The Growing Russia-India Relationship

by Ted Snider Posted on April 28, 2023

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2023/04/27/the-growing-russia-india-relationship/

The US has made much of its success in isolating Russia internationally. But that boast is hard to take too seriously when Russia is growing ever closer to the two largest countries in the world. While the world has been watching the "no limits" partnership between Russia and China grow into “a relationship that probably cannot be compared with anything in the world," Russia has been growing quietly closer to the second largest country in the world.

India has long been a close partner of Russia. In 2009, India and Russia signed the Joint Russian-Indian Declaration of Deepening and Strategic Partnership. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Russia where the two sides agreed on a number of steps to enhance that partnership.

That partnership did not come apart under US pressure after Russia invaded Ukraine. Despite intense pressure from the US to "take a clear position" against Russia, India has refused to condemn Russia at the UN and has repeated Russia’s call to take "into account the legitimate security interests of all countries." India has also offered Russia an escape from sanctions by swelling from a country that once imported little Russian oil to a country that now has Russia as its top supplier of oil. India imported $41.56 billion from Russia in the last fiscal year, which is about five times its previous level. Before the war, Russia was India’s eighteenth largest import partner; since the war, Russia has become India’s fourth largest import partner.

And the partnership did not only not come apart, it grew stronger. On September 16, 2022, over half a year after the war in Ukraine began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that "Relations between Russia and India have significantly improved." He called the friendship "extremely important." Seven months later, on April 16, 2023, Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the relationship with Russia had not changed, calling it "among the steadiest of the major relationships of the world in the contemporary era."

Russia’s March 31 new foreign policy concept states that "Russia will continue to build up a particularly privileged strategic partnership with the Republic of India in order to raise the level and expand cooperation in all areas."

And while the US is pushing a plan to ban all exports to Russia except those that are specifically exempted, India is defiantly following its independent path and continuing to strengthen its economic relationship with Russia. India and Russia have resumed discussions on a free trade agreement between India and the Russian led Eurasian Economic Commission that had been disrupted by COVID. The two countries are now engaged in "advanced negotiations" for a new bilateral investment treaty.

But the advancing relationship is not just based on trade. Beyond economics, Jaishankar said that India and Russia "share a commitment to a multi-polar world." The new Russian foreign policy concept also stressed that transforming "Eurasia into a continental common space of peace, stability, mutual trust, development and prosperity" necessitated the comprehensive strengthening of the SCO."

The SCO, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, is a massive international organization that includes Russia, China, India and Pakistan. It is the world’s second largest international organization after the UN, and its primary purpose is to re-balance the US led unipolar world into a multipolar world.

Along with Russia and China, India is also a member of BRICS, another important multipolar organization. Contained within BRICS is the core RIC group that traces its roots all the way back to 1996. In their joint statement of February 4, 2022, Russia and China stressed strengthening, not only the SCO and BRICS, but specifically "develop[ing] cooperation within the ‘Russia-India-China’ format." India has also called, not only for the general "strengthening of the BRICS Identity," but specifically for discussions on "further strengthening of RIC trilateral cooperation."

This year, India will host the SCO summit. In a further show of the growing relationship between Russia and India, Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to travel to India twice this year: once to the SCO summit and once to the G20 summit. The two countries expect to take advantage of the visits to make cooperation between them stronger. The visits make an additional statement following the International Criminal Court’s March 17 issuing of a warrant of arrest for Putin as a war criminal.

In a further evolution of the multipolar world, India seems interested in joining Russia and China in escaping from the hegemony of the US dollar. Speaking in India, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov expressed Russia’ interest in using "national currencies and currencies of friendly countries" for trade. Reuters reports that India, too, "has been keen on increasing the use of its rupee currency for trade with Russia." And, recently, India has begun purchasing some Russian oil in Russian rubles.

BRICS represents 40% of the world’s population, the SCO represents 43%, and both are growing. China and India make up more than a third of the population of the world. As Russia’s much discussed relationship with China and, importantly, its much less discussed relationship with India continue to grow, it is hard to take seriously the Western insistence that Russia is isolated and alone.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.

De-Dollarization Kicks Into High Gear

PEPE ESCOBAR • APRIL 27, 2023

 https://www.unz.com/pescobar/de-dollarization-kicks-into-high-gear/

It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in.

The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election.

The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it.

Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front.

Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT.

China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles.

Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia.

Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown.

BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent.

With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership.

MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China.

Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player.

Beyond BRIICSS

The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia.

The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.

Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia.

In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.

The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets.

Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS.

Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001.

The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market.

Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.”

The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro.

The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025.

The petroyuan cometh

And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner.

The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan.

The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves.

This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU.

Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar.

US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers.

The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself.

White House officials know Israel is an apartheid state, but they can’t say so

Beltway scholar Mark Lynch says even the White House understands Israel practices apartheid, even if it won't say so publicly, because Palestinian intellectuals have led the way in shifting the foreign policy establishment.

BY PHILIP WEISS  APRIL 26, 2023  

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/04/white-house-officials-know-israel-is-an-apartheid-state-but-they-cant-say-so/

Even in the White House officials know that Israel practices apartheid, but they can’t say so publicly. No, they have to cling to the two-state paradigm, says a Beltway scholar, Marc Lynch, who co-authored a breakthrough report in Foreign Affairs using the word apartheid to describe Israeli rule.

Lynch said that report was heavily influenced by Palestinian experts, who helped break a Washington “taboo” on saying apartheid. He cited Yousef Munayyer, Tareq Baconi, and Noura Erakat as intellectual leaders.

For many years Palestinians have told us that Israel imposes apartheid. In time, public figures such as Jimmy Carter and Betty McCollum and Rashida Tlaib and Jim Klutznick (of Americans for Peace Now) echoed that view. Then two years ago a number of human rights groups, notably Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, joined the chorus with reports labeling Israeli rule “apartheid.” They were followed by the Carnegie Endowment and the young Jewish group IfNotNow, and so on.

This month two important shoes dropped. Foreign Affairs published its paper on the “One State Reality” by Lynch and three other mainstream figures using the word apartheid. And now a respected poll reveals that 44 percent of Democrats say that Israel is “a state with segregation similar to apartheid” (in keeping with Gallup’s poll of last month showing way more Democrats are sympathetic to Palestinians than Israel).

The Foreign Affairs authors charted the emerging awareness of apartheid in a D.C. panel earlier this month, launching the book of essays they have co-edited.

Lynch said the “cascade” of experts’ reports on apartheid has reached policymakers, even in the White House:

There’s much less of disconnect than you might think. The deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel Palestinian affairs [Hady Amr] was here at the Elliott School last week and he knows all of these things, and I would say that everybody in the White House knows all these things, they all know these things, but they don’t act on them for various other reasons, because of political considerations, because of structural constraints and that sort of thing. I don’t think this is a knowledge issue. People [who spend their lives working on policy] are not unaware of the one state reality. It’s more the sense of paralysis and impossibility of finding anything else. Hence clinging to the idea of a two state solution in order to avoid having to come up with something different. That’s why I think there’ s more stasis in the policy debate than there is in the academic and civil society debate right now.

Co-author Shibley Telhami, a scholar who has worked as a policymaker, said that the death of the two-state solution is now an accepted fact in official circles, but officials can’t say as much.

I know both worlds, and the policymakers are not as detached as we assume they are. I know a number of high level people in government who have said, that it’s too late for two states, yet they’re advocating two states publicly. They’re not going to take that on, they’re not going to change the paradigm, it’s too costly, it’s not a high priority issue, no one is going to lead from within.

Just as the end of the peace process was a factor in Human Rights Watch declaring Israel an apartheid state in 2021, so it motivated these authors, co-editor Michael Barnett said:

We thought the peace process died certainly in the early 2000s. If the peace process does not exist, it leaves you with very few options in terms of what to think about what Israel/Palestine is… It really is based on control.

When the four published their piece in Foreign Affairs, Lynch said he expected pushback, but there hasn’t been much. Because the acceptance of apartheid has been “sudden and rapid”:

It’s been quite interesting to see the response… We all anticipated quite a bit of fireworks. In fact that has not happened, because everyone now pretty much agrees with us, which was certainly not the case five years ago. And that to me is one of the most interesting puzzles, is, how can you have intellectual and policy stagnation for decades and decades, followed by a very sudden and rapid intellectual and discursive change.

Lynch pointed to the inclusion of Palestinians as a factor in that change. He cited Munayyer’s article in Foreign Affairs in 2019, titled “There Will be a One State Solution” and said until that piece, the foreign policy establishment of the United States regarded the idea of one state as “toxic.” Today the “One State Reality” book is ahead of the curve of Washington and mainstream academia, Lynch said, but “we were well behind the curve of Palestinian intellectuals.”

Michael Barnett described the “difficult” and “incredible intellectual and emotional journey” of making the book as a Jewish person with deep involvement in the Israel issue. But he said he sought to be analytical, not emotional, in describing the reality. Israel has never had clear borders, and its occupation is far from temporary after 56 years.

“The language of occupation seemed awkward and probably a misnomer. At least back in the post World War Two period when international legal authorities began to draft doctrines of occupation, they never had in mind something like this… Occupation was supposed to be temporary, but here is something quite permanent or so it seems.”

Barnett said that understanding led to the idea that Israel exercises “coercive control” over subjects in ways that today’s world does not accept:

“The land that we’re talking about today, which Israel claims control over– that’s not legally recognized by any other state, as we speak…. We are now talking about a state where there are different levels of membership. Full members are Jewish Israelis.

But it’s simple, and Israel is doubling down:

“To simplify things, there are just two classes of people in this new state. There are Jewish Israelis, and then there’s everybody else. And if you have any doubt about it, look at the Basic Law from a few years ago. And look at the slew of bills that are coming down the pike in the Knesset. It makes it clear that there are two classes of resident.”

Israel has ceased to be a liberal democracy, it’s about “Jewish supremacy,” there’s no way around it. Barnett said:

For the longest time Israel was understood as a liberal democracy. And it had shared values with the west on those grounds. But Israel… has ceased to be a liberal democracy… Israel is a state that is built for, by and about Israeli Jews, that’s what it’s about. It’s about Jewish supremacy. That’s a hard word to actually evoke. But I don’t think there’s any way around it. This was a state that was intended to be for Jews and if it’s going to be a Jewish state then there are going to be those who are not full members, and it also means to preserve the Jewish state means to preserve systematic discrimination against those who are non-Jews.

The apartheid frame:

Where does it leave us? The one [idea] that’s clearly being evoked more and more, is apartheid. It may not be an exact analogy, but it’s pretty close. And so if in fact it’s an apartheid state, then one has to question… where is it then in relationship to other kinds of states [and it] imposes a slew of difficult and complicated challenges, certainly for the U.S. It was one thing to say we have shared values with a liberal democracy. It’s very difficult to make that same statement once you cast the frame as apartheid.

Nathan Brown says everyone knows it now:

This isn’t news. There are political actors in the region who have oriented themselves around this [one-state] reality increasingly over the last decade… Now everybody’s noticing, that’s what is new.

Lynch said that naming apartheid says to some that it cannot possibly survive. He disagrees:

I see nothing in history to suggest that’s true. Injustice can survive a tremendously long time. Once the initial impact of the apartheid level sinks in, politics moves on, nothing necessarily changes… People can live with an extraordinary amount of hypocrisy and evil in their lives, so long as it does not inconvenience them. and the power in the world today is not one which is leading toward greater liberalism or greater justice…by naming it, it might simply be put on like a fine dinner jacket, and become the new reality, and that would be quite tragic.

Barnett disagreed. He said the discourse will force change. Israel is already in freefall due to elites seeking to emigrate:

“You can’t go on as normal once you say that it’s an apartheid state. I think we learned that in South Africa. As a consequence, things are going to change globally… This creates economic instability, as we see in Israel. I have so many Israeli friends who are now applying for a passport elsewhere, who now want an exit option… What happens when those providing the gold decide to leave?

Barnett described apartheid as a “taboo” term that is no longer taboo:

Apartheid has been such a taboo language to talk about Israel that people get harassed for using it. But at the end of the day, apartheid is a legal language, apartheid is about international law, and it is about systematic discrimination by one group of another group based on any number of considerations, but largely around… race.

The racism of Israel that Palestinians have long identified is now dawning on others. Barnett described his own awakening to the idea of “Jewish supremacy”:

For those who have supported Israel– let’s just recognize up front it was created in 1948 as a state of the Jews…. We know that since 1948 that Arab Israelis now Palestinian Israelis were systematically discriminated against. That I think is undisputable. Then when you widen that to include the so called territories… That discrimination is simply about Jews against others. And as we say today, and [under] this current Knesset it will become further institutionalized, in that Jews have more rights than non Jews, and it’s designed to maintain Jewish power. I don’t think that’s controversial. It may be difficult to hear in those terms, but it is about Jewish supremacy. You can’t call it a liberal democracy… But acknowledge, that whatever you call it, it has to include practices of discrimination, by Jews against non-Jews. That’s undebatable.

The Jewish community is splintering because of this awareness. Barnett said that a “great number of Jewish Americans” are becoming indifferent to Israel, to the point they “actually don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”

Lastly, but very importantly: Barnett said as we move into the one-state reality, Americans need to rethink the nature of Palestinian violence. He described attacks on civilians as terrorism but said that the decolonization movement showed that violence directed against conscripted forces and not against civilians is legitimate. Washington has a long way to go on that one.

Amenazas para la paz

• Carlos Tello Díaz

https://www.milenio.com/opinion/carlos-tello-diaz/carta-de-viaje/amenazas-para-la-paz

El presidente Joe Biden acaba de anunciar, antier, su deseo de ser presidente por un término más. Es sin duda el mejor candidato demócrata para derrotar a Trump, aunque quizá no para vencer a un candidato distinto a él en el Partido Republicano. Tendrá 82 años en la elección que viene: un hombre viejo en un mundo joven. Pero lo que debe preocupar, más que su edad, es su política exterior.

Estados Unidos, hoy, es una amenaza para la paz en el mundo. Su política exterior tiene por objetivo mantener a todos los países bajo su predominio. Desde el comienzo de su historia, sabemos, Estados Unidos ha asumido consistentemente una estrategia enfocada en adquirir y mantener el poder sobre sus rivales, primero en Norteamérica, luego en Occidente, finalmente en todo el mundo. Washington considera que mantener su supremacía debe seguir siendo el objetivo central de su estrategia en el siglo XXI. Quiere determinar las reglas de las finanzas y el comercio mundial, controlar las tecnologías de punta, mantener la supremacía militar y dominar a todos los competidores que puedan aparecer.

Con respecto a China, en concreto, Estados Unidos, bajo el presidente Biden, ha buscado frenarla y aislarla, y más: obstaculizar su desarrollo, excluirla de los acuerdos comerciales, cercarla con alianzas militares en su periferia. Esta política contra China ha tenido, increíblemente, el apoyo de muchos en el Reino Unido, la Unión Europea, Japón, Corea, Australia y Nueva Zelanda. Pero no de todos. El presidente Emmanuel Macron dijo, en su viaje a China, que los europeos, que son aliados de Estados Unidos, no quieren ser vasallos de Estados Unidos. El economista Jeffrey Sachs dijo, en un artículo, que China tiene derecho a la prosperidad y a la seguridad nacional, libre de provocaciones de Estados Unidos en sus fronteras. Muchos otros ven, con alarma, la normalización de la posibilidad de una guerra entre los dos países.

Sachs es una de las voces de Occidente que han sido censuradas y silenciadas por su oposición a la política de Estados Unidos en Ucrania. Sus artículos ya no aparecen en la gran prensa occidental, como antes; ahora hay que buscarlos con dificultad. En uno de ellos, publicado el 13 de abril en The New World Economy, afirma que la política exterior de Estados Unidos tiene una contradicción inherente y un defecto fatal. La contradicción inherente es que ella choca con la Carta de las Naciones Unidas, que compromete a todos los Estados miembros (incluido Estados Unidos) a un sistema global basado en el principio de que ningún país tiene derecho de dominar a los demás. El defecto fatal es que Estados Unidos, con solo 4 por ciento de la población mundial, no tiene la capacidad económica, financiera, militar ni tecnológica, ni mucho menos la base ética y legal, para dominar al resto del planeta —es decir, a 96 por ciento de la población en el mundo.

 

Sachs ha expresado la urgencia de impulsar una nueva política exterior en Estados Unidos. “A menos que la política exterior cambie para reconocer la necesidad de un mundo multipolar”, afirma, “ella nos llevará a más guerras, y posiblemente a la Tercera Guerra Mundial”.

The World Is Changing, But Is Washington Finally Noticing?

by Ted Snider | Apr 26, 2023

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-world-is-changing-but-is-washington-finally-noticing/

Recent statements by two Biden administration officials hint that the United States is finally noticing that the world around them is changing.

On April 11, CIA Director William Burns spoke at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In a somewhat stunning statement that has, perhaps, not been so clearly and publicly articulated before, Burns said that we are in one of “those times of transition that come along a couple of times a century. Today the United States still has a better hand to play than any of our rivals, but it is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

Burns’ classifying the transition that is now taking place as a “transition that come along a couple of times a century” echoes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s comment to Russian President Vladimir Putin last month that, “Together, we should push forward these changes that have not happened for 100 years” and recognizes the significance of the tectonic geopolitical shift that is occurring. The unipolar world is extinct and has been replaced by an evolving multipolar world in which the United States “is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc.” China’s diplomatic role in brokering an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran demonstrated America’s “position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

The ever strengthening partnership between Russia and China has tilted the weight of the world toward a multipolar one. In March, Xi visited Putin in Moscow where they not only “reaffirm[ed] the special nature of the Russia-China partnership,” but “signed a statement on deepening the strategic partnership and bilateral ties which are entering a new era.”

But the Sino-Russian relationship in the new multipolar world isn’t just bilateral. Countries are lining up to join Chinese and Russian-led multipolar organizations like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. From the call for multipolarity among the many African nations attending the Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World conference in Moscow in March, to Saudi Arabia’s assertion that “We do not believe in polarization or selecting between one partner and another,” to India’s continued diplomatic and economic cooperation with Russia and China, to Brazil’s promise to uphold and strengthen multilateralism, to France’s surprising call for Europe to become a “third pole,” countries around the world are leaving the U.S.-led unipolar world for neutrality in a multipolar world.

One of the mechanisms for multipolarity is emancipation from the monopoly of the U.S. dollar. Most international trade is conducted in dollars, and most foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars. As the United States has recently demonstrated in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, the position of the dollar allows it to be very powerfully and quickly weaponized.

Sanctions have not only accelerated the evolution of the multipolar world by creating a community of sanctioned countries that turn to each other, forming a second pole, but they have also weakened the U.S.-led unipolar world by weakening willingness to depend on the dollar.

In the second stunning statement by a U.S. official, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on April 16, “There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar.” She explained, “Of course, it does create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative.”

And find an alternative they have. Yellen’s statement suggests that the United States is beginning to recognize that escaping the monopoly of the U.S. dollar is gaining momentum as a mechanism for ending, not only the “hegemony of the dollar,” but of the United States itself.

Recent demonstrations of the American ability to cut off countries that challenge it has awoken opposition. Several countries and regions, including Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, BRICS, and the Eurasian Economic Union, have all expressed interest in and even made moves towards partially escaping the U.S. dollar.

Russia and China are now conducting 65% of their trade in their own currencies. China and Brazil are now conducting bilateral trade in their own currencies, as are China and Pakistan. Iran and Russia are now settling trade in rials and rubles instead of dollars and recently announced that they have circumvented the U.S. financial system by linking their banking systems as an alternative to SWIFT for trading with each other. Saudi Arabia has  said that it sees “no issues” in trading oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. The Eurasian Economic Union has agreed on “a phased transition” from settling trade in “foreign currency” to “settlements in rubles.” Robert Rabil, Professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, says that the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Israel have all made some movement away from the U.S. dollar.

Brazil has raised the idea of a Latin American currency. And Brazilian President Lula da Silva recently asked, “Why should every country have to be tied to the dollar for trade? Who decided the dollar would be the [world’s] currency?” “Why,” he suggested, “can’t a bank like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade between…BRICS countries?” BRICS and the SCO are both considering abandoning the dollar in favor of trade in the currencies of member states.

While American activity suggests a foreign policy that drives on, unaware of the new terrain its entered, the recent statements by Burns and Yellen suggest that at least some in the Biden administration are beginning to notice that the world is changing. U.S. hegemony, its “position at the head of the table,” is no longer “guaranteed.”

POLITICO: Biden Preparing for Failed Ukrainian Counteroffensive

The US doesn't expect Ukraine to regain significant territory

by Dave DeCamp

Posted on April 24, 2023

https://news.antiwar.com/2023/04/24/politico-biden-preparing-for-failed-ukrainian-counteroffensive/

The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive failing, POLITICO reported on Monday.

Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by Airman Jack Teixeira revealed that the US doesn’t believe Ukraine can regain any significant territory in its counteroffensive, which is expected to be launched in the spring. The information in the leaks was based on an assessment made in February.

According to POLITICO, more current assessments also don’t expect much Ukrainian success. Two Biden administration officials said they don’t think Kyiv has the ability to sever Russia’s landbridge to Crimea in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

The report said US intelligence “indicates that Ukraine simply does not have the ability to push Russian troops from where they were deeply entrenched.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in March that his forces need more Western weapons before they can launch a counteroffensive.

The administration is expected to face criticism from hawks who believe Biden hasn’t given Ukraine enough weapons, as well as those who have been calling for the US to push for diplomacy. The US is also worried that many of its European allies will favor negotiations between the warring sides if Ukraine’s offensive fails.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the administration has discouraged peace talks and recently came out against the idea of a ceasefire in Ukraine. The administration has left it up to Zelensky when to pursue peace talks, and he still maintains they can’t happen until Russia is driven out of all the territory it controls, including Crimea.

But now, according to POLITICO, there is a discussion among administration officials about convincing Ukraine to accept more modest goals and agree to a temporary ceasefire. Possible incentives for Kyiv include giving Ukraine NATO-like security guarantees and more military aid.

The issue with the US plan is that Russia has signaled it won’t settle for a frozen conflict and has stated it can only achieve its war goals by military means. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently reiterated that one of Moscow’s main priorities is keeping Kyiv out of NATO after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine’s “rightful place” is in the alliance.

In the early days of the Russian invasion, Russian and Ukrainian officials were engaged in peace talks, and Moscow’s primary demand was for Ukrainian neutrality. But now Kyiv stands to lose much more as Russia maintains any settlement must include recognizing the areas it annexed in the Donbas and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts as Russian territory.

What exactly does Washington want from its containment of China?

By Global Times Published: Apr 23, 2023

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202304/1289646.shtml

China-US relations are in a long dark tunnel that seems to reveal a little light ahead but remains ambiguous.

Relations between the world's two largest economies are in an unprecedented state of "competition," according to Washington's reference, with almost one hundred more mechanisms of contact at every level that the two countries have built up over the past 20 years or so having ground to a halt. The high-level officials of both sides have not met in more than three months.

Washington is blaming China and claiming that China is reluctant to talk. But anyone who understands the situation can hardly find a day when the official and congressional agenda in Washington does not include measures or bills to contain China and sanction Chinese companies. The official rhetoric attacking China and fanning the China threat theory is escalating.

China and the US do need a face-to-face dialogue at a high level. Still, in this atmosphere, Chinese public opinion has become increasingly frustrated with what the two sides are going to talk about and whether the US is sincere.

If we have empty talks repeatedly, and after the talks, Washington returns to its strategic deployment to further contain China, the residual mutual trust between the US and China is likely to be depleted.

Can China-US relations be stable? Another question that needs to be addressed first is what exactly does the US want from its competition with China.

US officials have been referring to the competition as "healthy," the latest official expression appearing in a speech by Treasury Secretary Yellen on April 20.

If the competition is only about Washington's emphasis on US global economic, technological and scientific leadership, then it is an "internal issue." Washington can take full advantage of its leadership ability and even copy China's practice of mobilizing national efforts to consolidate its leadership. 

But the competition is seriously distorted.

The US is tripping and using concealed weapons against the Chinese runners who are running their own track, throwing stones and nails at the Chinese track, and even going so far as to move the knife.

On the Taiwan question, the US has deviated from its commitment to the one-China principle, using armed, political, and economical means to support Taiwan independence and undermine the status quo, and then backtracking by falsely claiming that the mainland "has created regional instability."

And look at all the nasty tactics used by Washington around the world to besiege and crack down on Chinese companies and Made in China.

Enough is enough! 

It's time for White House officials to stop describing the US-China relationship as a "healthy competition.''

Washington wants the comprehensive containment and retardation of China's development in exchange for consolidating its hegemony because it has already seen China as its first and utmost challenger.

It is a zero-sum game. 

No matter how US officials describe the competition, what is being done now foreshadows that direction, and there is no bottom line in sight. 

Yes, there are still few cooperative opportunities between the US and China, such as climate issues. But in the current domestic political climate in the US, these issues seem unlikely to be brought back into the relationship. China needs to do its international duty as a developing power, and again, this depends on how Washington views cooperation with China.

China's rejection of the "competition" argument is fundamentally about how the US side treats a rising power. China has never wanted to compete with the US or any other country for global hegemony, let alone export its political model.

Suppose China is not respected for its peaceful development to gain an international status commensurate with its weight and for choosing its path for development in realizing Chinese modernization. In that case, Washington's strategy will always be in place and will continue to increase the risk of extinguishing the last bit of light. 

REVEALED: BRITAIN SECRETLY BELIEVES ISRAEL HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS, BUT WON’T ADMIT IT

Declassified files show Whitehall has long assessed Israel as having an atomic arsenal, contrary to what ministers tell parliament.

PHIL MILLER

19 APRIL 2023

https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-britain-secretly-believes-israel-has-nuclear-weapons-but-wont-admit-it/

• UK military official feared that “openly admitting” knowledge of Israeli nuclear arms would “create pressure for action against Israel”.
• Israelis were described as “probably the world’s greatest proliferators” by British diplomat who went on to head the Foreign Office
• UK diplomats secretly agreed with Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book on Israel’s nuclear capability
• Revelations contradict what current foreign secretary James Cleverly recently told parliament.

British officials have privately regarded Israel as a nuclear-armed power for at least 40 years, while telling the public they cannot make an assessment.

Israel has never formally declared it has a nuclear weapons programme, a position UK ministers do not publicly contradict.

But behind the scenes in Whitehall, staff in the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence (MoD) have long believed Israel has developed nuclear arms.

The revelations are contained in files released to the UK National Archives as recently as last year and found exclusively by Declassified UK.

They severely undermine statements made to parliament by successive government ministers including the current foreign secretary, James Cleverly.

He told MPs last February how “Israel has never declared a nuclear weapons programme” and insisted the UK government was encouraging Tel Aviv to sign the non-proliferation treaty as a “Non-Nuclear Weapon State”.

However, a file from 1983 and marked “secret” shows the MoD believed Israel “probably produces enough plutonium for one nuclear weapon per year.” It added: “Thus she may now have a stock of about twenty,” having gone into production in 1964.

A group of British military officers were then told in 1985 by Israeli defence minister (and former PM) Yitzhak Rabin that: “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons, but she will keep the option in case the Arabs get the bomb”.

A British diplomat in Tel Aviv, Tim Dowse, regarded the second part of Rabin’s comment to be “as close as we are ever likely to come to an explicit confirmation that Israel has a nuclear capability.”

Hersh was right

The issue resurfaced in the early nineties after US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a book The Samson Option, which contained new evidence about the alleged scale of Israel’s nuclear programme.

Although Hersh has faced an establishment backlash over his most recent claims about the US bombing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, British officials took his research on Israel’s nuclear programme seriously.

His book prompted questions in 1992-3 from a Labour peer, Lord Kennet, about whether Whitehall agreed with Hersh’s claim that Israel had nuclear weapons.

An official from the MoD nuclear policy department, David G. Johnson, privately told colleagues: “Although we believe there is such a programme, the fact remains that we do not have firm evidence for this.” 

The first part of that statement was kept from Kennet, and Conservative defence minister Arthur Gore simply told the peer: “We have no firm evidence either to confirm or to deny that Israel may have a nuclear weapons programme.”

On seeing that answer, Foreign Office staffer Peter Spoor commented privately: “Strictly speaking this is true, since we have no direct evidence. But it is slightly disingenuous; there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence in the public domain and we work on the assumption that Israel has a nuclear capability.”

The MoD official, David Johnson, feared that “openly admitting our suspicions…would do more to undermine the credibility of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than does the current ambiguity surrounding the status of Israel’s nuclear programme.” 

Johnson added: “It would also create pressure for action against Israel which would be difficult to satisfy”.

Spoor worried similarly that “the inability of the international community to agree on an effective response would raise a political storm and help legitimise proliferation by other states.”

Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, countries without nuclear weapons agreed to avoid acquiring them. 

Israel is one of only three countries never to have signed the treaty, despite its programme being an open secret.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates Israel now has 90 nuclear warheads and is “believed to be modernizing its nuclear arsenal”.

‘World’s greatest proliferators’

By 1993, a colleague of Spoor’s in the Foreign Office’s non-proliferation and defence department (NPDD) had made an even more stark internal assessment. Peter January wrote: “We have no hard evidence but we believe that Israel possesses nuclear weapons”. 

His boss, the NPDD’s assistant head, Simon Fraser, said the Israelis “are, after all, probably the world’s greatest proliferators, and I think we need to maintain a fairly crisp tone of voice with them.” 

Fraser went on to run the Foreign Office from 2010-15.

A British diplomat in Tel Aviv, Andrew Pearce, tried to strike a softer note, saying: “Israel is almost certainly a nuclear weapons possessor, but I would hazard a guess that she would be one of the last countries in the world to pass nuclear secrets or technology to those countries with current nuclear ambitions (e.g. the Iranians, Iraqis etc) i.e. to proliferate as opposed to possessing herself.”

His argument received short shrift from colleagues in the arms control division. David Gordon-MacLeod sought to “re-emphasise at the outset that NPDD employs the acquisitive/possessive concept of proliferation. On this basis therefore Israel remains a proliferator.”

Ten years later, the UK would illegally invade Iraq based on fabricated intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. 

Israel, meanwhile, has become one of Britain’s closest allies in the Middle East – despite its increasingly far-right government.

Both London and Tel Aviv regularly denounce Iran’s alleged attempts to obtain nuclear weapons, and British ministers have unequivocally said: “Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon”. 

Israel is even suspected of assassinating the head of Iran’s nuclear programme.

The UK government’s refusal to publicly acknowledge Israel as a nuclear state is one of the ways Whitehall shields Tel Aviv from international criticism.

Reacting to our findings, Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a spokesperson for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, commented: “Israel, alongside the other eight nuclear-armed states retains a capability to commit mass atrocity – indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of thousands if not millions of people with weapons of mass destruction.

“Israel must take immediate steps to eliminate its nuclear arsenal, including by joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”