#Joe Cirincione

[plitnick]

What's So Funny About Peace for Ukraine?

My first Substack piece for this year revisits a theme I’ve written about before, which is the lack of serious debate about the war in Ukraine. This time, I take on the unfair and false characterization of those of us who question the Biden administration’s and NATO’s refusal to consider diplomacy rather than a victory at arms. Please subscribe to the newsletter, which you can do straight from…

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#Bill Burns #CodePink #Crimea #Henry Kissinger #Joe Biden #Joe Cirincione #Mark Milley #misinformation #NATO #propaganda #Russia #Stephen Walt #Ukraine #Veterans for Peace #Vladimir Putin #Volodmyr Zelenskyy #WILPF

[christinamac1]

A failure to review America’s nuclear posture

A failure to review America’s nuclear posture

By Joe Cirincione | October 28, 2022 The question is complicated by a process that gives those most interested in continuing nuclear programs the authority to write the policy governing these weapons. The Pentagon controls the…

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[gwydionmisha]

#Joe Cirincione #Donald Trump #Vladimir Putin #Nuclear Weapons #News

[antoine-roquentin]

General Dynamics’ Chairman and CEO Phebe Novakovic clearly stated that what’s bad for people is good for their bottomline. “[U]nfortunately, for the state of humankind, the world has become an increasingly dangerous place,” said Novakovic on Wednesday. “And so we see the reflection of that concern in many U.S. allies with increased demand for many of our products in Europe, Eastern Europe, a little bit in Asia, parts of the Middle East and in the former Commonwealth nations and the U.K.”

She later concluded that the potential of the world becoming more dangerous was producing a “nice cadence continuing in terms of our orders.”

Meanwhile, Lockheed CEO James Taiclet — who in January told investors that a growing security rivalry with China should give his company leeway with antitrust regulators concerned about Lockheed’s vertical consolidation of the missile industry — doubled down on his emphasis that a brewing cold war with China would be good for Lockheed’s business.

“[T]he Biden administration clearly recognizes that we’re all in the year of this resurgent great power competition and regional disruptive powers that are out there as well like Iran and North Korea,” said Taiclet on April 20. “That’s a world that’s not going to get any more peaceful anytime soon, most likely and so strong national defense is a priority of the administration, I believe, based on their own statements.”

Taiclet went on to conclude that “I see strong opportunities going forward under this administration for international defense cooperation, that would benefit Lockheed Martin, I expect.”

Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden echoed similar sentiments, telling investors on Thursday that “we believe our capabilities will remain well aligned with U.S. national security priorities,” emphasizing that “the Biden administration has signaled that it views competition with China as the most pressing long-term security challenge and will invest in the capabilities needed to maintain U.S. national security advantages.”

She singled out the government’s “modernizing” of the nuclear arsenal as “aligned with our portfolio.” The investment in nuclear weapons is a $2 trillion project, one that Quincy Institute Distinguished Fellow Joe Cirincione observed was “a collection of legacy systems and new programs promoted for financial and political profit,” benefiting lobbyists and defense contractors like Northrop, not driven by U.S. national security interests or strategy.

Indeed, none of the comments coming from weapons manufacturers celebrating the potential for a cold war competition with China or the declining “state of humankind” shouldn’t come as any surprise. They are, after all, in the business of selling tools of war. But it’s taxpayers who are picking up a growing bill for weapons, and those bills are coming from an increasingly less competitive and shrinking industry.

A 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office found that nearly half of all Defense Department contracts went to United Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing. And, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, over half of the defense budget — currently at $740 billion per year — goes to private contractors.

That might explain why Novakovic’s statements to investors on Wednesday could lament the “state of humankind” and “the world has become an increasingly dangerous place” but lead with the observation that “it’s a very good start to the year.”

With a president in the White House who explicitly linked his ambitious domestic spending bill to competing with China, an ongoing (if unnecessary) nuclear weapons overhaul, and a Pentagon budget that may actually grow by $11 billion if Biden’s proposed budget is adopted, it’s certainly a “good start to the year” for an industry that profits off the world becoming more dangerous.

[berniesrevolution]

In the early summer of 2017, a little less than a year after his Presidential campaign had ended, Bernie Sanders spent a few days on a speaking tour in England, to promote the European version of his book “Our Revolution.” The Brexit resolution had passed twelve months earlier, a general election looked likely to consolidate the conservative hold on the country, and Sanders’s audiences—in the hundreds, though not the thousands—were anxious and alert. I was at those events, talking with the people who had come—skinny, older leftists and louche, cynical younger ones—and they were anticipating not just the old campaign hits but a broader explanation of why the world had suddenly gone so crazy and what could be done. Sanders had scarcely talked about foreign affairs in his 2016 campaign, but his framework had a natural extensibility. Under way in the world was a simple fight, Sanders said. On one side were oligarchs and the right-wing parties they had managed to corrupt. On the other were the people.

In the thirty months since Sanders’s 2016 campaign ended, in the petulance and ideological strife of the Democratic National Convention, he has become a more reliable partisan, just as progressivism has moved his way. He begins the 2020 Presidential campaign not as a gadfly but as a favorite, which requires a comprehensive vision among voters of how he would lead the free world. In 2017, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser, a progressive think-tank veteran named Matt Duss. Sanders gave major speeches—at Westminster College, in the United Kingdom, and at Johns Hopkins—warning that “what we are seeing is the rise of a new authoritarian axis” and urging liberals not just to defend the post-Cold War status quo but also to “reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity.” In 2016, he had asked voters to imagine how the principles of democratic socialism could transform the Democratic Party. Now he was suggesting that they could also transform how America aligns itself in the world.

In early April, I met with Sanders at his Senate offices, in Washington. Spring was already in effect—the cherry blossoms along the tidal basin were still in bloom but had begun to crinkle and fade—and talk among the young staffers milling around his offices was of the intensity of Sanders’s early campaign, of who would be travelling how many days over the next month and who would have to miss Easter. It was my first encounter with Sanders during this campaign. Basic impression: same guy. He shook my hand with a grimace, and interrupted my first question when he recognized the possibility for a riff, on the significance of a Senate vote on Yemen. His essential view of foreign policy seemed to be that the American people did not really understand how dark and cynical it has been—“how many governments we have overthrown,” as Sanders told me. “How many people in the United States understand that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran to put in the Shah? Which then led to the Revolution. How many people in this country do you think know that? So we’re going to have to do a little bit of educating on that.”

One condition that Americans had not digested was the bottomlessness of inequality. “I got the latest numbers here,” Sanders said. He motioned, and Duss, who was sitting beside him, slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Twenty-six (Continue Reading)of the wealthiest people on earth own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. Did you know that? So you look at it, you say”—here he motioned as if each of his hands were one side of a scale—“twenty-six people, 3.6 billion people. How grotesque is that?”

He went on, “When I talk about income inequality and talk about right-wing authoritarianism, you can’t separate the two.” No one knew how rich Putin was, Sanders said, but some people said he was the wealthiest man in the world. The repressive Saudi monarchs were also billionaire Silicon Valley investors, and “their brothers in the Emirates” have “enormous influence not only in that region but in the world, with their control over oil. A billionaire President here in the United States. You’re talking about the power of Wall Street and multinational corporations.” Simple, really: his thesis had always been that money corrupted politics, and now he was tracing the money back overseas. His phlegmy baritone acquired a sarcastic lilt. “It’s a global economy, Ben, in case you didn’t know that!”

When Sanders’s aides sent me a list of a half-dozen foreign-policy experts, assembled by Duss, who talk regularly with the senator about foreign policy, I was surprised by how mainstream they seemed. Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate, might have featured in a Sanders Presidential campaign ten or twenty years ago. But Sanders is also being advised by Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.

Few of these advisers were part of Sanders’s notionally isolationist 2016 campaign. But, as emergencies in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have deepened, the reputation of Obama’s foreign policy, and of the foreign-policy establishment more broadly, has diminished. Malley told me, “Out of frustration with some aspects of Obama’s foreign policy and anger with most aspects of Trump’s, many leaders in the Party have concluded that the challenge was not to build bridges between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans but, rather, between centrist and progressive Democrats. That means breaking away from the so-called Blob”—a term for the foreign-policy establishment, from the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes. DiMaggio said, “The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.” She and others now see in Sanders something that they didn’t in 2016: a clear progressive theory of what the U.S. is after in the world. “I think he’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” DiMaggio said.

Since the 2016 campaign, Sanders’s major foreign-policy initiative has been a Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to suspend the Trump Administration’s support of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen. Mike Lee, a libertarian Republican from Utah, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, co-sponsored the resolution; on April 4th, it passed in the House and the Senate. It was the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Act since the law’s creation, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When we met, Sanders said that he thought the Republican support for the resolution was significant, in part because it reflected the strain of conservatism that is skeptical of military interventions. It also demonstrated, he believed, “a significant mind-set change in the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—with regard to Saudi Arabia.” He added, “I don’t see why we’d be following the lead or seen as a very, very close ally of a despotic, un-democratic regime.”

Sanders was warming to a broader theme. Our position in the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran should be rebalanced, he said. There has been, he went on, “a bipartisan assumption that we’re supposed to love Saudi Arabia and hate Iran. And yet, if you look at young people in Iran, they are probably a lot more pro-American than Saudis. Iran is a very flawed society, no debate about it. Involved in terrorism, doing a lot of bad things. But they also have more democracy, as a matter of fact, more women’s rights, than does Saudi Arabia.” As President, Sanders said, he imagined the U.S. taking a more neutral role in the countries’ rivalry. “To say, you know what? We’re not going to be spending trillions of dollars and losing American lives because of your long-standing hostilities.”

Sanders turned to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which he described in similar terms; he wanted to orient American policy toward the decent people on both sides, and not to their two awful governments. “While I am very critical of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, I am not impressed by what I am seeing from Palestinian leadership, as well,” he said. “It’s corrupt in many cases, and certainly not effective.” He mentioned the United States’s leverage in Israeli politics, because of its alliance and economic support. (“$3.8 billion is a lot of money!”) I asked if he would make that aid contingent, as some Palestinian advocates have suggested, on fuller political rights for Palestinians. Sanders grew more cautious here. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” he said. He was worried about the situation in Gaza, where youth unemployment is greater than sixty per cent, and yet the borders are closed. (“If you have sixty per cent of the kids who don’t have jobs, and they can’t leave the country, what do you think is going to happen next year and the year after that?”) But he also said that he wanted to “pick up from where Jimmy Carter was, what Clinton tried to do, and, with the financial resources that we have of helping or withdrawing support, say, ‘You know what? Let’s sit down and do our best to figure it out.’ ” He seemed to want to strike an earnest, non-revolutionary note. “I’m not proposing anything particularly radical,” he said. “And that is that the United States should have an even-handed approach both to Israel and the Palestinians.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #bernie sanders #foreign policy #New Yorker #2020 election

[pern-dragon]

[the-only-mainstream]

Audio Video Precipitate/Filtrate 133

《中国爸爸》— 王伊凡 Witch Coast "Devil Vision" Chomsky on Liberalism (1977) Dolly Parton Interview at The Library of Congress Chomsky June 2018 Inerview on Illegal Alien Crisis La Jolla Symphony and Chorus - Fauré Requiem Opus 48 - June 2018 Bringing Production Back In - Ha-Joon Chang at UNICAMP - May 2018 DN: Glenn Greenwald vs Joe Cirincione on U.S.-Russia relations Dancing dabkeh in front of Israeli snipers in Gaza Humans... - Crab Sound

______________________________

AVPF tag / channel list

#Chomsky #Glenn Greenwald #Ava DuVernay #Palestine #王伊凡 #AVPF #Witch Coast #Bryan Magee #Dolly Parton #Giselle Fernandez #Gabriel Fauré #Fauré #Ha-Joon Chang #Ha Joon Chang #Joe Cirincione #geopolitics #Gaza #Nestor Ovilla

[googletrends-blog]

Bolton Emerges as Potential Wrecking Ball for Trump

Bolton Emerges as Potential Wrecking Ball for Trump

[ad_1]

John Bolton’s desire to turn North Korea into the next Libya isn’t going over so well in Pyongyang, where Kim Jong Un’s government has threatened to cancel upcoming talks with the U.S. in part because of the U.S. national security adviser’s remarks.

Bolton drew the ire of the North Korean government for saying that the country’s nuclear disarmament should follow the “Libya model”…

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#Ball #Bill Richardson #Bolton #emerges #Iraq #Joe Cirincione #Libya #military #national security #North Korea #nuclear weapons #politics #potential #Singapore #Trump #White House #Wrecking

[culturesofresistancefilms]

Let's put an end to this dangerous nuclear arms race!

From our ally Ploughshares Fund:

"The expansion of missile defense to space would make us less safe and exacerbate a global nuclear arms race. Watch Joe Cirincione discuss President Trump's misguided plans on PBS NewsHour. With your interest and support, we can prevent the implementation of his unworkable, destabilizing plans and work on real solutions."

Watch here: https://www.pbs.org/…/trumps-new-plans-for-missile-defense-…

[plitnick]

We need to discuss how Biden is handling Ukraine, not stifle the debate

We need to discuss how Biden is handling Ukraine, not stifle the debate

Two prominent members of the Quincy Institute have quit, saying they disapprove of the way Quincy analysts have discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Their departure raises a host of issues, even if it’s far from the “fracturing” that Mother Jones Magazine called it. There are legitimate debates to be had over hoe the United States has approached Ukraine, and they have too often been shut down…

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#Anatol Levien #Antony Blinken #AUKUS #Cold War #Democrats #Donald Trump #Joe Biden #Joe Cirincione #Lloyd Austin #Matt Duss #Mideast NATO #Military Industrial Complex #Mother Jones #NATO #Paul Eaton #Quincy Institute #Robert Wright #Russia #Ukraine #Vladimir Putin #Volodmyr Zelenskyy #William Hartung

[protoslacker]

There seems to be a growing recognition, one I certainly share, that Twitter is a uniquely poor, even destructive, medium for conducting complex political debates and should be avoided for those purposes. That view was reinforced for me by a lengthy, spirited, and substantive debate I had on Democracy Now! this morning about the Trump-Putin summit, and U.S. politics more broadly, with Joe Cirincione, the longtime president of Ploughshares Fund, which has long been devoted to the reduction and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Think Progress. Although we disagreed on several critical questions, the debate was substantive, respectful, and nuanced, and therefore, infinitely more illuminating of my positions and his than endless Twitter bickering could possibly achieve. . .

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept. A Spirited, Substantive Debate on the Trump-Putin Summit, Russia, and U.S. Politics

Greenwald links to a debate with Joe Cirincione in two parts, 1 and 2, at Democracy Now!.

Yesterday going through my Twitter feed was dispiriting. I'm not sure what to make of how much calmer Twitter seems today? My views jibe more with Cirincione's than Greenwald's. But having read Greenwald for so many years, I’m convinced about integrity in his work, even when I disagree. Anyhow, neither Greenwald nor Cirincione suggested that I'm an asshole or moron, which made it easier to follow their points with interest.

#donald trump #Vladimir Putin #russia #debate #twitter

[sataniccapitalist]

[emmabeverage]

Conversations with Marianne: DISCUSSING THE WAR MACHINE with Joe Cirincione

[christinamac1]

Why the US wastes $billions on nuclear weapons it doesn’t need

Why the US wastes $billions on nuclear weapons it doesn’t need

Why the US wastes billions on nuclear weapons it doesn’t need https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/01/06/why-the-us-wastes-billions-on-nuclear-weapons-it-doesnt-need/?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=8e1f6ced7fb78c22d8ac3d4037ffcf46f77449be-1614929046-0-AZABHKV4aYtUa0Prc0Aghu6GdOuAqNKkLcImI5jaNYOawX3Kv1wTCS89zeyDWczWumlm-Idy9-J8PvA8khsD8YLXkgdQyN6C3WAdWw JANUARY 6, 202  Joe Cirincione    There’s a myth in…

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[megarosan-blog]

Nuclear Weapons Are Out of Control. But Biden Can Make the World Safer.

Nuclear Weapons Are Out of Control. But Biden Can Make the World Safer.

Nuclear Weapons Are Out of Control. But Biden Can Make the World Safer. Six ways that Biden can make the world safer in 2021. January 1, 2021 Joseph Cirincione  THE AMERICAN PROSPECT PRINTER FRIENDLY   Twitter Facebook Mail The Red Safe held the launch codes and keys, Steven Miller Donald Trump left Joe Biden with a hot nuclear mess. Trump made every nuclear danger he inherited worse by the…

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[swords0827]

Watch "The Real National Security Danger Of Trump's Last Days w/Joe Cirincione" on YouTube

#Youtube