It’s Back to the Future for U.S. Grand Strategy

By Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

BACK TO THE FUTURE? GRAND STRATEGY???? THIS IS PROPAGANDA MALAISE AND CLICHE GALORE.....

Angela IS A FULL-ON PRODUCT OF THE US HEGEMONY. Her comments are in normal type, GUS'S COMMENTS ARE IN CAPS....

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine ended the first phase of the post-Cold War era. 

The Warrior Games is a multi-sport event for wounded, injured or ill service personnel and veterans organized by the United States Department of Defense (DoD).

The Army hosted the games for the second time in 2022, August 19–28. 

In 1990, scientists from around the world published a report that spelled out that the climate was changing and that we — human beings — were the cause.

If we continued polluting, with business as usual …

"Emissions of greenhouse gases … will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 degree Celsius above the present value by 2025, and 3C before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady."

This is a story about a story that nobody else seems to think is a story.

When the story is about the Governor-General’s rather odd support of an $18 million charity, hot on the heels of the Governor-General’s rather odd silence at the time of Scott Morrison’s rather odd secret ministerial job collection, well, this old journalist finds it rather odd.

BY Michael Pascoe

What is with politicians and tanks and other armoured vehicles?

In 1988, Michael Dukakis doomed his already slim US presidential hopes by allowing himself to look ridiculous in a 68 tonne Abrams Main Battle Tank. Liz Truss, possibly the next Tory PM, was ridiculed for appearing in full military gig in Estonia. Kim Beazley (Bomber Beazley to colleagues) was often perched on military vehicles.

Scott Morrison, in between squeezing into Bathurst 500 cars, squeezed into a fighter jet and even Malcolm Turnbull was pictured in a Victorian-built armoured vehicle – albeit a tad uncomfortably – while dressed in an elegant suit rather than combat gear.

On Aug. 17 Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky ratified Law 5371, which removes rights for workers at small and medium-sized companies. It will be effective for as long as the country is under martial law — a qualification added at the last minute, under pressure from trade unions.

Under the new law, people who work for firms with up to 250 employees will now be covered by contracts they negotiate as individuals with their bosses, rather than the national labour code.

By ODR Team
openDemocracy

In practice, this means that around 70 percent of workers in Ukraine have been stripped of many labour protections.

The Ukraine war has generated great controversy, but of one point there can be no doubt, and Benjamin Abelow, a physician with a longstanding interest in public affairs, has properly emphasized this in his brief and excellent book. The policy of the United States toward the war, and more generally toward the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, has been one of direct confrontation rather than peaceful accommodation.

“If you have an old kettle that takes ages to boil, it may cost you £20 to replace it, but if you get a new one, you’ll save £10 a year every year on your electricity bill,” outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared in his final policy speech to reporters in Suffolk on Thursday. 

Johnson explained that financial assistance for families facing record-high energy bills, which are expected to exceed £3,500 annually on average when the price cap is lifted in October, would be determined by his successor – either Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. However, he reassured onlookers that it would be plentiful. “Of course, there will be more cash to come, whoever takes over from me, in the months ahead – substantial sums, that’s absolutely clear,” he said.

The Ukrainian conflict, presented as a Russian aggression, is only the implementation of the Security Council resolution 2202 of February 17, 2015. If France and Germany did not keep their commitments during the Minsk II Agreement, Russia prepared itself for seven years for the current confrontation. It had foreseen the Western sanctions well in advance and needed only two months to circumvent them. These sanctions disrupt US globalization, disrupt Western economies by breaking supply chains, causing dollars to flow back to Washington and causing general inflation, and creating energetics in the West. The United States and its allies are in the position of being the hosers hosed: they are digging their own grave. Meanwhile, the Russian Treasury’s revenues have increased by 32% in six months.

I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adult at the end of the one, 40-year-long period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector and significant public housing. We thought it would last forever. 

A deeply flawed culture is spreading throughout the world epitomised by today’s global, technocratic and managerial elite with growing inequality and concentration of wealth and power.

Cultures define what we know about the world, and so what we do in the world. We need to pay them more attention.

By Richard Eckersley

When I was young, back in the 1970s, I spent two years travelling across the world: by truck with a group through Africa from south to north; in a campervan with a friend through northern and eastern Europe and Russia; on foot along most of the south coast of Crete; and by boat, bus, truck and train across Asia to India and Nepal.

Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined legions of world leaders in paying tribute to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was reported dead on Tuesday at age 91.

“There’s an old saying, ‘Never meet your heroes,’” the Terminator star wrote on Twitter, posting a photo of himself with Gorbachev. “I think that’s some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard.”

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It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink 

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known; cities of men 

For centuries, it was the dream of the Jewish people to reach the “Promised Land,” to have a place they could call home. 125 years ago, in the Swiss city of Basel on the banks of the Rhine, that dream began to take shape.

Unsuspecting of the horrors that the 20th century had in store for them – the Holocaust, mass migration from Europe and the exodus from Arab countries – 204 Jews from 17 countries came together to formulate the first political program of the Zionist movement, paving the way for the eventual creation of the Israeli state.

Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face.

Donald Trump becoming president? You must be kidding! 

If you want a bizarre image, just imagine him in the company of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, really, what’s happened to us?

BY Tom Engelhardt