History is replete with examples in which one side won a war and benefited from doing so, but it also includes examples like the First World War, in which all sides lost far more than they gained. Two years into the Russia-Ukraine War, it is apparent that this conflict will be counted among the latter cases.
The notion that non-Western powers might band together to resist the depredations of Europe and the United States has been around since the late 19th century, but only now has the power balance shifted to a sufficient degree that the era of Western global dominance is actually coming to an end.
The US political and media establishment is beginning to wake up to the fact that, having lost the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, it is now on the path toward losing its proxy war in Ukraine as well.
After decades of conflict and military occupations, Afghanistan has yet to emerge from its ongoing humanitarian crisis. The main culprits at this juncture are the poor governance of the ruling Taliban as well as the remarkably hostile policies of the United States and its allies, which are, in effect, waging economic warfare against one of the poorest nations on Earth.
Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.
The US Congress and President Joe Biden are facing fresh pressure to end “forever wars” abroad and to pursue a US foreign policy that is “consistent with the nation’s legal, human, and civil rights obligations, and the moral authority that the United States has long claimed on these issues.”
The Draft Resolution of the Japanese Communist Party 27th Congress contains valuable insights about how the global superpower is viewed by sections of Japanese political left.
It is not exactly an unknown technique in politics, but the Abe administration is using it in several high-profile cases, and some people, at least, have noticed. The technique is to establish supposedly “independent” panels or organizations, but appointing people to serve on those panels or in those organizations whose opinions and conclusions are already known in advance.
