on the invitation, Musk replied that “[it] seems a bit dangerous there right now.” “But I do believe that a long-term prosperous Gaza is good for all sides,” he added.

The US tycoon’s remarks came after Musk traveled to Israel on Monday, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, and walked through a kibbutz destroyed by Hamas.

https://www.rt.com/news/588186-musk-hamas-invitation-gaza/

 

GUSNOTE: THE KIBBUTZ SEEN BY ELON MUSK "HAD BEEN RAIDED BY HAMAS" BUT WAS DESTROYED BY THE ISRAELI FORCES...

 

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