Tag: Asia Pacific

Inside the Trilateral Commission: Power elites grapple with China’s rise

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Inside the Trilateral Commission: Power elites grapple with China’s rise (original)

Each new candidate for Commission membership is carefully scrutinized before being allowed entry. As a rule, members who take up positions in their national governments — which is uncannily common — give up their Trilateral Commission membership while in public service. Those include U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

This revolving door between the commission and senior government ranks has always been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Its first director in 1973, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later became U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. The very existence of the commission, meanwhile, seems predicated on the question of whether governing should be left to the people. It is a question the commission itself has tackled head-on since 1975: Is democracy functioning? Or does someone need to guide it?

That year, three scholars — Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki — wrote a report for The Trilateral Commission titled “The Crisis of Democracy.” In it, Huntington wrote that some of the problems of governance in the U.S. stem from an “excess of democracy.”

Related:

The Crisis of Democracy – Trilateral Commission – 1975

Macron rejects ‘confrontation’ as he relaunches Asia strategy

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Macron rejects ‘confrontation’ as he relaunches Asia strategy

“We don’t believe in hegemony, we don’t believe in confrontation, we believe in stability,” Macron said.

…

Macron said a coordinated response was needed to tackle the overlapping crises facing the international community — from climate change to economic turmoil triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Our Indo-Pacific strategy is how to provide dynamic balance in this environment,” he said.

“How to provide precisely a sort of stability and equilibrium which could not be the hegemony of one of those, could not be the confrontation of the two major powers.”

The Indo-Pacific Strategy doesn’t sound as innocent as Macron makes it out to be:

The new US Indo-Pacific Strategy document released in February has two interesting components, one overt and one covert. The document overtly declares the US is an “Indo-Pacific power.” Covertly, its aim is to “tighten the noose around China.” Arguably, minus the military might, China’s nearly a decade-long “Belt and Road Initiative” cannot be perceived as a grand national strategy aimed at controlling Eurasia or the Asia Pacific or any region for that matter. Yet the BRI is mythologized into such a geostrategic game-changer that it has rattled the US and its allies in the Asia Pacific. The BRI, at best, is nothing more than a mere geopolitical overland and maritime “chessboard” based on trade and investment.

BRI and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ Strategy: Geopolitical vs. Geostrategic

The United States Wants to Prevent a Historical Fact: Eurasian Integration

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

by Vijay Prashad / July 7th, 2022

Over the course of the past fifteen years, European countries have found themselves with both great opportunities to seize and complex choices to make. Unsustainable reliance on the United States for trade and investment, as well as the curious distraction of Brexit, led to the steady integration of European countries with Russian energy markets and more uptake of Chinese investment opportunities and its manufacturing prowess.

The United States Wants to Prevent a Historical Fact: Eurasian Integration

Related video:

Vijay Prashad – Why the United States Opposed the Historical Integration of Eurasia

Why Revolution? DPRK: History of Continuous US War Games Provocations Against North Korea Since 1953

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

We are very pleased to republish an excellent history of the massive campaign of threats and intimidation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) by the United States and its puppet government in South Korea since 1953. This document was published in English on one of the official news websites of the DPRK – the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on 4 September 2022.

The DPRK is a Stalinist workers state whose rather austere brand of socialism is entirely conditioned by this continual threat of war from the United States and South Korea. Every attempt by the North Koreans to “open up” their country economically has been met with extreme hostility and renewed threats of war from the United States Government, who can never forgive the DPRK for the profound humiliation that heroic socialist workers state inflicted on the US during the Korean War as it successfully defended itself from one of the most murderous and genocidal attacks ever seen in world history. The increasingly threatening statements from the US Government of “Lesser Evil” Democrat Joe Biden to target and annihilate the North Korean leadership in a nuclear attack is what has led the DPRK to increase its expansion of its nuclear arsenal and to publish a revised statement of its intent to use nuclear weapons if necessary to defend itself and its people from any attack from the USA, South Korea or any other regional puppet regime. We say: the DPRK has every right to possess and to use nuclear weapons to defend itself from an attack launched by US imperialism or its puppets. We agree with the latest statement published by North Korea regarding its revised policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons to deter a war on the Korean peninsula and to utilize those weapons against the US forces in South Korea should they attempt to attack the DPRK. We will be republishing the text of that declaration of the DPRK in a new article as soon as possible.

Why Revolution? DPRK: History of Continuous US War Games Provocations Against North Korea Since 1953

Related:

Joint US-South Korea military exercises conclude, with an eye on North Korea and China