A ceasefire brokered by Russia over the weekend that was to allow time for both sides in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to collect the dead and exchange prisoners, broke down almost immediately. Within 24 hours, heavy shelling was reported in civilian areas. Fighting has continued on into the beginning of this week. Antiwar.com reported the following:

The ceasefire fell apart on Sunday, and Azerbaijan said it shelled an Armenian regiment after an attack on Ganja, a city deep inside Azerbaijan’s territory. Armenia denied attacking Ganja.

Accusations continued on Monday. Baku accused Armenian forces of launching attacks inside Nagorno-Karabakh and shelling areas inside Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh said Azerbaijan directed a “large number of forces” to Hudrut, a town in the south of the enclave, and reported “large-scale hostilities.”

Nagorno-Karabakh said on Monday that 45 more of its servicemen were killed, bringing its total military deaths to 525 since the clashes broke out on September 27th.

Follow-up reporting by AP on Tuesday stated:

The reported death toll in clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has reached about 600, with officials reporting more military and civilian deaths as the fighting continues despite a cease-fire announced over the weekend.

Nagorno-Karabakh military officials said Tuesday that 16 more of their servicemen have been killed in fighting, bringinhe total number of dead among military members to 532 since Sept. 27, when the fighting started. Azerbaijan hasn’t disclosed its military losses, and the overall toll is likely to be much higher with both sides regularly claiming to have inflicted significant military casualties on one another.

Azerbaijani authorities said 42 civilians have been killed on their side in over two weeks. Nagorno-Karabakh human rights ombudsman Artak Beglaryan late Monday reported at least 31 civilian deaths in the breakaway region. Hundreds more have been wounded….

….On Tuesday, Azerbaijani officials have once again accused Armenian forces of shelling some of its regions, and Nagorno-Karabakh officials said Azerbaijan launched “large-scale military operations” along the front line.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has employed multiple professional PR firms to lobby for its interests in Washington DC, including pushing the characterization of Armenia as the aggressor in the current flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh. According to reporting from Barbara Boland in The American Conservative:

While oil-rich Azerbaijan’s lobbying slowed after 2016 due to the collapse of its currency, Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) documents reveal a flurry of recent activity aimed at convincing Washington elites that Armenia is the aggressor and that the U.S. should favor Azerbaijan in the conflict.

When American lobbying and public relations firms are hired by foreign countries, they are legally required to register their clients with the Justice Department under FARA. They are also required to provide a list of the activities they undertake on behalf of the foreign country.

Azerbaijan’s hired K Street guns are distributing what are euphemistically referred to in FARA documents as “informational materials.” These materials could be more accurately described as propaganda. The documents distributed on Capitol Hill highlight Armenia’s “provocative actions,” its “illegal” role in the conflict, that Armenia allegedly “kills Azerbaijani civilians, including children,” and how “Armenia’s leaders have been actively undermining the ongoing peace process.”

The documents lobbyists distribute on Capitol Hill make some incredulous claims: that “Armenia has long been involved with Middle Eastern terrorism,” that “Azerbaijan has been consistent in urging substantive and result-oriented negotiations in order to achieve a breakthrough in the conflict,” and that “Turkey is not directly involved and is not a party to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.”

Read the full article here.

For some interesting background on the historical complexities behind the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, read Nagorno-Karabakh’s Myth of Ancient Hatreds here and The Fighting Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Halted – But a Deep-Rooted Conflict Remains here. Pepe Escobar provides his take on things at Asia Times.

***********************************************************************

In late August, Washington floated the idea of trying to cement a NATO-style alliance in Asia against China consisting of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India – a group of nations currently known as “the Quad.” The aspiration of an Asian NATO was mentioned publicly by Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun:

“It is a reality that the Indo-Pacific region is actually lacking in strong multilateral structures. They don’t have anything of the fortitude of NATO or the European Union,” Biegun said. “There is certainly an invitation there at some point to formalize a structure like this.”

However, a meeting of the Quad members last week seemed to put the kibosh on that idea:

A meeting in Tokyo of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad” — the United States, India, Japan, and Australia — ended without a joint communique or no mention of an earlier proposal by Washington that it might be time to expand their group into a more formal security alliance akin to NATO. 

This is a blow to the Trump administration, which is looking to shore up its support for what it sees as a growing cold war against China.

Read the full write-up by Jason Ditz here.

By Paul Robinson, Irrussianality, 10/5/20

…The View from Moscow reads somewhat like two books in one. The first 150 pages consist of a straightforward survey of Russian history from Kievan Rus onwards, with a focus on the Soviet period (everything up until 1917 gets a mere 44 pages). The second half of the book then shifts tone and becomes altogether more political, as Baldwin attempts to explain how post-Soviet US-Russia relations deteriorated to the extent that we are now in a sort of ‘New Cold War’.

Read full review here.

By Professor Paul Robinson, RT, 9/28/20

Azerbaijan has never forgotten its 1990s humiliation at the hands of Armenia. Now stronger than its sworn enemy, and emboldened by Turkish support, Baku’s assertiveness is creating a headache for Moscow.

Russian president Vladimir Putin once complained that communist leader Vladimir Lenin had placed a ‘time bomb’ under Russia. He had in mind the introduction of the federal principle after Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Lenin gave national minorities their own republics within the Soviet Union. In so doing, he created a situation which allowed those republics to secede from the Union once communist power collapsed.

Soviet federalism brought other problems. The communists granted autonomy to the larger nationalities in the form of 15 ‘republics.’ Smaller nationalities also got autonomy, but of a different form – so-called ‘autonomous republics’ and ‘autonomous regions.’ When the union fell apart, fully-fledged republics got independence, but the autonomous republics and regions within them did not.

Unsurprisingly, many of the smaller minorities were not too happy with this somewhat arbitrary outcome, and attempted to secede from the seceding republics. The result was several wars, the first of which took place in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, after it attempted to secede from Azerbaijan and join with Armenia. The war ended in an Armenian victory. Not only did the Armenians drive the Azeris out of Nagorno-Karabakh, but they also captured a swath of Azeri territory linking Armenia with the breakaway region.

Continue reading here.

Today’s guest post is by James Chen. Please feel free to give your thoughts on the article in the comments section below. – Natylie

By James Chen

In the most important speech of his short, but significant life of public service, President John F. Kennedy explained about “the genuine peace”:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

I like to point out two not-so-subtle essences of the meaning of genuine peace, which are frequently missed or ignored by some childish political pundits and radical “peace lovers.” First, genuine peace cannot to be achieved by an indiscriminate pacifists’ approach. Secondly, genuine peace should not be obtained through endless Machiavellian shenanigans, such as the adage that my enemy’s enemy is always considered a friend.

The indiscriminate pacifists’ approach can only make more wars necessary. When The League of Nations chose to acquiesce to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Northern and Eastern China, permission was in fact granted to the Japanese Empire to choose its next target, the Soviet Union or the United States. Again, when Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, a disastrous war in Europe was invited. No imperial aggressor has ever been dissuaded or deterred by goodwill alone in human history.

The doctrine of making one’s enemy’s enemy a friend will inevitably lead to wars with our emboldened “allies” who are fundamentally our enemies. Henry Kissinger, who persuaded President Richard Nixon to play the “China card” against the Soviet Union, only found himself, at the last stage of his life, struggling to urge a new cold war with imperial China, which had already infiltrated every fabric of the United States in the past half century. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who devised the “Mujahideen card” for President Jimmy Carter, would always be branded as the prime culprit whose ill-minded scheme ultimately led to the bombing of the World Trade Center and an endless war against Islamic terrorism. Making friends with someone who does not share the same values does not make him a true friend, but a true enemy much harder to deal with, due to the technology, weapons and money that is provided.

In order to understand why 75 years after the end of WWII, we are still far away from realizing the dream of genuine peace which the whole world suffered so much to achieve as 70 million lives were lost, we have to go back to the historical moment when the most deadly confrontation of human beings was about to end. It is well known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a great vision to achieve world peace which he sought to implement by eradicating the long-standing practice of imperialism and by developing a rapport with the leader of the second most powerful country of the world at that moment. The chance was never better in human history. His abrupt death disrupted this dream as his successor, President Harry S. Truman, did not have Roosevelt’s understanding of the nuances of the international arena or the Soviet Union’s security concerns, much less his diplomatic skills. Most unfortunately for the world, Truman did not have that deep aspiration for genuine peace.

The consequences have been quite severe. Not only did the world miss one of the greatest opportunities to advance human civilization with a quantum leap, but also the U.S. took an erroneous path to engage in a prolonged and dangerous cold war with the Soviet Union. At the same time, the British Empire was allowed to survive and continue to play a manipulative role on the world stage. After all, two of the most ambitious and barbaric medieval empires, the Chinese and the Ottoman, were also revived as a result of the Machiavellian game. During the process, the American Republic has been degenerating into an empire, controlled by the deep state of establishment, disguised under the mask of a permanent revolving election door of two-party dictatorship. Today, although the Soviet Union has been dissolved for nearly thirty years, we are probably even farther away from achieving the goal of genuine peace than we were 75 years ago, while world peace is constantly threatened by the ambitions of four contemporary empires: the American, the British, the Chinese, and the Ottoman.

With no intention to write a book-length article, I would only point out here two ominous manifestations of each of the four empires as follows:

The American Empire

1. The United States government orchestrated a permanent military organization, NATO, only four years after the end of WWII. The military organization was created in 1949 against the Soviet Union as a loophole to by-pass the UN Charter, with a claim to secure a lasting peace in Europe, based on common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The interesting thing is that it continues to expand nearly thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many of its member states are in fact rated as flawed democracies, and four of its member states – Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey – are rated as hybrid regimes by the most recent Democratic Index. The records of NATO breaching the UN Charter – invading and bombing sovereign countries, sponsoring terrorism, and conducting genocides – are numerous.
2. The military forces of the United States invaded Vietnam and intended to suppress the self-determination of the Vietnamese people in the 1960s-70s, causing millions of deaths in that country. And the ripple effect of that intervention resulted in human catastrophe in surrounding countries, such as Cambodia and Laos.

The British Empire

1. The United Kingdom persuaded the United States to join the 1953 Iranian coup d’état carried out by the Iranian military, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état, resulting in the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in favor of the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in August of 1953. It is not necessary to list the consequences of the coup in this article.
2. The United Kingdom was the first country to join the United States in the second Iraq War, which was orchestrated by the neoconservatives of the Bush II administration to expand the American-Anglo dominance of the world, resulting in total destabilization of the region and the spread of Islamic terrorism.

The Chinese Empire

1.  Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China has been continuing its imperial expansion without cessation, epitomized by the annexation of Tibet in 1950 and suppression of the Tibetan rebellion in 1959; invasion of India and occupation of Aksai Chin in 1962; invasion of Vietnam in 1979; continuous aggression against Taiwan – threatening invasion, massacres and annexation, causing multiple Taiwan strait crises in 1954, 1958, 1996, and further; militarizing international waters of the South China Sea by constructing military bases on uninhabitable archipelagos in violation of international law.
2. Since the normalization of relations between U.S. and China, the Chinese government has been trying to weaken the United States through sabotage, infiltration, spying, subjugation, and coercion. At the same time, it has been influencing and bribing many American politicians, academics, and businesspeople to serve its interests. One of the most pertinent examples of the Chinese interference in the American political and business arena is related to the current Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, a lawyer and investment banker, until recently was a director at Bohai Harvest RST, known as BHR, formed with $1 billion in Chinese government funding shortly after then-Vice President Biden visited China in December 2013, according to the investigative report. BHR co-purchased Henniges Automotive with Chinese military contractor AVIC, which had been identified as a front for China’s military and had been sanctioned before the Obama administration approved the Biden-connected sale.

The ultimate goal of the Chinese government is to replace the United States as the most powerful country on Earth, including their own ideology of exceptionalism.  Their goal is to realize the ambition reflected in their name for their country, “the Central Empire,” which is based on the myth of a single dominant “race” of Han-Chinese.

The Ottoman Empire

1. Thirty thousand Turkish troops are currently occupying one third of the Republic of Cyprus since 1974, after a bloody invasion. This occupation of a foreign territory of a sovereign state is the only such occupation confirmed and recognized by the UN Security Council, with condemnation and resolutions currently issued on the subject.  This is in addition to other indisputable invasions and occupations perpetrated by the Turkish military forces in other sovereign countries, including Greece, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
2. The Turkish government continues to conduct genocide against the Kurdish people inside and outside its borders, both physically and culturally for nearly 100 years, sometimes with help from the United States through military and economic aid programs. The Turkish government also continues to deny the Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek genocides which were the archetypal examples for all the genocides committed in the twentieth century and beyond. Today, it continues efforts to eradicate acknowledgment of those victimized ethnic groups under the pretense of national security concerns, which is supported by typical acquiesce from the United States and the United Kingdom, two so-called western democracies which do not officially recognize the Armenian genocide.

Understanding the pathophysiology of this four-empire disease of the world, I would like to jump directly into the solution of it. The principles we should bear in mind are:

1. The government of the United States should lower the threshold for organizing a new party that is free of control by the military-industrial complex, banks, oil companies, etc.
2. Our government should start to break down the few media-conglomerates and social media companies to allow truly free discussion by American citizens;
3. Our government should change the direction of our foreign policy towards respecting true democracy, self-determination, and sovereignty;
4. Our government should stop supporting theocracies disguised as democracies;
5. Our government should make allies by shared values, not necessarily short-term interests;
6. Our government should start to dissolve, or at least reform, all the permanent military organizations which the United States is currently participating in;
7. Our government should avoid playing into the hands of globalist fascism, which advocates forming a single global government with etiology of neo-liberalism;
8. Our government should seek foreign policy advice from outside of establishment think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.

To be more specific, we should start to move in the following five directions without hesitation:

1. Disengage from any relationships with the Chinese and Ottoman empires;
2. Form true alliances against the Chinese and Ottoman empires;
3. Sever the so-called US-UK special relationship and encourage the dissolution of the British Empire;
4. Consolidate cooperation with Australia, EU, Japan and India;
5. Rebuild trust with Russia.

I have no doubt that this approach is the only approach that can not only serve the founding principles of this country, but also can deliver genuine peace to the world by the end of the twenty-first century.

James J. Chen has had a life-long interest in history, politics, and the humanities. He has begun writing on these topics, with a particular emphasis on the the U.S.’s role in the evolution of the modern world.  He lives and practices medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area. His website address is: https://jamesjchen.wixsite.com/save-the-country.