February 2019

Peace can never be achieved this way a) The issue is about peace, not only nuclear weapons. The US has not been willing to sign a peace agreement after all these years. After some kind of peace process and treaty has been achieved, you can turn to the specific issue of nuclear weapons. b) Making peace takes time, thorough preparations, lots of different expertise, long consultations and only face-to-face meetings when all are sure that, when the parties finally meet at top level, some kind of deal will be signed. c) This would have been an issue for the UN if it were respected and used fairly by member states around the world. Naive and egotist people believe they can do miracles without the institutions of the international system. Probably Trump and Kim are in the same category believing that they are all capable and great guys of history (worthy...

Kim Jong-un, paramount leader of the North Korean dictatorship, is in Vietnam ready to meet President Donald Trump. Last June the two leaders met, applauded themselves and each other and made some sort of a deal even if it wasn’t the one Trump boasted about – the total elimination of the North’s nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the North has stopped nuclear testing. The US only stopped in 1992 and France in 1996, so this is a very important step forward. It should not be minimized as the American “Blob” is doing. (The “Blob”, a creation of the White House of President Barack Obama, is the highly influential industrial/military/legislative/media complex, a majority of whom are hard line on foreign affairs.) The North also has begun dismantling a missile-engine test site. Set against that, the US intelligence community and independent observers say it is continuing to build intercontinental missiles and is preparing to...

By Michael T. Klare February 26, 2019 In his highly acclaimed 2017 book, Destined for War, Harvard professor Graham Allison assessed the likelihood that the United States and China would one day find themselves at war. Comparing the U.S.-Chinese relationship to great-power rivalries all the way back to the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BC, he concluded that the future risk of a conflagration was substantial. Like much current analysis of U.S.-Chinese relations, however, he missed a crucial point: for all intents and purposes, the United States and China are already at war with one another. Originally published at juancole.com Even if their present slow-burn conflict may not produce the immediate devastation of a conventional hot war, its long-term consequences could prove no less dire. To suggest this means reassessing our understanding of what constitutes war. From Allison’s perspective (and that of so many others in Washington and elsewhere),...

By Pía Figueroa February 26, 2018 I recently returned from my first trip to China and I am still thinking about everything I saw, which undoubtedly made me realize – once again – how much distortion comes from the press, manipulated by Western interests, on a daily basis. We construct our picture of the world on the basis of information given to us by the news and we blindly believe their interpretation of the facts from their point of view.   These are narratives are at the service of the economic and geopolitical positioning of the major European and North American powers, which take for granted that the world is the way it is and built from there. Originally posted on December 22, 2018, by Pressenza International News Agency here But have we ever been told, for example, how 740 million people, according to official figures, have been able to...

It’s time overdue that the misleading myths on immigration are thrown into the trashcan. They are causing untold damage. The fact is that President Donald Trump’s own government research shows that Mexican migration has dropped sharply in recent years. In Britain, the Brexit debate which began with a whipped up crisis about immigration has now moved to a level where it’s tearing the country apart.  In France and Belgium immigrants are falsely blamed for Islamic terrorism. In Sweden and Denmark the myth-makers have pushed traditionally left of centre electorates rightwards. A new book on the subject, “Blaming Immigrants”, by University of Columbia professor, Neeraj Kaushal, says it all. It pulls together most of the research so far done. Immigration is one of the most divisive issues of our times. Yet the increase in immigration globally is largely in line with the growth in world population. It was 3% in 1990...

A conversation with Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif The Western mainstream press hasn’t done much to enlighten their audiences to the plain fact that there is more than one side to a conflict between at least two. The Transnational is happy to make available some other views, particularly since Iran is the David and the West the Goliath and since omission is more effective in propaganda terms than fake. Iran’s views, its history, its reasons to do what it does and see the world as it does is woefully under-represented in the said press. So is leading media’s criticism of US policies vis-a-vis Iran. They systematically take the side of the strong, the bully and the war-threatening side of the conflict. If the Munich Security Conference has no other merits, it does offer an opportunity to hear many voices and here them from their own representatives and not through Western...

“Working for a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind by Promoting International Cooperation and Multilateralism” By Yang Jiechi February 18, 2019 MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) – Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, delivered China’s keynote speech on February 16, 2019 at the 55th Munich Security Conference. Italics added by The Transnational for pedagogical, easier-read reasons. This is the English translated version of the speech reprinted from China Org. cn here: Mr. Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my great pleasure to join you at this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC). As a global forum on security policy, the MSC provides an important platform for people around the world to express views and share insights on major issues concerning world...

By Seyd Hossein Mousavian February 18, 2019 In his State of Union, President Trump focused his comments about the Middle East on Iran, the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS or IS), and the U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria. Despite his negative rhetoric about Iran, Trump did identify some potential common ground with the government in Tehran. The challenge for the next two years is to focus on that common ground, avoid a war between the United States and Iran, and prepare for an eventual U.S. return to the nuclear agreement with Tehran. Originally published by LobeLog February 7, 2019 here. While Iraqi President Barham Salih hailed Iran for supporting the Iraqi nation in the fight against IS, Donald Trump singled out Iran as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. Moreover the Iraqi president rejected a plan floated by President Trump that calls for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq...

Nigeria is a veritable factory of sophisticated novelists. It was no surprise that Ben Okri won the British Booker Prize that goes annually to the best novelist of the year. Considering that high-class novel writing in English only began in Nigeria in 1958 with Chinua Achebe’s famous work, “Things Fall Apart”, now a classic, it has come a long way in a short time. Will Nigeria move at a similar speed with its economy and banish poverty as it once promised to? Read Ben Okri’s vivid capture of poverty in his novel, The Famished Road, where the words are illuminated as if they had been thrown up in the air, then descend, sparkling like diamonds and rubies: “Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, and the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, and the little girls naked on the sand playing with...

With Trump the silences are usually as expressive of his intentions as the incoherent dogmas. Indeed, his Second State of the Union Address delivered in Congress on February 5, 2019 gives a clear insight into the political mentality of tormentor in chief when it comes to the human condition. The speech contains many tensions, but none more illuminating than his denunciation of socialism and his silence about the resurgence of fascist tendencies throughout the world, and not least in his own country, which he several times anointed that night as the best the world has ever known. He not the first leader to make such a claim, of course, but he is undoubtedly the least qualified, and his own two years of faulty leadership has contributed to making America far less admired, and far more feared, than previously. His diatribe against socialism had at least two targets: First, the Sanders...

On February 11, 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran marks the fortieth anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution. In his latest speech at a conference of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), for which he received huge fees, National Security Advisor John Bolton said: The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its fortieth birthday. I have said for more than ten years since coming to these events that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran…and that is why before 2019 we here will celebrate in Tehran. Even more ominously, late last year Bolton instructed the Pentagon to produce options for attacking Iran. Addressing the same conference on June 29, 2018, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani also predicted: “Freedom is right around the corner...