Tel Aviv – John Malcolm

By James Lewis | June 18, 2012 | American Thinker

In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That’s after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their “scientific” policies this time around.

Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.

So much for eradicating human nature.

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By Omri Ceren | August 16, 2011 | Commentary Magazine

Now this is just getting silly. The Obama White House is gearing up for a Supreme Court case in which it will defend its refusal to list “Jerusalem, Israel” on the passports of Americans born in the Israeli capital. As part of its preparations the administration recently scrubbed all the captions on a White House photo gallery of Vice President Biden in the city, changing “Jerusalem, Israel” to “Jerusalem.” The optics of methodically erasing the word “Israel” from the White House webpage caused a predictable uproar.

By Viktor Burbaki | May 11, 2012 | Russia & India Report

The world is entering a transition epoch, during which a big war over natural resources and spheres of influence, along with series of preceding regional conflicts, become a virtually inescapable.

Traditional “family photo” at the G8 summit meeting in Deauville in 2011. Source: en.wikipedia.org

The dynamics unraveling within the world system and driving deep transformations of the existing centre – semi-periphery – periphery layout is prone with a proliferation of serious armed conflicts.

This big war is looming on the horizon as the US is readying the scene for it in the Middle East. Far too many forces seem convinced that the war has to be the solution of choice to the lingering global crisis. In the meantime, watchers are trying to descern the objectives behind the brewing conflict. The first part of the agenda is not deeply hidden – the war should:

help switch the attention of the Western population from the crisis to the fight against a “global enemy”;
create conditions for writing off the sky-high sovereign debts;
stop the US slide towards a new great depression, revitalize the country’s economy and give it a fresh start;
re-institute the US leadership within the world system;
perpetuate the existing financial order based on the broadly interpreted Washington consensus and the status of the US Federal Reserve as the global money-printing factory.

The same agenda, however, includes a taboo part – the plan is supposed to guarantee the survival of Israel which retains the occupied Palestinian territories and can only exist in the settings of permanent confrontation with its neighbors, provided that the West unwaveringly supports it and the Israeli military superiority in the region continues into the future. So far, Israel has had a potential to crash practically any coalition of Arab countries, while its regional nuclear-arms monopoly serves Tel Aviv both as a means of containment and a safeguard in case an armed conflict does erupt and takes an unexpected turn. Israel absent the enemies surrounding it – a small state with no natural resources on premises – is a picture impossible to imagine. The reason why these days Israel desperately needs a great war are:

a military triumph would confirm Israel’s high global status;
the outbreak of war would make it impossible for the crisis-ridden West, especially for the US, the country accounting for 22% of Israel’s foreign trade and known to pour an extra $3.71b into it in direct aid, to terminate or to considerably reduce support for Israel. It is worth mentioning in the context that Germany paid the last portion of compensations to Israel for World War II crimes in 2011. Under normal conditions, propping up Israel alone may seem too heavy a burden for the US;
the war would put an end to Iran’s nuclear program and spare Israel any potential regional rivalry in the nuclear arms sphere.

The third and, arguably, the top secret part of the big war agenda is the rebuilding of the global colonial system.

Classic colonialism dominated the world for over five centuries and was partially pushed off the global stage only in the second half of the XX century when the USSR established itself as a world power. At the moment, one gets an impression that, due to the logic of the Western economic development, the brief post-colonial interregnum is nearing the end. Under pressure from competitors, the Western economic system is sustainable only as long as it can draw additional resources from the outside. It’s stability takes the existence of a subordinate periphery supplying the world system core at affordable costs.

The recent developments – from the seizure of Iraq and Afghanistan to the rape of Libya and the spill of the Arab Spring – leave no doubt that the world system periphery faces a new round of colonial conquests. The geopolitical process is likely imminent since a power capable of mounting serious opposition to it is completely missing in today’s world, and the only aspect of the situation that currently remains unclear is whether the revival of colonialism will follow a bipolar pattern, with the US and the EU securing a grip on the rest of the world, or some sort of an alternative colonization model is going to emerge.

The world subject to a new wave of colonization will see a sweeping re-codification of the international law and a full scale-demise of its former Yalta-Potsdam framework. The transformation will include a definitive departure from the underlying principles of the UN charter, the elimination, on an institutional level, of the permanent UN Security Council membership, and radical adjustments to the notion that sovereign countries should be treated as equal partners in international politics. In a not-so-distant future, occupation and colonization – if perpetrated in the confines of “recognized” spheres of influence – will be legitimized as substitutes for self-determination and sovereign nations’ rights to stay insulated from meddling. The West is already restoring the two-level format of the international relations which allows complete sovereignty exclusively to the countries belonging to the world system core and leaving the periphery with strictly the amount of decision-making freedom transnational corporations can painlessly tolerate.

Read the full article here.