By MK Bhadrakumar, Consortium News, 1/19/24

After stunning missile and drone strikes on three countries — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan — over a period of 24 hours, Tehran then took the extraordinary step of claiming responsibility for the attacks. 

This conveyed a very big message to Washington that its stratagem of creating a coalition of terror groups in the region surrounding Iran will be resolutely countered. 

That the U.S. strategy against Iran was taking new forms began emerging after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the consequent erosion of its standing as the regional supremo.

The China-brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement and the induction of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Egypt into BRICS put U.S. strategists in panic mode. (See my analysis “US embarks on proxy war against Iran,” on Nov. 20, 2023.) 

There were already signs  by the latter half of 2023 that the U.S.-Israeli axis was planning to use terrorism as the only viable means to weaken Iran and restore the regional balance in favour of Tel Aviv.

That is critically important for Washington’s prioritisation of the Asia-Pacific while it continues to need to control the oil-rich Middle East. Indeed, a conventional war with Iran is no longer feasible for the U.S., as it risks the potential destruction of Israel. 

Future historians are sure to study, analyse and arrive at sober conclusions as regards the attacks on Israel by Palestinian resistance groups on Oct. 7.

In classic military doctrine, they were quintessentially a pre-emptive strike by resistance groups before the U.S.-Israeli juggernaut of terrorist groups — such as ISIS and Mujahideen-e-Khalq  — turned into a rival platform matching the Axis of Resistance.

Iranians celebrate the Al Aqsa Flood attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. (Ahamadreza Madah, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Tehran is cognisant of the urgent necessity to carve out strategic depth before the wolves close in. It has been pressing Moscow to expedite a bilateral strategic pact but Russians, unsurprisingly, took time over it.

One key agenda item during President Ebrahim Raisi’s “working visit” to Moscow on Dec. 7 to meet with President Vladimir Putin was finalising the pact. 

On Monday, finally, the Russian Defence Ministry disclosed in a rare statement that Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu had called his Iranian counterpart Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani to convey that Moscow has agreed to sign the pact. The MoD statement stated:

“Both sides stressed their commitment to the fundamental principles of the Russian-Iranian relations, including unconditional respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which will be confirmed in the major intergovernmental treaty between Russia and Iran as this document is being finalised already.” 

Iran’s Ashtiani, on right, in May 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

According to Iranian news agency IRNA, Shoigu conveyed that Russia’s commitment to Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity will be explicitly stated in the pact.

The report added that “the two ministers also pointed out the importance of issues related to regional security and emphasised that Moscow and Tehran will continue their joint efforts in establishing a multipolar world order and negating the unilateralism of the United States.” [Emphasis added.] 

On Wednesday, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Moscow that the new treaty would consolidate the strategic partnership between Russia and Iran and cover the full range of their ties. “This document is not just timely, but also overdue,” said Zakharova. 

“Since the signing of the current treaty, the international context has changed and relations between the two countries are experiencing an unprecedented upswing,” she said. Zakharova added that the new treaty was expected to be signed during an upcoming contact between the two presidents. 

Separately, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by the TASS state news agency as saying that an exact date for a meeting between Putin and Raisi is to be determined. Clearly, something of profound significance to the geopolitics of the Middle East is happening in front of our eyes. 

A New Milieu

 Raisi with Putin in Moscow on Dec. 7, 2023. (Sergei Bobylev, TASS)

Iran’s missile and drone strikes against terrorist targets on Wednesday are a vivid demonstration of its assertiveness to act in self-defence in the new regional and international milieu. 

Iran’s so-called proxies — be it Hezbollah or Houthis — have reached adulthood with a mind of their own, who decide their own strategic positioning within the Axis of Resistance. They don’t require a life-support system from Tehran.

It may take some time for the Anglo-Saxon strategists to get used to this new reality, but eventually they will. 

Clearly, it is an underestimation to regard Iran’s missile and drone strikes as merely counter-terrorist operations. Even with regard to the strike on Baluchistan, interestingly, it took place within a month of the weeklong trip to Washington in mid-December by Pakistan’s chief of army staff, Gen. Asim Munir. 

Munir met senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, U.S. Forces Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown and U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Finer — and, of course — the redoubtable Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the driving force behind the Biden administration’s neocon policies. 

From left: Nuland, Munir and, on right, Blinken at the State Department in Washington on Dec. 14, 2023. (State Department, Freddie Everett)

An official statement in Islamabad Dec. 15 on Munir’s high-flying tour stated that Pakistan and the U.S. “intend to increase interactions” for “mutually beneficial” engagements. It said the two sides discussed the ongoing conflicts in the region and “agreed to increase interactions between Islamabad and Washington.”

The statement said, 

“Matters of bilateral interests, global and regional security issues, and ongoing conflicts were discussed during the meetings. Both sides agreed to continue engagement for exploring potential avenues of bilateral collaboration in pursuit of shared interests.” 

The statement added that during the meeting between the top defence officials of the two countries, “counter-terrorism cooperation and defence collaboration were identified as core areas of cooperation.” 

On his part, Munir underscored the importance of “understanding each other’s perspectives” on regional security issues and developments affecting strategic stability in South Asia, according to the Pakistani statement. 

Pakistan [which launched retaliatory strikes on Iran on Thursday] has an entire history of serving American interests in the region and the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi has been the charioteer of such collaboration. 

What is evident today is that the forthcoming elections in Pakistan did not discourage the Biden administration from rolling out the red carpet for Munir. But the good part is that both Iran and Pakistan are smart enough to know each other’s red lines. 

U.S. intentions are clear: outflank Tehran in the west and east with failing states that are easy to manipulate. The hastily arranged meetings in Davos between U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and top Iraq officials (here and here) in the downstream of the Iranian strikes underscored 

• “the importance of (Kurdistan) resuming oil exports (to Israel) and Washington’s support for “the Kurdistan region’s strong partnership with the United States;” 
• the importance of stopping attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria;
• U.S. commitment to “enhancing security cooperation as part of a long-term, sustainable defence partnership;” 
• U.S. support for Iraqi sovereignty; and,  
• Biden’s invitation for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shyaa Sudani to visit the White House “soon.”

In a nutshell, Sullivan has voiced the U.S. intention to strengthen its presence in Iraq — and it has similar objectives to pursue in Pakistan too. Washington trusts Munir to ensure that Imran Khan languishes in jail no matter the outcome of the Pakistani elections.

[See: US Urged Ouster of Khan, Cable Shows]

This strategic realignment comes at a time when Afghanistan has conclusively slipped out of the Anglo-American orbit and Saudi Arabia shows no interest in being a cog in Washington’s wheel or dabbling with forces of extremism and terrorism. 

M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Views are personal.

This article originally appeared on Indian Punchline.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

John Pilger passed away earlier this month.

By John Pilger, Consortium News, 9/7/22

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked.  “Yes, especially them,” she said. 

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies. 

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected. 

Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power? 

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.  It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. 

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

Harold Pinter Broke the Silence

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is

“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this: 

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl. 

“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan. 

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that U.S. President Joe Biden’s theft of $7 billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)

It says: “NATO’s enlargement has been an historic success.” 

I read that in disbelief. 

The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda. 

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border. 

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man. 

Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany. 

NATO on Hitler’s Borderline

Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union. 

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.  

[Related: John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda]

On the same day, Russia invaded — an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing. 

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On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken.” America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.

[Read:  Joe Lauria: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis. 

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bQ5H9S2pv08%3Ffeature%3Doembed

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera.  The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist. 

Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.

 “I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.” 

In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.  

Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.” 

Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable. 

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance.  In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid.  It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

“The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.”

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.  

Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking.  When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated. 

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” 

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists. 

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here. 

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago? 

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

This article is based on an address the author delivered at the Trondheim World Festival, Norway.

John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Russia Matters, 1/19/24

5 Things to Know

1. In the past month, Russian forces have gained 57 square miles of Ukrainian territory, while Ukrainian forces have re-gained 1 square mile, according to the Jan. 16, 2024, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. In an article on the war entitled “Russia Regains Upper Hand in Ukraine’s East as Kyiv’s Troops Flag,” NYT noted this week that “[n]ow Russian troops are on the attack, especially in the country’s east. The town of Marinka has all but fallen. Avdiivka is being slowly encircled. A push on Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut, is expected.” A new Russian offensive could occur sometime between Jan. 12 and Feb. 2, ISW reported, citing estimates of Russian war watchers. For Ukraine to survive Russian offensives in 2024, it needs to pursue the strategy of active defense, according to Western officials cited by FT. Pursuing this strategy, toward which the Ukrainian government has recently allocated $466 million, could be vital, given the ammunition and personnel shortages the Ukrainian armed forces are suffering from, the former partially blamed on delays in disbursements of military aid by the U.S. and EU:

• Russian artillery fire now exceeds Ukrainian artillery fire at ratios between five-to-one and ten-to-one, ISW reported this week, citing Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. “Today we had two shells, but some days we don’t have any in these positions,” a commander of a Ukrainian artillery crew told NYT. “I have two tanks, but only five shells,” a deputy Ukrainian battalion commander told this newspaper.
• Russian forces can generate forces at a rate equal to Russian monthly personnel losses, while Ukrainian forces struggle to find adequate personnel reinforcements, according to the Ukrainian MoD’s military intelligence cited by ISW and  NYT, respectively. “Three out of 10 soldiers who show up are no better than drunks who fell asleep and woke up in uniform,” a Ukrainian soldier confided to NYT in reference to new recruits that arrive at his brigade. Ukrainian MPs are expecting to receive a revised version of the mobilization bill, which is expected to allow a mobilization of half a million Ukrainians, in the first week of February, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

2. Several top figures in NATO’s staff and alliance members’ governments have asserted this week that they believe a war with Russia is possible, with some warning that it could possibly erupt as soon as 5 years from now. Among them are Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Britain’s defense secretary Grant Shapps. “We have to take into account that Vladimir Putin might even attack a NATO country one day,” Pistorius—whose country’s military is reportedly gaming out a Russian-NATO conflict in 2025—told Tagesspiegel. “Our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible,” he added, according to Politico. As for Shapps, he has said that Western countries need to prepare for further conflicts involving Russia over the next five years, according to FT. In the view of NATO military committee chief Rob Bauer, a conflict could occur in the next 20 years. The alliance needs to be on high alert for war, and “that’s why we are preparing for a conflict with Russia,” Bauer said. Putin and his top ministers have repeatedly rejected predictions that Russia might attack a NATO country.

3. Around 90,000 troops will participate in NATO’s largest exercise in decades, known as Steadfast Defender 2024, which will kick off next week, the alliance’s top commander Chris Cavoli was quoted by Reuters as saying on Jan. 18. Steadfast Defender 2024 will run to late May and involve units from all 31 NATO member countries, plus Sweden, according to AFP. The drills will include at least 1,100 combat vehicles, 80 aircraft and 50 naval vessels and will be taking place in the Baltics and Poland, according to Axios and Stripes.com. The exercise will be the biggest since the 1988 Reforger drill during the Cold War, according to AFP.

4. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has rejected U.S.-Russian arms control talks because of U.S. support for Ukraine and warned about the risks of a direct confrontation, according to Reuters and  Bloomberg. “There is already more and more talk of a direct clash of nuclear powers” while “there are fewer and fewer restraining factors in the West,” he claimed at a Jan. 18 press conference meant to sum up Russian diplomats’ work in the past year. Lavrov—who will travel to New York for UNSC meetings next week—said Washington had proposed separating the issues of Ukraine and the resumption of talks on arms control, but Russia found the proposal unacceptable. Lavrov’s warning of a nuclear clash comes one week after Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev’s threat to carry out nuclear strikes if Ukraine tried to target “our missile launchers across the entire territory of Russia.” Speaking in Washington on Jan. 18, Pranay Vaddi, senior director for arms control at the White House national security council, expressed hope that Russia may change its mind as the February 2026 expiration of New START approaches.

5. Security officials from 83 countries have discussed the terms of Ukraine’s Peace Formula in Davos this week, with Switzerland agreeing to host the next meeting even as its foreign minister said it would be an “illusion” to think that Russia would participate on such terms. These include the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian territories. In a setback to Ukraine, China chose not to attend the Jan. 14 meeting, which took place ahead of the World Economic Forum, even though Chinese Premier Li Qiang was attending WEF. In addition, officials from some non-Western states that did attend the meeting reiterated their position that a settlement should address Moscow’s security concerns, such as Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, according to FT. In remarks made this week, Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov rejected Kyiv’s peace formula again, with Lavrov reiterating Russia’s maximalist demands, including Ukraine’s “backing out of joining of NATO.”

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 1/5/24

Here’s a little experiment that you can replicate at home: Type ‘Russia Danger’ into Google (or Bing, or whatever search engine you like, but it probably has to be in English or another NATO-affiliated language; say German or French or Polish). Peruse the results.

Then type ‘Russia Weak’ and repeat.

Funny, isn’t it? Both searches will net you a rich catch of links and titles, of opinion pieces, longform articles, surveys and so on, depicting a dangerous or a weak Russia, as the case may be. And many of those sources will be high-quality or, at least, thoroughly mainstream: Reuters, The Telegraph, The New York Times, NPR, reputable think tanks, institutes, and experts – that sort of thing.

In other words, the West is producing two roughly equally prominent narratives about Russia that are mutually exclusive. True, there are some attempts – vaguely reminiscent of medieval scholasticism – to reconcile them. Almost a year ago now, Reuters, for instance, ran the headline that “even a weak Russia is a problem for Europe.”

How convenient from a Western point of view! That way, you can have your triumphalism (because the phrase “Russia weak” here, of course, implies “West strong”) and, at the same time, you can still spread the fear of big bad Russia, with all that means for intra-NATO politics (i.e. US dominance), military budgets, and arms manufacturers. The latter have been doing very well out of yet another war that has – surprise, surprise – turned out to be a racket, in the famous words of US Marine Major General Smedley Butler.

Yet, on the whole, we are looking at a stark contrast. You may think that this is simply reflecting a healthy debate, with two opposing opinions clashing or that differences are due to time passing and things, especially in Ukraine, changing on the ground. To an extent, you’d be right: It is obvious, for instance, that the Western mood has become more pessimistic after the failure of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive had to be acknowledged.

But the above is far from the whole explanation for the striking Western bipolarity (to use a term from clinical psychology) about Russia. For as so often with Western narratives about that country, they may not help you much to understand the real Russia, but if you read them against the grain, they can tell you a lot about the West’s imaginary Russias (yes, there is more than one). And that, in turn, offers some timely insights into the real West.

Let’s look at a sample of points habitually made about Russia in the two big Western narratives.

For ‘Russia Danger’ we get: obsessively imperial (wants the Soviet Union back or, at least, something similarly dominant); supremely devious (never means what it says and not even the opposite, either); very subversive (able to make or break American presidents, for instance); militarily powerful and ruthless (its forces are battle-hardened and learning, its weapons advanced and adaptable, and, worst of all, its war economy is effective – unlike the West’s); well-connected (it gets ammunition from North Korea, sells oil to India, China just won’t stop siding with it, and, exasperatingly, much of the world is not heeding the West’s command to isolate it); and last but not least, politically “totalitarian,” of course (just disregard here that that term makes absolutely no sense with regard to Russia now).

For ‘Russia Weak’ we find: Not all it’s cracked up to be and really just a fraud (this is where almost no one can resist that deadly tired cliche about “Potemkin” this and “Potemkin” that); primitive in terms of, well, really, everything: values, politics, organization, technology (Remember German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s Wayward Washing Machine Theory regarding how Russians get their microchips? No? Lucky you.); savage (This one easily blends with “primitive,” of course – see under “Russian soldiers without guns but with sharpened shovels”); isolated (at least by the very proper crowd in the West), and, last but not least, always brimming with repressed popular discontent and, potentially at least, on the verge of color revolution and regime change (so to speak, authoritarian enough to condemn, but terribly bad at that, too – see under “Potemkin” and “primitive”).

We could refine the picture, but the outlines should be clear enough. And here is what it reveals: what is behind the West’s two Russias is not merely a debate or differences of opinion and assessments, but the latest iteration of a deep cultural pattern with a long history, reaching back to, at least, the moment when Peter the Great gate-crashed the European Great Power club in the early 18th century.

On one side, the West loves to imagine Russia in what – after the great Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said – we have learned to call an Orientalist framing, as a Backward Other: a part of that perennial fantasy ‘East’ that the West simply can’t imagine – or accept – as its equal. That’s the root of all those descriptions of today’s Russia as a kind of shovel-wielding gas station running on empty (if you will forgive a metaphor as muddled as the thinking it designates).

But there is another powerful register in the West’s Russia imagination: the Sinister Other. Whereas in the Orientalist key, Russia is ultimately always seen as reassuringly weak, the Sinister Other is different: a kind of evil mirror image of the West’s self-idealization, this Russia appears as modern, wielding up-to-date means of power across multiple domains from information, to the economy, to the battlefield. The Sinister Other can also mobilize its population well; it has, like the West, solved the political challenge of bringing the masses into politics, only in a way the West likes to imagine as morally inferior to its own brand of manufacturing consent.

Consider the issue of how Russia has been fighting the current war between it, on one side, and Ukraine and (de facto) NATO on the other. Initial – and gleeful – Western observations about Moscow’s mistakes and predictions that, with its call-up of September 2022, Moscow would fall flat on its face and even trigger large-scale rebellion, if not revolution, were a classic example not only of wishful groupthink but of the Orientalist, Backward-Other register. Put crudely: “Those Russians just can’t hack it, because – they are Russians.”

Yet, when Russia did succeed in mobilizing and also adjusted its military tactics, at least some Western perceptions shifted into the Sinister-Other key: as Barry R. Posen, an unusually perceptive Western observer wrote in Foreign Affairs, “the most alarming thing about Russia’s bombing campaign is that Moscow knows what it is doing.” Indeed. But where’s the news?

It is crucial to understand that this Western pattern is not merely about passive observation. On the contrary, there is a proactive aspect to it: We can read the last decades, essentially since the end of the Soviet Union, as marked by the West’s obstinate attempt to not only imagine Russia as backward and weak. Rather, Russia – and Russians – were supposed to fit that image: Under Western eyes, Russia was to be relegated in the real-existing hierarchy of international politics – a big country (and market), sure, but still one that, when push comes to shove, can be coerced and even defeated. And because Moscow has resisted this demotion successfully, Russia is now the Sinister Other again.

That shift illustrates the single most depressing thing about the West’s views of Russia: the West may change its tone from time to time, it may even produce two very different, mutually exclusive narratives about Russia at the same time, when stuck in a moment of transition or confusion. But it never actually learns. All it does, collectively and with all too few exceptions, is alternate between different frameworks of stereotypes. What a missed opportunity. Again and again.

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine, 1/2/24

A few days after the October 7 attacks in northern Israel, The Atlantic Council ran an inflammatory article on its website by Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer, entitled “It doesn’t matter whether Iran planned the Hamas attack—Tehran is still to blame.”[1]

The article referenced a Wall Street Journal article that claimed unfoundedly that Iran was responsible for planning the attacks, and expressed belief that even if Iran didn’t directly plan it, Iran was still responsible because it had supported Hamas in the past.

The article went on to support an aggressive military response by the U.S. and Israel that could potentially entail bombing Iran. The latter was a long-held dream of neoconservatives who have wanted to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs since it took over from the Shah, a U.S. and Israeli client, in a 1979 revolution.

Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (Clarity Press, 2023) looks at the influence of think tanks like The Atlantic Council in driving gargantuan U.S. military budgets and endless wars that have no end in sight.

The Atlantic Council has been particularly hawkish with regards to Russia, helping to fuel a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine that has decimated a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and left us on the threshold of World War III.

Diesen is an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

His book emphasizes the undue influence that think tank pseudo-intellectuals play because of their ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media as well as academia and because of their authorship of policy reports that often guide government policy.

Rather than being even-handed or in any way objective in their analysis, the think tank fellows follow a preordained narrative.

According to Diesen, their job is to manufacture consent for the goals of their paymasters—weapons manufacturers and oil companies who profit off of war along with foreign governments courting more U.S. military aid.

Diesen writes that “think-tanks have become a symptom of hyper-capitalism in which all aspects of society have become an appendage to the market. Even political influence is regulated by the free-market, in which think tanks are an important component.”

Diesen notes that a brilliant achievement of propaganda has been to convince the population that propaganda is only an instrument of authoritarian states—that the U.S. is supposedly combating—and not liberal democracies.

The think tanks help condition the public to fear foreign threats and support wars of aggression under the veneer of providing independent expert analysis.

Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, has called The Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex,” while Diesen calls it “NATO’s Propaganda Wing.”

The Atlantic Council’s financial report from 2019/2020 reveals that it received over $1 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Diesen. It also received major contributions from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. State Department, a Saudi oil billionaire (Bahaa Hariri), Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, Crescent Petroleum, and Burisma, an energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarchs which appointed Hunter Biden to its board along with former CIA counter-terrorism director Cofer Black.

The Atlantic Council’s close ties to the CIA were further evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the NED, a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.

Former CIA Director James R. Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.

Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation being spread allegedly by Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who called for more aggressive intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics.

One of The Atlantic Council’s fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable, attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.

In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other lethal weapons.

Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, The Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.

Last February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of ’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[2] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precipitous drop in global temperatures, affecting food production across the globe.

Triggering New Cold and Hot Wars

The Atlantic Council’s support for war with Russia is characteristic of think tanks which played a crucial role in pushing the decision to expand NATO after the Cold War.

George F. Kennan and other foreign policy experts had warned against this because NATO was perceived as a hostile military alliance by Russia and it would undermine new European security initiatives involving Russia. Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara at the time also called for a new “peace dividend” by which the U.S. would reduce its military budget and address social needs with taxpayer dollars.

The overriding imperative of the weapons industry, however, was to revitalize cold war thinking to ensure continuously high military budgets and the expansion of NATO and the think-tanks were enlisted to fulfill that end.

Diesen points out that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest American think tanks, played an instrumental role in the Russia Gate hoax, which greatly contributed to the spread of Russophobia underlying the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

A primary researcher and contributor to the Steele dossier, the seminal document in Russia Gate which spread false information about Donald Trump being blackmailed because of an alleged encounter with Russian prostitutes, was an employee of the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko, who was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI.

Working under Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and renowned anti-Russian hawk, Danchenko claimed to have accrued incriminating information against Trump from a meeting with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergey Millian, who said that this meeting never actually took place.[3]

The Atlantic Council was another false purveyor of Russia Gate whose revenues increased tenfold from 2006-2016 when it began demonizing Vladimir Putin and smearing politicians like Tulsi Gabbard who advocated for cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.

Leaving out the fact that Putin revitalized Russia’s economy after the failed privatization and shock therapy initiatives of the 1990s, The Atlantic Council made people believe that Putin invaded Ukraine on a whim and would destabilize all of Europe if he was not stopped.

This kind of analysis obscures the true origins of the conflict in Ukraine and the Western role in supporting NATO expansion and a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s legally elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the outbreak of civil war.

The Atlantic Council continues today along with other think-tanks to whitewash Ukrainian war crimes, corruption and close ties with the far-right and neo-Nazis.

A person in a suit smiling

Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute even celebrates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition politicians and media, while hypocritically framing the struggle against Russia as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.

McFaul and others have made clear that a primary U.S. foreign policy goal is to try and delink Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russia while expanding U.S. natural gas sales in Europe.

In 2019, the RAND Corporation, the think tank of the intelligence agencies, issued a report calling for threatening NATO expansion and the arming of Ukraine in order to draw Russia into a conflict that would facilitate its overextension militarily and economically and cause the Russian government to lose domestic and international support.

The same report advocated for intensifying the ideological and information war against Russia to weaken the legitimacy and stability of its government, and voiced support for the anti-corruption crusade of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Diesen identifies as a British intelligence asset supportive of policies designed to weaken the Russian Federation.

RAND earlier had advocated for provoking civil war within Syria through covert action and informational warfare and by capitalizing on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict in order to undermine the nationalist Assad regime and draw Russia into the conflict there.

RAND also advocated for the destabilization of the Caucuses in order to cause a fissure between Russia and its traditional ally, Armenia, hence weakening Russia.

This latter goal was achieved when Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed no-confidence in Russia’s ability to protect it after Azerbaijan—heavily armed by the U.S. and Israel—invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

RAND had also issued policy recommendations for reducing Russian influence in Moldova and undercutting Russian trade with Central Asia and promoted regime change in Belarus to destabilize a Russian ally and alter the country’s orientation westward.

Following this prescription, the NED and other U.S. agencies provoked an uprising in 2020 against Belarus’ socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was demonized in western media though he helped curb inequality and poverty considerably while resisting the rapid privatization initiatives carried out by other post-Soviet leaders.

CNAS and Team Biden

One of the most influential think tanks today is the Center For a New American Security (CNAS), which received huge sums from oil companies like Chevron and BP, financial giants like Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amazon and Google from Big Tech.

CNAS’s former CEO, Victoria Nuland, was a former adviser to Dick Cheney and a key architect behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine.[4]

CNAS’ founder, Michèle Flournoy, was a board member of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy helped develop counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and contributed to convincing Barack Obama to invade Libya. More recently, she has advocated for an aggressive military buildup in the South China Sea to counter a rising China.

When Joe Biden became president, at least 16 CNAS alumni were selected for foreign policy positions. CNAS had pushed heavily for making Kamala Harris Vice President as her foreign policy team consisted of an army of CNAS think-tankers—including Flournoy.

The appointment of CNAS alumni to prestigious positions and their lobbying influence epitomizes the so-called revolving door in which high level White House and Pentagon officials who serve corporate-military interests while in power are rewarded with lucrative paying jobs in which they continue to serve the same underlying interests.

Diesen emphasizes at the end of his book that think tanks in the modern U.S. have helped to subvert democracy and obstruct U.S. foreign policy in the interests of wealthy corporations that profit from endless wars. He sees as a solution more public disclosures about the sources of think tank funding and public pressures that could help reduce their influence.

Another more radical solution is a socialist revolution that would result in the nationalization of the weapons industry, taking profit out of war, and reorganizing research, development and production toward fulfilling human needs.

1. Panikoff is the Atlantic Council’s Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. ↑
2. In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑
3. The New Knowledge think-tank fabricated a story of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama state election with the intent of causing the defeat of Republican candidate Roy Moore. ↑
4. Nuland was also a fellow at the Brookings Institute. ↑