early warning

H. Peter Langille February 14, 2024 Now more than ever, we need a more effective United Nations; one with an appropriate instrument for preventing armed conflict and advancing sustainable common security. Despite having primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, the UN still lacks a dedicated capacity to respond rapidly and reliably to prevent armed conflict and protect people. As a result, the world has witnessed humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sir Lanka, Darfur, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Tigray, the Ukraine, Sudan and Israel/Palestine/Gaza. Despite the promise of “never again”, mass atrocities occur again and again. Even before the war on Gaza, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned, “the world is now facing the highest number of violent conflicts since 1945. He identified the crux of the problem, “we have no instruments to deal with crisis…we live in a dangerous...

Photo The New York Times John Mearsheimer analyses the South African “application” to the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and explains why he now thinks it is genocide. John Mearsheimer January 5, 2024 Professor John Mearsheimer is one of the world’s leading analytical minds, lately and particularly on both the NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Please see his words in this article about South Africa’s application to the ICJ: – “For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes–but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders.⁵ But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.”...

Be a Peace Warrior – The Online Participatory Peace Project in English and German Dr Norbert Stute & Rachael Mellor September 4, 2023 Better World Info is a unique platform for peace, offering important resources and reliable information on the most pressing peace issues.We invite peace activists who enjoy research and content creation to contact us and contribute to this ever-growing, high-quality Peace Directory making a difference. While military budgets are skyrocketing, peacebuilding remains a grossly underfunded sideline. Global military spending increased for the eighth consecutive year in 2022, reaching a staggering $2.2 trillion. More 28 wars and armed conflicts are currently active, deadly, and unrelenting. “The world is over-armed, and peace is under-funded,” said Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General. Advancing peace efforts effectively is a collaborative journey. Our common goals for peace require the active participation and shared support of activists, organisations, journalists, scientists, politicians, and philanthropists. The power...

The Illegality of NATO: Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles. Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans Christof von Sponeck – also a TFF Associate – used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding framework.” However, the United Nations’ monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include...

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rides on a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Type 10 tank during a review at JGSDF Camp Asaka in Tokyo on November 27, 2021. Photo: JiJi Richard Javad Heydarian February 5th, 2023 Prime Minister Kishida goes on a diplomatic offensive in the West as Tokyo cranks up defense spending to counter China Originally posted on Asia Time on January 23, 2023 here MANILA – Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida kicked off the new year with a series of high-profile visits across key Western allied nations, including the United States. In Washington, he held “very productive” talks with US President Joe Biden on strengthening bilateral cooperation in critical industries, particularly semiconductors, as the West contemplates decoupling from its decades-long dependence on China.  Earlier, the Japanese leader also met counterparts in Europe where he signed new defense agreements to augment military interoperability and joint exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Together with the United...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to TFF@transnational.org or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

Jack F. Matlock, Jr. May 27, 2022 An avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense, writes Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members. President Joe Biden has...

Chris Hedges April 28, 2022 The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia. Originally posted on Sheer Post homepage on April 11th, 2020, here The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.  They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within...

Anatol Lieven March 7, 2022 For those who understand Moscow’s establishment and view of their country’s vital interests, none of this should be a surprise. The illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine has shocked the West and many ordinary Russians. But for those who understand the Russian establishment and its view of Russia’s vital interests, it should not have come as a complete surprise. Since NATO expansion first began in the mid-1990s, Russian officials and other establishment figures have been warning that if the West tried to turn Ukraine into an ally against Russia, this would lead to confrontation and quite possibly war. As the great international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau taught, to craft a viable U.S. policy towards other major states, it is essential to understand from within how they see the world and their country’s place in it. Today, we need to do this if we are to craft a policy...

Photo from the original article Hussein Askary November 1, 2021 According to well-documented statistics provided by American research institutions and universities the human, economic, and financial costs of all wars the United States launched since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, are in the millions of killed, maimed, and traumatized (mostly civilians); destruction of infrastructure in the hundreds of billions; and financial cost for the war effort itself in the trillions of U.S. Dollars. Added to that is a lost economic opportunity in dozens of countries and several regions. These wars and regime-change operations started with Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in October 2001, and continued to Iraq in 2003, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, in addition to so-called anti-terror operations in Africa that are continuing to date. Originally posted on Brix Sweden’s homepage on September 6, 2021 In the meantime, China, which has been more criticized in Western media than the...

, in Washington and New York, everybody talked about who could have done it, how they did it and with what means. The only thing never brought to the fore was: WHY would somebody want to do something like 9/11 to the United States of America? By not asking the Why question, the US could stand as the innocent victim of cataclysmic violence. It would not have to do any soul searching and therefore no change of its global militarist policy. 9/11 was not a response to US foreign policy – but it needed a response. The world felt sympathy for the American suffering – much more so than for the suffering and deaths in other countries around the world. The fact is that the 9/11 attack targeted the US’ global finance-capital (World Trade Center), its global military (Pentagon) and its political (White House, however not hit) centres – not...

“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible because we are still each other’s only hope.” Maria Popova April 23, 2020 NOTE: This is the first installment in a multi-part series covering Mead and Baldwin’s historic conversation. Part 2 focuses on identity, race, and the immigrant experience; part 3 on changing one’s destiny; part 4 on reimagining democracy for a post-consumerist culture. On the evening of August 25, 1970, Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) and James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation about such enduring concerns as identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. By that point, Baldwin, forty-six and living in Paris, was arguably the world’s most famous living poet, and an enormously influential voice in the civil rights dialogue; Mead, who was about to turn seventy, had become...