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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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Western media start to note how their politicians' unwavering support for Israel and Ukraine is diminishing their countries' global standing.

At Naked Capitalism Yves Smith notes the devastating political effects of the Gaza bombing on Biden's foreign policies:

Biden Gets Zelensky Treatment in Middle East as Israel Tries to Escalate

The US, in a continued demonstration of the degree of enbubblement of what passes for its leadership, seems to believe it still has the force and soft power to be able to bully talk its way out of its geopolitical messes. Yet this week we have stunning examples of how critical players in the rest to the world no longer buy what the US is selling. The gap between the American establishment’s connection to reality and facts on the ground has opened up to a yawning chasm as the Arab world, as Jordan cancelled a Biden summit with its King Abduallah II plus PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in response to Israel’s shelling of Al-Ahli Arab hospital. Not only are they rejecting the attempt to shift blame for the attack to Hamas (we’ll soon address the “rogue shell” claim), but also the bigger pretense behind that, that the US is incapable of, as opposed to unwilling to, applying the choke chain to Israel. Even the Western media are not much on board with the Israeli and Biden Administration pretense that somehow Hamas dunnit, when Israel has been trying to herd Palestinians out of northern Gaza and specifically attempted to order the evacuation of the hospital. Oh, and this follows Israel ordering the UN to evacuate from Gaza in 24 hours and then shelling its warehouse there: ...

Israel bombed, probably with a U.S. made Hellfire missile, the courtyard of the Baptist al-Ahli Arab hospital where thousands had sought refuge. A short video of the immediate aftermath shows several dozens if not hundreds of dead and wounded. Doctors later held a press conference while standing among some of the casualties.

Like other hospitals al-Ahli Arab had been told by Israel to evacuate but could not do so as there are no other places where the sick and wounded, including many intensive care cases, could be cared for.

Three days earlier, notes the UN, the same hospital had, like others, already been bombed:

14 October 2023: In Gaza city city and governorate, Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by Israeli airstrikes, partially damaging two floors and damaging the ultrasound and mammography room. Four people were injured. Sources: Al Jazeera V and Personal Communication

To then claim, as Biden did, that 'the other team' was responsible for the attack is unfathomable.

It was also way too late says a RUSI fellow:

Going to repeat this as the situation has moved more in the past 16 hours than in the previous week. The plates have shifted, radically. The window for Israeli operations has shrunk from more than a month, to a few days...if at all. That is now the reality of where we stand.

No country besides the U.S. and a few Europeans will ever defend such barbarity. They will simply stop listen to what the 'west' has to say.

The Financial Times quotes a G7-official who struggles with this global divide:

Rush by west to back Israel erodes developing countries’ support for Ukraine (archived)

Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned. The reaction to the October 7 attack on Israel by Islamist militant group Hamas and to Israel’s vow to hit back against Gaza has undone months of work to paint Moscow as a global pariah for breaching international law, they said, exposing the US, EU and their allies to charges of hypocrisy. In the flurry of emergency diplomatic visits, video conferences and calls, western officials have been accused of failing to defend the interests of 2.3mn Palestinians in their rush to condemn the Hamas attack and support Israel. ... The backlash had solidified entrenched positions in the developing world on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, officials said. They warned that this could derail future diplomatic efforts on Ukraine. “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” ... Some American diplomats are privately concerned that the Biden administration’s response has failed to acknowledge how its broad support of Israel can alienate much of the Global South.

Looking at the current BRI anniversary meeting of some 140 states in Beijing, the New York Times voices similar concerns:

New Global Divisions on View as Biden Goes to Israel and Putin to China

Russia and China are siding with a Palestinian people seeking liberation and self-determination, while in Washington’s eyes, they themselves deny those same possibilities to the Ukrainians, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and even to the Taiwanese. But in their reluctance to blame Hamas and effort to associate themselves with the Palestinian cause, both Russia and China are appealing to a wider sentiment in the so-called Global South — and in large parts of Europe, too. For them, it is Israel that is conducting a colonialist policy by its occupation of the West Bank, its encouragement of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land and its isolation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza, who are subjected even in normal times to sharp restrictions on their freedoms. The Global South, a term for developing nations, is a vital area of the new competition between the West and the Chinese-Russian alternative, said Hanna Notte, the director of a Eurasia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. From the point of view of many in the Global South, she said, “the United States fights Russia, the occupier of Ukraine, but when it comes to Israel, the U.S. is on the side of the occupier, and Russia taps into that.”

The editorial board of the Washington Post also declares the failure of U.S. policies:

It would be a moral and strategic mistake to ignore Gaza’s plight

Still, the plight of Gazans has been treated by the United States and the wider international community as a sad but immutable fact in an irresolvable conflict. This was a moral and strategic error, helping promote the instability that has, for now, wrecked efforts on the part of Israel, the United States and Arab states to build a durable diplomatic settlement among the region’s big players.

The Carnegie Council explains how the global rift necessitates a change in western policies. It especially sees a need to ditch the so called "value-" or "rules-based-order" policies:

A Requiem for the Rules-Based Order The Case for Value-Neutral Ethics in International Relations

Regardless of how it eventually concludes, the Russo-Ukrainian War represents a seismic event signaling profound changes in the global landscape. The unipolar era is at its end, major countries are more concerned with their cultural sovereignty and strategic autonomy than they have been in decades, and it seems inevitable that the once-dominant Western hegemony must gradually yield to a more diverse and multipolar system. The period following World War II witnessed the ascendancy of the United States and its allies as architects of a new international order premised on the institutionalization of Western values such as democracy and human rights. This Western-centric approach to global governance—known as the “rules-based order”—has encountered mounting challenges. China's rise, Russia's geopolitical subversiveness, and the growing assertiveness of emerging powers from the Global South have eroded Western dominance. The outcome is a more diverse world, characterized by multiple centers of power coexisting, challenging any single ideology or set of substantive values. ... Our particular sense of morality in the West should not stop us from aspiring to pursue what’s both wise and right. The evolving international order, characterized by polycentrism and multipolarity, challenges the conventional Western-dominated “rules-based” order. Drawing from Nietzsche's perspective on values, we recognize that values are context-dependent rather than innate, timeless, or universal. Similarly, the decline of our ancien regime does not spell the end of international ethics. If the current transition is understood correctly, it could promise the birth of a new normative system based on a functional, value-neutral, situational, and diplomatic ethic that has its primary concern in managing reciprocal relations between world powers. Instead of attempting to impose our values on others (no matter how good or true we think they are), we in the West should prioritize engagement with other major powers based on common interests and shared objectives. ... ... In sum, within the intellectual framework offered by cultural realism, we need an alternative instrumentalist and pragmatic ethic that 1) accepts the realities of power politics and spheres of interest without moralizing and projecting a Manichaean mentality upon the world, and 2) is grounded in principles that are conducive to a pluralist modus vivendi, including mutual and equal recognition, statesmanship, non-interference, humility, strategic empathy, and open dialogue.

Some might say that the west will never change its behavior but I do not believe that.

The west WILL HAVE TO change its behavior or it will go down into history's graveyard. There is no longer an alternative as the 'rules based order' has proven to be an unsellable dead end.

Posted by b on October 18, 2023 at 15:31 UTC

#multipolarity #global south #moon of alabama #israel #gaza #israel palestine conflict #joe biden #us hegemony

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thefreethoughtprojectcom · 2 months

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Those who question multipolarity do not believe that any system of global governance can possibly serve the interests of humanity. Such as system is, by default, designed to benefit oligarchs, not the people.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/foreign-affairs/multipolarity-is-just-the-new-world-order-by-another-name

#TheFreeThoughtProject #TFTP

#the free thought project #tftp #multipolarity

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saltedlimes · 7 months

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Imo a major takeaway is that escalatory attacks without enough power to end things harm more than they help in the long run. Ultimately the US is the one giving these junior partners enough money and support to keep up their violence against neighbors, and US imperialism must end before we can see an end to major conflicts like this one.

Also the point about how Hamas could possibly be being used to redirect attention away from the stalled Ukraine offensive and the unpopularity of the Israeli government was very interesting to me.

#youtube #palestine #israel #us imperialism #multipolarity #russophobia #sinophobia #history #hamas #hezbollah #video

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whatisonthemoon · 1 year

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The weakening of domestic resistance to U.S. militarism has resulted from the abolition of the draft and distancing of war from the public because of the reliance on private military contractors and sophisticated military technologies like drones. Of the more than 241,000 people killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, only one percent were U.S. military personnel.

Trump and other Republicans have effectively directed the lower-middle class’s resentment of the deteriorating economic and political situation toward China, whereas Obama, Clinton and Biden and the Democrats have done the same with the upper-middle class and Russia. The political climate in the U.S. increasingly resembles the McCarthyist period of the 1950s consequently, and in certain ways that of Germany in the early 1930s.

#u.s. imperialism #imperialism #united states #united states of america #politics #multipolarity

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ininterestingtimes · 1 year

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youtube

Why the Global South Is Raising the Russian Flag

The people of Africa and much of the rest of the Global South are increasingly raising high the Russian flag in protest as a symbol of defiance and resistance against US-led Western Global Hegemony and as a symbol of hope for a multi-polar world. - The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda

#Africa #Russia #geopolitics #war #France #Secret World War Three #Youtube #multipolarity

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immaculatasknight · 2 months

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It doesn't have to be this way

#Larouche #Oasis Plan #economic development #physical economy #win-win #golden rule #Israel #Gaza #decolonization #sovereignty #multipolarity

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kesarijournal · 6 months

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The Geopolitical Chessboard: Pawns, Knights, and the Illusion of the Awakened

In the grand, often absurd theater of geopolitics, where the script is written in the ink of commodities and cyber skirmishes, a new dichotomy has been proposed: the ‘awakened’ and the ‘unawakened.’ It’s a tale spun by the modern-day Nostradamus, Alexander Dugin, who views the world not as a complex mosaic but as a binary chess match between the grandmasters and the novices (Dugin’s Dilemma,…

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#2023 #China-Taiwan-Relations #Geopolitics #Global-Strategy #International Relations #Middle-East-Dynamics #Multipolarity #Political-Satire #Russia-Ukraine-Conflict #Unipolarity #US-Foreign-Policy

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sayruq · 3 months

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kneedeepincynade · 2 months

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Un giorno dovremo tutti sederci al tribunale della storia ad essere giudicati,la storia ci chiederà cosa abbiamo fatto davanti a tutta la sofferenza,davanti alla morte,davanti al genocidio, io sono fiero di poter rispondere davanti alla storia di essere stato in prima linea,di essere andato davanti alla sede del male e aver dichiarato la verità

One day we will all have to sit at the tribunal of history to be judged, history will ask us what we did in the face of all the suffering, in the face of death, in the face of genocide, I am proud to be able to answer in the face of history that I have been on the front line, of having gone before the seat of evil and having declared the truth

#israel palestine conflict #palestina #stand with palestine #palestine #protesta #roma #ambasciata israeliana #anti imperialist #anti idf #anti imperialism #socialism #communism #marxism leninism #marxist leninist #marxist #marxismo #marxism #multipolar world #multipolarity

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workersolidarity · 11 months

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🇮🇷 I support Iran. I want to make that clear. 🇮🇷

Iran's anti-Imperialist creds are unquestionable. The entire basis for the existence of the revolutionary Iranian Islamic Republic is anti-Imperialism. No country supports Palestine and the Palestinian people more than the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The moment the Iranian government no longer supports the fight against Western Imperialism, the justification for its existence vanishes with it, along with the support of the Iranian people it enjoys today.

National Sovereignty is the basis of Socialism. And though Iran is by no means a Socialist country, neither is it a Neoliberal Western Proxy, and Iranians enjoy one of the largest economic safety nets in the Middle East, as well as an economy who's natural resources are dominated by SOEs. Including their National Oil Company...

Iran's oil, of course, was initially Nationalized under Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in March 1951... and of course two years later he was couped by the United States in a typically American Colonialist move, giving full political power to the Shah who used it to stifle dissent, especially and not coincidentally, Socialist and Communist dissent, responsible for a multitude of slaughters against the Iranian people, who were demanding a more active and independent government.

At least, that was until the Islamic Revolution, beginning in 1978 and culminating in the overthrow of the Shah, imposed on the Iranian people by the United States, in February 1979.

You cannot have Socialism without National Sovereignty. And one way the Iranian government can be thought of, is as a radical movement for National Sovereignty; an anti-Imperialist project to expel the colonizers and Western Capitalists who would see the wealth sucked out of their country by Wall Street.

Please, please please don't fall for more US sponsored color revolutions!

Support the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran and its fight against Western Imperialism and US Hegemony! And join our fight to build a Multipolar world and Socialism!

youtube

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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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Posted onOctober 18, 2023 by Yves Smith

The US, in a continued demonstration of the degree of enbubblement of what passes for its leadership, seems to believe it still has the force and soft power to be able to bully talk its way out of its geopolitical messes. Yet this week we have stunning examples of how critical players in the rest to the world no longer buy what the US is selling. The gap between the American establishment’s connection to reality and facts on the ground has opened up to a yawning chasm as the Arab world, aa Jordan cancelled a Biden summit with its king Abduallah II plus PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in response to Israel’s shelling of Al-Ahli Arab hospital. Not only are they rejecting the attempt to shift blame for the attack to Hamas (we’ll soon address the “rogue shell” claim), but also the bigger pretense behind that, that the US is incapable of, as opposed to unwilling to, applying the choke chain to Israel.1

Even the Western media are not much on board with the Israeli and Biden Administration pretense that somehow Hamas dunnit, when Israel has been trying to herd Palestinians out of northern Gaza and specifically attempted to order the evacuation of the hospital. Oh, and this follows Israel ordering the UN to evacuate from Gaza in 24 hours and then shelling its warehouse there:

To wind back to just before the hospital attack, first, we had the highly visible snub of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken by a nominal ally, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal Bin Farhan, by keeping Blinken cooling his heels for hours. Blinken got a less impolite but still chilly reception in Egypt and Jordan.

Then Biden decided to go to the Middle East, as if he would be able to get Egypt and Jordan to reverse their firm position that they are not taking in Palestinian refugees. Not only do they not want to enable ethnic cleansing or take on aneconomic burden, they also don’t want the militant contingent operating in and from their territories.

Israel has been acting as if it’s indifferent to forcing Palestinians out of Israel versus eliminating them in place. There are credible accounts of Israel not only refusing to allow humanitarian aid in from Egypt and foreign passport holders out, but also multiple Isreali shellings of the crossing point. It does not take much in the way of discernment to see that denying Palestinians in Gaza water and food is a death sentence.

But even with rising international outrage over these war crimes, the shelling of the hospital was an escalation too far. It’s derailed even the feeble US attempts to get in front of this crisis. Israel, being stymied in its desire to clear Gaza by its obvious inability to do so (lack of experience, lack of equipment, reluctance to take the baked-in high casualties) instead appears to have settled on Plan B of shelling and starving it until everyone there dies.

To clear up “whodunnit”:

Recall that Jacob Dreizin reported that JDAM kits were being sent in bulk to Israel:

I also reported extensively from Raqqa during the war against ISIS, and from Ukraine during the battle of Kyiv. No Palestinian group has a missile powerful enough to level a hospital. It was a fucking JDAM. https://t.co/mRhsjvpcLq — Seth Harp (@sethharpesq) October 17, 2023

This is not yet confirmed as of posting time but should go viral shortly if this rumor pans out:

While as far as I can tell, the Western media has yet to take this press conference up, the number of views on Twitter indicate it is getting traction in the Algosphere, and one has to think elsewhere:

Now to the stunning spectacle of the US/Collective West surprise as to the reaction outside the rapidly shrinking US sphere of influence. A new story in the Financial Times, Western rush to back Israel erodes developing countries’ support for Ukraine, makes for good one-stop shopping.

Before we get to the body of the story, let’s deal with the headline claim. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that various votes in the UN intended to condemn Russia have shown lower and lower vote counts supporting that position. US former at least sometimes friendlies Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Argentina joining BRICS is another proof of waning US influence.

In addition, in the 2023 Munich Security Conference, the US invited Global South members to enlist their support for Project Ukraine. That plan backfired as the US/NATO team was told that Ukraine was a European affair and of no concern to the rest of the world….save they were being dragged in via sanctions blowback, specifically denying poor countries access to Russian grain and fertilizer. Recall that the Collective West doubled down on showing its lack of concern about suffering in poor countries by not delivering on its half of the Ukraine grain deal, which included ending sanctions on the Russian agricultural bank to allow for purchase of Russian fertilizer, as well as not barring Russian shipments.

And finally recall that even UN votes are not a great indicator of sentiment outside the US. There have been reports of the US browbeating foreign diplomats, including threatening expulsion of the kids of UN representatives from schools in the US and dinging any applications to US higher education institutions.

So now to the Financial Times:

Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned… In the first days after Hamas’s assault, some western diplomats worried that the US was giving carte blanche to Israel to attack Gaza with full force. That had eroded efforts since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to build consensus with leading states in the so-called Global South — such as India, Brazil and South Africa — on the need to uphold a global rules-based order, said more than a dozen western officials.

I have to stop here. Those of you who watch Alexander Mercouris or Alex Christoforu regularly will have seen clips of how Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is received at various conferences…as in enthusiastically. And as both Putin and Lavrov have taken to saying, no one has the rules for this supposed rules-based order, calling out the US pretense that it means anything more than the US preserving its hegemony.

The story continues:

“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” Many developing countries have traditionally supported the Palestinian cause, seeing it through the prism of self-determination and a push against the global dominance of the US, Israel’s most important backer…. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” the senior G7 diplomat added. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”

This comes off as Western diplomats having gotten high on their own PR. The fact that some countries are still trying to maintain a productive relationship with the US can’t be seen as tantamount to support. But the US has been desperate to depict our relations with key players as better than they are, witness in particular China. Chinese officials repeatedly turned down US meeting requests and were apparently upset when the US leaked the fact that a supposedly confidential meeting between Jake Sullivan and (IIRC) Wang Yi in Italy was publicized, apparently to depict US and Chinese relations as on the mend. Recall also that after that incident, Xi decided not to go to the G20, with some pundits taking the view that it was to make sure he was not buttonholed by Biden, which the US would then try to depict falsely as a thawing.

And now the US is reduced to desperately scheming to prevent a Russian UN Security Council proposal, which includes among other things a cease fire, from garnering enough votes to force US veto. The article skips over what it would take to get such a resolution to the floor of the General Assembly where the odds are good that the US and Israel would get a stunning rebuke by it passing:

Russia’s proposed UN security council resolution garnered support from only four countries — China, the United Arab Emirates, Mozambique and Gabon — but many western diplomats worry that an amended Russian resolution could gain the nine votes required to pass. The US, UK or France might then veto it, handing Moscow a propaganda victory. “We have to prevent Russia . . . supported by the Chinese . . . taking the initiative to use this against us,” said a senior western diplomat. “There’s a risk that at the next vote in the [UN] General Assembly on supporting Ukraine, we’ll see a big explosion in the number of abstentions.”

In other words, the loss of US authority has become so visible that even loyal organs like the Financial Times are forced to take notice. How long before the rest of the mainstream media follows suit? Or is Biden so deluded that he too will escalate in the hope that playing war president will force a show of loyalty?

____

1 Consider how intransigent Israel would be if it were told replacement parts for US weapons would not be forthcoming until they shaped up. The reason the US does not use that and other obvious sources of leverage is fear of the Israel lobby in DC. It’s striking how the US tries to bully pretty much everyone except our military dependents who need to have their ears boxed. And that is set to decline generationally as young Jews in the US don’t much identify with that cause.

2 Anyone who knows the procedure is encouraged to pipe up.

#naked capitalism #yves smith #israel palestine conflict #al ahli baptist hospital #gaza #multipolarity #us imperialism #us foreign policy #BRICS #un security council #joe biden #russia #china #global south

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