RT — Do you believe it's OUR goal? Putin says he knows ‘very well’ who seeks to rule the world

Faced with a rather provocative question from the WSJ Moscow Bureau Chief, Ann Maria Simmons, Putin said that “when it comes to ruling the world we know very well where the headquarters [of those], who are trying to do exactly that,” is located. “And it’s not in Moscow,” the president added, speaking at an annual Q&A session in Moscow.…

All the speculation about Russia’s supposed aspirations for the world dominance are nothing but a “mentality imposed by some to achieve internal goals,” the president said...

Ha ha. The US already declared it in the Wolfowitz doctrine.

RT
Do you believe it's OUR goal? Putin says he knows ‘very well’ who seeks to rule the world

Caitlan Johnstone — Russiagate Isn’t About Trump, And It Isn’t Even Ultimately About Russia

Caitlan Johnstone gets the policy, strategy and tactics right, in line what we have been saying here for some time.

It's about the US maintaining and extending global hegemony in face of the challenge of China's rise.

The 2018 US National Defense Strategy all but spells it out.

We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order…

Translation: The so-called international liberal order that held sway in the West since the end of WWII is fracturing, challenging Western hegemony under "US leadership."

China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea. Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors....

The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.

 Translation: Other countries are no longer doing what the US tells them to do as global leader. That is unacceptable under the Wolfowitz doctrine, that the US will brook no rivals.

The Greanville Post
Russiagate Isn’t About Trump, And It Isn’t Even Ultimately About Russia

Caitlan Johnstone

Ulson Gunnar — Continuity of Agenda: US Encirclement of China Continues Under Trump

The United States has pursued a decades-long policy of encircling, containing and if possible, undermining China as part of a larger strategy of achieving and maintaining what US policy papers call “primacy” over Asia.

US policy has led to deeply-rooted networks operating within China’s borders and along China’s geopolitical peripheries to divide and destabilize the immense and increasingly powerful Asian state. These networks are funded and supported regardless of who occupies the White House. While the rhetoric shifts from president to president regarding “why” the US is providing so-called “activists” and “opposition” fronts aid, the aid and the agenda it serves continues....

Longish, with a lot of detail. Backgrounder for those who want to understand what is happening in on the Grand Chessboard in the Great Game for dominance of the World Island through control of the Eurasian landmass.

It is clear enough that China is being systematically targeted and undermined within its own borders by US foreign policy stretching from the end of World War II and continuing to present day. However, just as important, are US efforts to encircle, contain and undermine China along its peripheries.

This includes Southeast Asia where the US has spent decades attempting to influence and control the region. This included the outright invasion of Vietnam, proxies wars fought in neighboring Laos and Cambodia and political upheaval the US has sponsored everywhere from Myanmar to Malaysia and Thailand to Indonesia....

NEO
Continuity of Agenda: US Encirclement of China Continues Under Trump

Ulson Gunnar

John Robb — Delaying Chinese Global Dominance

How strategists think.

Global Guerrillas
Delaying Chinese Global Dominance

John Robb

Daniel Lazare — The Dangerous Decline of US Hegemony

The bigger picture behind Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, Syria and North Korea is the image of a decaying but dangerous American hegemon resisting the start of new multipolar order, explains Daniel Lazare.…

Unipolarity will slink off to the sidelines while multilateralism takes center stage. Given that U.S. share of global GDP has fallen by better than 20 percent since 1989, a retreat is inevitable. America has tried to compensate by making maximum use of its military and political advantages. That would be a losing proposition even if it had the most brilliant leadership in the world. Yet it doesn’t. Instead, it has a President who is an international laughingstock, a dysfunctional Congress, and a foreign-policy establishment lost in a neocon dream world. As a consequence, retreat is turning into a disorderly rout.

This is not just official Washington but the entire Anglo-American and European power structure — "the Atlantacists" —  that has dominated the global beginning in the 16th century.  Could have another world war over it as the Atlanticists struggle to maintain position. They realize that position cannot be maintained statically but must be advanced through expansion of control. These are parlous times for humanity with the world brisling with WMD and not just nukes.

See Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History for the rise and fall of civilizations.

Also Oswald Spengler.

Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency whose countering would necessitate Caesarism (extraconstitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of the central government).

This also coincides with the work of Strauss and Howe, and also Ravi Batra, under the influence of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.

While historical trend analysis is far from precise, it provides a framework for thinking about issues that are complex owing to reflexivity and involve emergence that necessitates adaptation.

This dynamic is a whole lot bigger than the Thyucides trap between the US and China.

Many forces are converging now — natural forces like climate change, social forces like conflict of value structures and competing ideologies, and artificial forces like technological disruption brought by the "third, fourth and fifth industrial revolutions," which also have military implications.

"The times they are a-changin'."

Consortium News
The Dangerous Decline of US Hegemony
Daniel Lazare

Oliver Stone — The Russians Are Coming

Summary of the crazy. 

Stone doesn't mention the method in the madness though, which is at least in part feeding the military-industrial complex. 

Another part is promoting the power structure, which is under populist attack and wobbling on its feet after the electoral blow struck by Donald Trump. 

A third is maintaining global hegemony in accordance Wolfowitz Doctrine. 

A fourth is imposing liberal globalization in accordance with the Washington Consensus. 

The Very Serious People are struggling to look serious.

Includes links to supporting material.

Oliver Stone at Medium
The Russians Are Coming
Oliver Stone

Tony Cartalucci — Syria’s War Was Only Ever the Beginning

Documented.

NEO
Syria’s War Was Only Ever the Beginning

Tony Cartalucci

James Holmes — Why the World Should Fear a 'Thucydidean' China

This is an interesting article from the perspective of psychological projection. Professor Holmes projects onto China the behavior of the American Empire asserting its right to global hegemony as "exceptional" and "the indispensable nation" that gets to make the rules.

In comparison China has so far has done very little to project its power, while the US has been encircling China militarily.

Moreover,the Chinese government certainly has not claimed global hegemony as the US did in the Wolfowitz Doctrine. And has the good professor forgotten about the Monroe Doctrine that claimed hemispheric hegemony in 1823 and America's ongoing intrusion in the internal affairs of Latin American countries?

Moreover, the People Liberation Army officers that Holmes quotes are not in a position of authority to speak for the Chinese government on Chinese foreign policy.

Interestingly also, Holmes uses the term "Thucydidean." Certainly he is aware that the Thucydides trap refers to a country in decline going to war with a rising power challenging it to maintain position and that international relations (IR) experts have applied it to the US-China relationship. President Xi was so concerned it was becoming an IR meme that he addressed while in the US, brushing it off as irrelevant in today's world of mutuality.

It appears to be yet another example US pessimism and paranoia.

The National Interest
Why the World Should Fear a 'Thucydidean' China

James Holmes | Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College

Federico Pieraccini — From Bush to Trump: Culture, Economy and War. The Pillars of the New World Order

Good summary of American geopolitics and geostrategy since WWII.

Strategic Culture
From Bush to Trump: Culture, Economy and War. The Pillars of the New World Order

Federico Pieraccini

Pepe Escobar — Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington

Wondering why HRC is charging Russia with "aggression" in Syria when Russia was invited in by the current sovereign whereas the US is in Syria illegally and is itself the aggressor. Similarly, why is Ash Carter charing China with "aggression" in developing reefs in the South China Sea in waters that China as claimed historically, while the US sits on the other side of the Pacific Ocean?

Pepe Escobar explains.

RT
Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington
Pepe Escobar

FB Ali — One Belt, One Road

Where the geopolitical, geostrategic, economic action is.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
One Belt, One Road

FB Ali

Richard Sale — Ideology and Hillary’s Foreign Policy

It's about much more than Hillary.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Ideology and Hillary’s Foreign Policy

Richard Sale

Kai Elhers — The Ukraine-Syria Complex: What Does Putin Want?

…the often puzzled-over breakup of the former “friendship” between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo(ğ)an can be explained here. With the loss being a transit country in Syrian-Iranian pipeline project, Turkey didn’t just lose a lucrative transit operation. They lost out on the possibility of exerting pressure on the EU.

What happened after this situation was created is understandable only in a geopolitical sense. First of all, let’s envision again the current basic situation that can viewed as a juxtapostition of all the three major transformation trends currently happening around the globe: the post-Soviet partitioning of the world, the crisis of the nation state, and the fundamental problem of how we want to live in the future if we’re not subject to the spent “either-or” of socialism OR capitalism.

These three basic trends overlap each other. At the overlap points, alternating knots of conflict are formed which — after they’ve been broken up and used — are generally left unresolved as whole, or they remain as half-frozen deferred conflicts. Only to name the last few: the day before yesterday [it was] Moldova [and] Georgia; yesterday the Ukraine; today Syria and the entire “Crescent.” Maybe tomorrow [it will be] the North Pole, whose territorial claim provides the start [of a new conflict] for those already driving their marked stakes into the ground.

As different as these conflicts are, there’s one constant variable, a common thread that runs through all of them: the containment of Russia as a potential rival for the US, who still sees itself as the only world power. The possible conflict with China, India, and other countries that might connect themselves to Russia is lurking in the background.

Why Russia? It cannot be repeated enough: because Russia is the only country that has, throughout its history, evaded the control and associated exploitation of its resources through the colonial grip of the West — and it continues to this day.

Let’s direct our attention to the Ukraine and Syria. The method is essentially the same in each case. The main message is as follows:

• Russia can no longer remain an empire without the Ukraine.
• Without its alliance with Syria, Russia can only realize the half of its resource-based exports.…

Russia Insider
The Ukraine-Syria Complex: What Does Putin Want?
Kai Elhers
Originally appeared at Hintergrund.
Translated from the German by Susan Neumann

Dan Sanchez — How Russia's Syria Campaign Shocked the Neocon Quest for Empire

Good read.

Russia Insider
How Russia's Syria Campaign Shocked the Neocon Quest for Empire

Dan Sanchez

Fort Russ — Former Prime Minister of France: "The Americans are going too far"

Imperial overreach. Just as Charles de Gaulle warned and Gaullists continue to hold. Maybe more agree now, especially with the recent revelations about espionage.

Fort Russ
Former Prime Minister of France: "The Americans are going too far"
Translated from French by Tom Winter

John Feffer — Tomgram: John Feffer, Why the World Is Becoming the Un-Sweden

Today, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, offers a cunning bow to the convergence theorists of the Cold War era, a crew of thinkers who imagined that someday the two superpowers would merge into one conglomerate creature in strangely upbeat ways. In reality, as he points out, “convergence” (even in an era that lacks the Soviet Union) has turned out to be a dismally downbeat process. He does, however, skip the earliest convergence theorist of them all, who happened to be a novelist rather than an economist or a philosopher. I’m talking about George Orwell who, in his novel 1984 (published in 1948 just as the Cold War was ramping up to a low burn), imagined the convergence of the worst of West and East, of capitalist America and communist Russia, in a state so memorably malign that, almost seven decades later, everyone, including Edward Snowden, still remembers Big Brother.

The NSA's global surveillance state, revealed by Snowden, managed to put even the dreams of the totalitarian states of the previous century in the shade (and caused sales of 1984 to spike) -- and it's but one reminder of Orwell’s foresight. So many other details of our moment from black sites and kidnapping schemes to torture and assassination programs remind us that, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, convergence of a sort still seems to be in the cards. Here’s the strange thing, though: if a kind of eerie version of convergence is indeed underway, as Feffer so memorably suggests, in the organized precincts of what used to be called the First and Second Worlds -- the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China -- in the former Third World, or at least across vast stretches of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, a process that might be called divergence seems to be gaining strength. The power of states is weakening, fragmenting, or simply dissolving amid the growth of extremist organizations, sectarian or sectional militias, and terror groups.

As miraculous as Orwell was -- and in the earliest days of the television age he managed to conjure up a future world in which the screen would be omnipresent and everyone could be surveilled, tracked, and controlled through it -- he had no way of imagining such a strange form of divergence. Its origins seem to lie, at least in part, in a twenty-first-century American urge to take its much-ballyhooed role as the planet’s last remaining superpower to heart and essentially try to rule the world. This desire to create a planetary Pax Americana (and an American Pax Republicana) led the Bush administration to punch a devastating hole in the oil heartlands of the planet, setting off a storm of sectarian chaos within which old systems of control, already frayed, began to collapse and whose endpoint is, at present, beyond our ken.

Convergence and divergence, centralization and fragmentation: it’s a vision of a planet that’s not exactly Orwellian, but certainly represents a nightmare worthy of some still-to-be-discovered Orwell of our moment. In the meantime, while we await the novel 2051, let John Feffer tell you about the dark, converging world of 2015. Tom

Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: John Feffer, Why the World Is Becoming the Un-Sweden
John Feffer

Jon Hellevig — Ex-NATO Chief Calls for Holy Crusade Against Russia in the Name of “Democracy”

Jon Hellevig smacks down Rasmussen's Project Syndicate piece, link to here at MNE previously.

In his op-ed in Project Syndicate, ex-NATO chief and former Danish PM Anders “Fog of War” Rasmussen calls for war against Russia in the name of democracy and the ever so elusive “Western values”. “The current conflict between Russia and the West is, at its core, a clash of values,” he announces to start with, but then through a seriously convoluted brain process arrives at the conclusion that “It is about democracy.” In his mind the latter must be the distilled sublime product of the former. And since it is about democracy, Mr. Fog of War reasons, “the West must respond accordingly.”

I cannot fathom why on earth this concept, “democracy”, this linguistic abstraction, stirs such passions in a man who, by all formal counts, should rank among the best that his nation, with its long traditions of progress, has produced. Isn’t this guy in actual fact taking us a thousand years back and calling for a Holy Crusade against Russia? The crusades were military campaigns in the name of a God and true interpretation of the scripture. They were sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages with the ostensible goal to restore Christian access to holy places in Jerusalem. In reality, they were aggressive Western expansion attempts driven by economic and political reasons, fueled by personal ambitions and served to the European sheeple packaged in lofty religious causes.

Rasmussen, the former High Priest of NATO, is driven by all these exactly same considerations. He is supporting the NATO war effort to take a stranglehold of Russia with the actual aim to create a global hegemony led by the Western elite. As in the Middle Ages, so today, the idea of a war for the sake of pure conquest does not sell with the herds — if the pasture is good enough, then why bother — therefore, all you need to do is replace God with Democracy and the Ten Commandments with Western Values. (What easy work for the modern day apostles, the Western stink tanks — they do not actually have to spell out what these “values” are, not even in a list of ten).….

Hellevig spells it out: "democracy" = neoliberalism = Western elite global hegemony.

Hellevig is clearly pissed.

Russia Insider

Ex-NATO Chief Calls for Holy Crusade Against Russia in the Name of “Democracy”
Jon Hellevig, founder and CEO of Awara Group

Phil Butler — The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

A recent report issued by the Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in Britain, it virtually assures us we’ll see a brand spanking new arms race. Now we see the main reasoning behind the west-east divide of the last months.

Sanctions and sword rattling, dirty tricks and death dealing over the geography of Europe and the Middle East, it’s all about weapons and money, as if we didn’t know.…

The trident

The dogma, ideals, and failed strategies of such men are telling if we consider peace in our time a goal of nations. Gates, a protégé of President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, he’s advised every administration since the Carter presidency. If you’re looking for a least common denominator in US and western policy, then these two and their colleagues like Henry Kissinger are your policy ring leaders. 

If these men are one point of a US hegemony trident, then corporate owned media is a second one.… 

People like Barack Obama or David Cameron, they possess very little real power actually. Consider them media celebrities, or the connective tissue in between the thinkers, talkers, and instigators. 

Our third pointy facet is the latter of these, those that provide the funding, give the orders, and who build the weapons and washing machines. The industrialists who’ve always played at world domination, they’re the ones doing us all in. In the United States, in particular, the grease that runs Washington comes from Corporations now, more than ever.

I would sum the trident up as 1) the deep state, 2) the corporate media, and 3) the ruling elite that have captured the apparatus of the state through oligarchic "democracy". It's about establishing the neoliberal oligarchic world order as a fait accompli because "freedom and democracy".

Their argument is that there is no alternative to liberalism, and liberalism equates to neoliberalism, or at least ordoliberalism, but not the social liberalism of social democracy, which is economically inefficient and therefore wasteful short term and unworkable in the long run, threatening a descent into socialism.

Russia Insider | Opinion

The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

Phil Butler

Phil Butler (born 1955) is an American journalist, editor, and analyst. He is a partner at Pamil Visions, a leading digital PR firm, and is the former managing editor of Everything PR News, Europe's leading public relations news portal. He contributes to such online publications as The Epoch Times, the Huffington Post, Japan Today, and RT, as well as dozens of others.… 

Phil holds a Masters in Political Science, and was formerly an engineering professional for a number of Fortune 500 companies including Nucor Steel, Ameristeel, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Tenneco Automotive. Phil's first professional writing experience came as a member of the crew of the USS Iowa, one of the World War II battleships modernizer for Ronald Reagan's 600 ship navy. Phil was a technical writer then, on a team creating all the ship's new technical and training manuals. He transferred this engineering experience into a career in industry until being sought out for covering Web 2.0 technology innovations.

He blogs at http://www.phillip-butler.com/

Tony Cartalucci — Global Hegemony in the Guise of “Collective Defense”

Let me tell you all the ways...

New Eastern Outlook
Global Hegemony in the Guise of “Collective Defense”

Tony Cartalucci

First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/10/global-hegemony-in-the-guise-of-collective-defense/

James Carden — Moscow Has Very Clearly Stated Goals. Washington and the EU Do Not

U.S. foreign policy—perhaps during the Obama era more than at any time in the post-1989 period—couches its intention to further its geopolitical objectives through military might in the soft language of a universal democratizing ideology. It is shot through with ambiguity. 

Russia’s foreign policy is not.

National Interest
Moscow Has Very Clearly Stated Goals. Washington and the EU Do Not
James Carden