China’s orchestration of the renewal of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia should be a wakeup call to the Biden administration’s national security team, particularly to Antony Blinken’s Department of State. China’s success exposes flaws in American national security policy, particularly the policy of nonrecognition as well as the reliance on the use of military force to achieve gains in international politics. Our instruments of power are not working.
The US Federal Reserve printed $300 billion in a week to save collapsing banks and bail out Silicon Valley oligarchs. 93% of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits were uninsured, over the FDIC limit of $250,000, but the government still paid them. 56% of SVB’s loans went to venture capitalist and private equity firms.
In deciding to supply Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine, Olaf Scholtz breaks the self-imposed constraints on the military’s role in German foreign policy that had been in place since the end of WWII.
He briefly struggled to find “the proper language” to describe the Russian invaders before settling on “these inhumans.” [Untermensch]
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., drew a connection between Zelenskyy and Churchill. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was a member of the House at the time of Churchill’s 1941 visit. The British leader addressed Congress on the day after Christmas.
“The Time You Sent Troops to Quell the Revolution”
The United States invasion of Russia remains a hidden dimension of U.S. policy in the Great War, marking the beginning of a long Cold War. In August 1918, three months prior to the Armistice, the Wilson administration sent several platoons of U.S. soldiers into Russia to aid in the overthrow of the new Bolshevik government, which had come to power in the October Revolution of 1917. The operation was carried out alongside British, French, Canadian and Japanese forces in support of White Army counter-revolutionaries whose generals were implicated in wide-scale atrocities, including pogroms against Jews. This “Midnight War” was carried out illegally, without the consent of Congress. The Commanding General in Siberia, William S. Graves thought that his mission was to protect a delegation of Czech troops and the Trans-Siberian railway and to serve as a mediator. He was disappointed to learn that in fact the United States was enmeshed in another country’s civil war and came to oppose the whole operation. In his memoirs, he expressed “doubt if history will record in the past century a more flagrant case of flouting the well-known and approved practice in states in their international relations, and using instead of the accepted principles of international law, the principle of might makes right.”
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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