THE CONSOLIDATION OF WORLD POWER: THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL

The political, military and economic elites of the United States and Israel have been considering in the last two years the need to weaken and, if possible, subjugate/eliminate those countries and international actors that they consider to be obstacles to their domination over most of the world, or that are resolutely opposed to said domination.

Thus, the multimillionaires, politicians, communicators, intellectuals, academics, etc. who, from the centers of power of the United States (Washington, New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, etc.) define the security, economic, foreign, technological and communication policies of the most powerful country on earth, constitute a large but homogeneous group that coordinates and/or follows the guidelines of the Zionist elites of Israel, to consolidate their world power, through:

1. Undisputed military, economic and technological hegemony of the United States in the world.

2. Undisputed military, economic and technological hegemony of Israel in the Middle East.

3. Political subordination of the West and the Global South to the guidelines established by the United States and Israel.

4. Weakening and, if possible, subjugation/elimination of countries or actors in international society that hinder or flatly oppose this American Israeli hegemony (China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Hamas groups, Hezbollah, Houthis).

5. Establishment of a world power center that replaces the UN, and that follows the guidelines of Washington-Tel Aviv.

In this sense, the United States has launched a hybrid war against China, Russia and Iran over the past ten years, to, on the one hand, strategically wear them down by supporting countries and movements that question the influence of said countries in their respective zones of influence (the former Soviet republics; Southeast Asia; Middle East); and to hinder and flatly oppose the economic and technological expansion of said powers (extensive sanctions in time and scope).

Thus, the United States has first launched Georgia (2008) and then Ukraine (2014) to provoke Russia, with the aim of involving it in exhausting and prolonged wars, as has been the case with Ukraine (again) since February 2022.

In the Chinese case, constant military aid to Taiwan, the establishment of a military and economic containment strategy in the Indo-Pacific, economic and technological sanctions against Chinese companies, and the extensive network of military bases around China, constitute a permanent and prolonged effort to prevent the Asian giant from surpassing the United States in the military, economic, and technological fields.

For its part, Israel has the unrestricted support of the United States and the West to exterminate the groups fighting for the survival of the Palestinians, and to carry out ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the West Bank and South Lebanon, in order to consolidate its Greater Israel project (at least at this stage), for which the Washington governments have fully embraced the plans of Zionism, given that the last 5 American presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden) have been dominated by powerful pro-Israeli economic, political and communication interests, which have captured the US decision-making process, at least in the last 30 years.

Both the Israeli elites, as well as their allies/subordinates in Washington, estimate that they are currently more powerful militarily and economically than their opponents, so they have recklessly launched military actions to weaken them (arming Ukraine to attack Russia) or outright destroy them (Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah).

They also believe that they have enough strength to “isolate” China economically and technologically, and thus stop its growth and the challenge it implies to US global hegemony.

Trump’s arrival to the presidency of the United States, with a cabinet made up of convinced pro-Israelis and “hawks” who seek to confront and, if possible, defeat militarily their main adversaries, only confirms that the political-military and economic-technological establishment of the United States-Israel intends to subjugate countries, actors and international organizations that oppose its hegemony (there is the case of the continuous threats of sanctions to the members of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for the cases of South Africa against Israel, accusing it of genocide in Gaza; and for the requests for international arrest warrants against the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant). And to use all the means of power at its disposal to achieve these objectives, even if it could provoke the Third World War.

Eight Reasons Why Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Posted on November 19, 2024

https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2024/11/18/eight-reasons-why-marco-rubio-would-be-a-disastrous-secretary-of-state/

Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.

The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”

But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.

1.   His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island. 

Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.

It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”

In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.

These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.

2.   Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.

Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.

Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.

Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”

While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.

3.   He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.

Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.

In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself  extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.

4.   His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran. 

Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.

While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

5.   He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.

Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.

6.   He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar  Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.

The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

7.   Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.

Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

8.   He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.

Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.

The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.

Conclusion

On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.

Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.

His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.

Ethnic cleansing in north Gaza worsens: Israel expels 100,000 Palestinians in 24 hours

Israel continues to implement the Generals' Plan to expel, starve, or kill hundreds of thousands

NOV 15, 2024

https://thecradle.co/articles/ethnic-cleansing-in-north-gaza-worsens-israel-expels-100000-palestinians-in-24-hours

At least 100,000 Palestinians have been forced to leave northern Gaza in the last 24 hours, the UN reported on 15 November, as the already catastrophic conditions continue to worsen amid Israel's continuous airstrikes and denial of aid delivery requests.

“Chaos, suffering, despair, death, and destruction in northern Gaza is a daily reality as access is at a low point,” stated Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Humanitarian Coordination Office (OCHA), who spoke to reporters in Geneva earlier this morning.

All indicators in Gaza show that “we're going in the wrong direction,” Laerke added.

“Displacement is at a high point, and it is near impossible to deliver aid in there,” he warned.

Staff working on the ground in Gaza told Laerke that UN efforts to deliver aid are being “stifled.”

“One of my colleagues described it as, from a human front for a humanitarian worker, which he is, [that] when you are faced with a situation like that, you want to jump. You want to jump up and do something. But what he added was, our legs are broken; we're asked to jump, but our legs are broken. That is the picture of it right now.”

Israel is currently seeking to implement the so-called Generals' Plan by forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the north Gaza towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun while starving or killing anyone who remains.

A recent report from Israel's Channel 12 TV showed starving and thirsty Palestinians fleeing through one of the Israeli army's “drainage points” in Jabalia. At the drainage point, the soldiers abduct the men and some of the boys, claiming they are Hamas members, while terrified women and children flee, carrying whatever possessions they can.

The Channel 12 “Palestinian Affairs Correspondent,” Ohad Hemo, then ’interviews’ desperate and terrorized women and children to solicit anti-Hamas comments as they walk through the post-apocalyptic landscape.

The state-backed settler war to annex the West Bank

With an indebted Trump soon to be back in the White House, Tel Aviv is orchestrating a calculated campaign of militia formation and settler violence to seize control of the West Bank, aiming for annexation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities.

Robert Inlakesh

NOV 13, 2024

https://thecradle.co/articles/the-state-backed-settler-war-to-annex-the-west-bank

Despite Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and military aggression against Lebanon, Tel Aviv is preparing to unleash its fanatical Jewish settlers in a coordinated war against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, aiming to ethnically cleanse what remains of the territory and pave the way for further annexation.

Adding fuel to the fire, billionaire Miriam Adelson, the wealthiest Israeli in the world, bankrolled Donald Trump's “huge victory” in his successful presidential campaign with one clear condition: support for annexing the West Bank.

Last month The Times of Israel noted that the wealthy widow “is carrying on a legacy she built with her late husband, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson,” and that “The Adelson family has long been one of the largest sources of campaign money for Republican candidates and has backed Trump during each of the last three general elections.”

The complete consolidation of the West Bank

Speaking to The Cradle, Ubai al-Aboudi, executive director of Palestinian rights group ‘Bisan Center,’ says that “the Israeli settlers are preparing to carry out a major attack, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population,” adding that this attack will be particularly focused on completely erasing Palestinians from what is known as Area C, which constitutes roughly 60 percent of the West Bank.

That escalation has already begun. On 4 November, armed settlers launched a brazen assault on the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh, marking a surge in the violence that has gripped the West Bank. In October alone, settlers carried out at least 1,490 attacks against Palestinians, their property, and their land – often under the supervision and protection of occupation soldiers.

In the past, extremist settler attacks against Palestinians were characterized by their spontaneous nature and uncoordinated thuggery, but this has begun to change. During a recent interview with Israel’s Channel 7 News, West Bank Settlement Council leader Israel Gantz commented on a meeting he had with the recently sacked Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant:

“We asked that the West Bank be treated as Jabalia, Rafah, and the villages of southern Lebanon were treated, which means displacing the residents, killing the terrorists in these villages, cleansing the terrorist infrastructure, confiscating the weapons and then returning them to their villages.”

While the statement includes the idea of returning Palestinians to their villages, if such an operation replicated Gaza and southern Lebanon, there would be no village to return to. Gantz also requested that Palestinian villages bordering illegal Jewish settlements be ‘cleansed’ due to the potential security threat posed to Israelis living there – both ideas reportedly opposed by Gallant.

On 5 November, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replaced Gallant and handed the defense minister position to long-time ally Israel Katz. While serving in his previous role as Israel’s foreign minister, Katz openly called for expelling Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, unlike his predecessor.

‘Organized militias’

Last November, it was revealed that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir had ordered the police to stop enforcing the law against West Bank settlers.

This is why the armed settler assault on Al-Bireh was seen as so significant. As Netanyahu reshuffles his cabinet to include a full deck of right-wingers, many of whom are themselves West Bank settlers, these groups are becoming even more brazen.

The assault on Al-Bireh was particularly alarming – a “pogrom-style attack,“ according to Aboudi, as “they feel emboldened by the impunity they enjoy.” Rampaging settlers burned 18 vehicles and two apartments while Israeli soldiers looked on.

One West Bank Palestinian described to The Cradle how settlers showed up outside her home armed with Molotov cocktails, but “were luckily scared off” prior to assaulting family members:

“I had just left my home prior to the attack, but I knew something was wrong because the soldiers were acting very violently at all the checkpoints as I was leaving … you have to understand that these kinds of attacks don’t happen without the soldiers participating in some way.”

“The settlers are acting more and more like organized militias; they are an extension of the Israeli army working towards an agenda of ethnic cleansing,” insists Aboudi, affirming that this year’s attacks have been dramatically increasing. According to statistics, settler violence has been escalating every year since 2021, reaching an unprecedented number of attacks in 2024.

Through the use of state-backed settler ‘defense squads,’ Israel has managed to ethnically cleanse 16 Palestinian communities in the southern hills of Al-Khalil (Hebron). In 2023, it was discovered that the Israeli army had established the ‘Desert Frontier’ unit, comprised of the most extremist Jewish settlers from the notorious ‘Hilltop Youth’ group. Human rights groups have also documented the use of Israeli standard-issue rifles by West Bank settlers attacking Palestinians, all pointing toward state complicity in these attacks.

According to Aboudi, “around 700 [Israeli] roadblocks cut off Palestinian villages from each other.” Set up by occupation forces, the roadblocks provide cover for “attacks from violent settlers who target Palestinians passing by … greatly affecting the ability to even travel safely across the West Bank.” The attackers can rely on unconditional impunity from Tel Aviv, he explains:

“They feel that they have enough resources, weapons, arms, political backing, to commit whatever crime they choose."

Trump and West Bank annexation

Yossi Dagan, the settler leader of Samaria Regional Council, recently purchased some 500 rifles to arm and prepare “emergency security teams” in anticipation of a war in the West Bank. In September, Israel declared the West Bank a “combat zone,” and created closed military zones as buffers surrounding the illegal Jewish settlements.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister who was recently gifted control of settlement affairs for the occupied Palestinian territories, issued a public call for annexation in late October. As a longtime West Bank settler himself, Smotrich openly works on behalf of a 2017 settler movement proposal, outlined in a document entitled ‘Decisive Plan,’ which seeks to double the settler population of the West Bank.

If this is combined with Israel’s decision to begin transferring the Israeli settler population from military to civil control, it becomes clear that the process of annexation is already underway.

With the victory of Donald Trump in the recent US elections, it is more than likely that Netanyahu views annexation of the West Bank to suddenly be a very viable option, despite the historic opinion delivered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July that declared Israel's occupation of the territories to be a violation of international law and demanded that Tel Aviv end its occupation, dismantle all settlements, pay reparations for damages to Palestinians, and facilitate the return of all displaced natives.

But Trump's sweeping electoral victory was aided by uber-Zionist Adelson’s contribution of $100 million to his campaign, with the single request that the Republican leader permit Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

Recall too that the Adelsons financed Trump's first presidential bid, in 2016, with the quid pro quo that the Republican leader move the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize the Holy City as Israel’s undivided Capital – a promise that Trump implemented in 2018.

Now, Miriam Adelson is pushing for the annexation of the West Bank. Combined with the surge in settler violence, the formation of Jewish militias, military training programs for settler civilians, and the distribution of 120,000 rifles, a calculated strategy is taking shape. This is not just about sporadic attacks – it is a deliberate, state-backed campaign to alter the demographics of the West Bank permanently in line with the expansionist, settler-colonial ideology of the most extremist coalition government in Israel's history.

Global South continues to drive changes in the global governance system

By Miao Beilei

Published: Nov 16, 2024

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202411/1323179.shtml

In the remaining days of November, the 31st APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting and the 19th G20 Leaders' Summit will capture global attention. These two major international meetings, hosted consecutively by Peru and Brazil, highlight the "Global South moment" in global governance.

Amid a backdrop of insufficient momentum for global economic growth and an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape, China and Latin American countries are collaborating on the multilateral stage to jointly uphold the common interests of Global South countries. In the face of hegemony, power politics, protectionism, unilateralism, and the tangible risks of "small yard, high fence," this cooperation will strengthen the unity and resilience of Global South countries and play a constructive role in addressing global challenges and reforming the global governance system.

As a collective of emerging markets and developing countries, the Global South now accounts for over 40 percent of the global economy, profoundly reshaping the global economic landscape and becoming a key force for change in the international order. These upcoming APEC and G20 meetings will strengthen the voices of the Global South and participation in the international financial system, giving more smaller countries a chance to partake in global decision-making. This will help promote a more balanced and stable global governance system.

The Global South has long been a stabilizing force in maintaining world peace. However, due to failures in global governance, the legitimate demands of Global South countries are often overlooked, and many important resolutions passed within the UN framework are not effectively implemented. Currently, the Global South is working together to enhance its representation and voice within the global governance system, assuming shared but differentiated responsibilities, and aiming to play a larger role globally. This collective effort seeks to steer global governance toward a more just and equitable direction.

Development is the master key to solving all problems. The Global South countries, once oppressed and colonized, have now emerged as a vital force in reshaping global governance. This shift is rooted in the fact that over the past 20 years, Global South countries have contributed as much as 80 percent to global economic growth. Only by sustaining and advancing their development can Global South countries genuinely secure fairness and justice within the current global governance system.

In advancing modernization alongside Global South countries, China emphasizes that while pursuing its own path of modernization, other Global South nations should also center their unique cultures, allowing their own national memories and traditions to play a significant role in the modernization process. China has always remembered that it was the developing countries that supported its entry into the UN. Regardless of changes in the international landscape, China remains deeply connected to and rooted in the Global South, viewing it as a stabilizing force for peace, a central force for open development, a constructive force in global governance, and a driving force for cultural exchange. Through tangible cooperation, China seeks to provide sustained momentum to the modernization of the Global South.

In the future, China is willing to work hand in hand with countries of the Global South to practice true multilateralism, uphold the vision of global governance based on extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits, and jointly build a more open and inclusive Global South. Together, we will promote the creation of a community with a shared future for humanity and achieve a truly united world.

The author is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Marxism of the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn