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The Counter-Constitutional Movement: The Assault On America’s Defining Principles

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Kamala Harris declared in Tuesday’s debate that a vote for her is a vote “to end the approach that is about attacking the foundations of our democracy ’cause you don’t like the outcome.”

She was alluding to the 2021 Capitol riot, but she and her party are also attacking the foundations of our democracy: the Supreme Court and the freedom of speech.

Several candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination, including Ms. Harris, said they were open to the idea of packing the court by expanding the number of seats.

Mr. Biden opposed the idea, but a week after he exited the 2024 presidential race, he announced a “bold plan” to “reform” the high court. It would pack the court via term limits and also impose a “binding code of conduct,” aimed at conservative justices.

Ms. Harris quickly endorsed the proposal in a statement, citing a “clear crisis of confidence” in the court owing to “decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.” She might as well have added “because you don’t like the outcome.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) has already introduced ethics and term-limits legislation and said Ms. Harris’s campaign has told him “that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about.”

The attacks on the court are part of a growing counterconstitutional movement that began in higher education and seems recently to have reached a critical mass in the media and politics.

The past few months have seen an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of “democracy” unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.”

In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”

In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Others have railed against individual rights. In my new book on free speech, I discuss this movement against what many professors deride as “rights talk.” Barbara McQuade of the University of Michigan Law School has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.”

In another Times op-ed, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, asserts that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”

George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”

Mainstream Democrats are listening to radical voices. “How much does the current structure benefit us?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said in 2021, explaining her support for a court-packing bill. “I don’t think it does.” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said at the Democratic National Committee’s “LGBTQ+ Kickoff” that “we’ve got to reimagine” democracy “in a way that is more revolutionary than . . . that little piece of paper.” Both AOC and Ms. Robinson later spoke to the convention itself.

The Nation’s Elie Mystal calls the Constitution “trash” and urges the abolition of the U.S. Senate. Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law School complains that Americans are “slaves” to the Constitution.

Without countermajoritarian protections and institutions, politics would be reduced to raw power. That’s what some have in mind. In an October 2020 interview, Harvard law professor Michael Klarman laid out a plan for Democrats should they win the White House and both congressional chambers. They would enact “democracy-entrenching legislation,” which would ensure that “the Republican Party will never win another election” unless it moved to the left. The problem: “The Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described, and that’s something the Democrats need to fix.”

Trashing the Constitution gives professors and pundits a license to violate norms. The Washington Monthly reports that at a Georgetown conference, Prof. Josh Chafetz suggested that Congress retaliate against conservative justices by refusing to fund law clerks or “cutting off the Supreme Court’s air conditioning budget.” When the audience laughed, Harvard’s Mr. Doerfler snapped back: “It should not be a laugh line. This is a political contest, these are the tools of retaliation available, and they should be completely normalized.”

The cry for radical constitutional change is shortsighted. The constitutional system was designed for bad times, not only good times. It seeks to protect individual rights, minority factions and smaller states from the tyranny of the majority. The result is a system that forces compromise. It doesn’t protect us from political divisions any more than good medical care protects us from cancer. Rather it allows the body politic to survive political afflictions by pushing factions toward negotiation and moderation.

When Benjamin Franklin said the framers had created “a republic, if you can keep it,” he meant that we needed to keep faith in the Constitution. Law professors mistook their own crisis of faith for a constitutional crisis. They have become a sort of priesthood of atheists, keeping their frocks while doffing their faith. The true danger to the American democratic system lies with politicians who would follow their lead and destroy our institutions in pursuit of political advantage.


Mr. Turley a law professor at George Washington University and author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage

WWIII? Coming Closer to the Brink

Putin said that Russia’s nuclear doctrine has been changed. Key points.
1. The threshold for using nuclear weapons has been lowered. Now it will be easier for Russia to use nuclear weapons.
2. The main thing is that nuclear weapons can now be used against a non-nuclear state if it commits aggression against Russia with the support of a nuclear state.
3. Russia can also use nuclear weapons to defend not only itself, but also its allies. Specifically, Belarus.
4. Generally speaking, this means that Russia, according to the new doctrine, can now use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. There is Ukrainian aggression in the Kursk region. There is support from the nuclear USA, Britain, and France. This means that it is already possible to strike Kiev with nuclear weapons.
5. But Russia will not strike Kiev with Tactical Nuclear Weapons. This creates a contradiction – reminiscent of the story with the Red Lines. 6. But Russia is clearly threatening with nuclear weapons.
7. The reason for changing the nuclear doctrine is the threat of a complete escalation of the war against Russia by the West. The West is confident that Russia will not use TNW first. But Russia says it is ready.

S. M.

UN, 2024: Signs Towards More War Escalation

The discussion about Ukraine at the UN unexpectedly turned out to be largely about nuclear power plants.

  1. China called for leaving the nuclear power plants alone and not involving them in the conflict.
  2. Zelensky said that Russia is preparing strikes on three nuclear power plants.

  3. Zelensky said that according to intelligence, Russia is using photos of nuclear power plants in Ukraine from Chinese satellites to prepare strikes on nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

  4. It is known that Russia does not strike nuclear power plants, and Ukraine regularly strikes the periphery of the Zaporizhzhya NPP and the Kursk NPP.

  5. In Russia, at the expert level, the need to strike at electrical substations that transmit electricity from nuclear power plants to the economy of Ukraine is being discussed. Since Ukraine receives most of its electricity from nuclear power plants, the only way to damage the Ukrainian power grid is to disconnect these networks from the nuclear power plant.

  6. But for two years now, Russia has not even tried to disconnect the Ukrainian power grid from the nuclear power plant.

On the other hand, Zelensky’s message is all about escalation.

Zelensky’s speech at the UN Security Council was surprisingly not focused on peace initiatives. It was assumed that Zelensky would try to win the sympathy of the countries of the Global South and would lie that Ukraine was in favor of peace.

But it turned out that Zelensky did not say anything pleasant for the countries of the Global South. And he continued to speak like a war maniac. He spoke only about the need to force Russia to peace under the terms of Zelensky’s formula, that is, about the need to defeat Russia on the battlefield and then force Russia to semi-capitulate.

It is not very clear why Zelensky did not use this opportunity to win the sympathy of the countries of the Global South?

Options:

  1. Zelensky knows that Washington is very close to making tough decisions about significantly greater NATO involvement in the war against Russia. And that is why he focused his speech not on the Global South, but on the West. And that is why he was so belligerent.

  2. Zelensky has personally psychologically turned into a war maniac and cannot even talk about peace for tactical purposes.

Sergey Markov

Netanyahu Seeking to Implement the Greater Israel?

The so-called “Agreement of the Century” signed by Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and sponsored by Donald Trump staged the de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over much of the Jewish colonies in the West Bank (including the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights and virtually the entire holy city of Jerusalem with the exception of two eastern suburbs) and demands that the Palestinian community renounce completely its historical claims and the right to which it is entitled under international law in exchange for a promise of an injection of $50 billion within 10 years, This would in practice result in the loss of Israeli citizenship for 300,000 Arabs and make it impossible to have a Palestinian state.
Such a doctrine would clash with the vision of Theodor Herzl, considered the father of the present-day State of Israel and founder of Zionism in promoting the creation of the WSO (World Zionist Organization), who in his book “The Jewish State: Testing a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question”, proposed the creation of an independent and sovereign Jewish State for all the Jews in the world. In his work “The Old New Earth” (1902), he lays the foundations of the present-day Jewish state as a utopian modern, democratic and prosperous nation, in which the Jewish people were projected into the context of the search for rights for the stateless national minorities of the time, such as the Armenians and the Arabs.

Later, in 1938, the visionary Einstein warned of the dangers of an exclusionary Zionism by stating: “I would like to see a reasonable settlement with the Arabs on the basis of peaceful life in common, which I believe would be preferable to the creation of a Jewish state”.

Towards the Greater Israel

The Greater Israel (Eretz Israel), is an entity that would try to unite the antithetical concepts of the atavism of the Great Israel (Eretz Israel) and which would have as main advocate Isaac Shamir defending that “Judea and Samaria (biblical terms of the present-day West Bank) are an integral part of the land of Israel.

They have not been captured and will not be returned to anyone”, a doctrine on which the current postulates of the Netanyahu-led Likud party that aspires to make Jerusalem the “indivisible capital of the new Israel” would be based after the invasion of its eastern part following the Six-Day War (1967).

Thus, the Netanyahu government would be speeding up the deadlines to implement the endemism of Greater Israel (Eretz Israel), which would drink from the sources of Genesis 15:18, which notes that “4,000 years ago, the title to all land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates River was bequeathed to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and subsequently transferred to his descendants”.
This would involve the restoration of the Balfour Declaration (1,917), which drew a vast State of Israel with an area of nearly 46,000 square miles and which extended from the Mediterranean to the east of the Euphrates encompassing Syria, Lebanon, northern part of Iraq, northern part of Saudi Arabia , the coastal strip of the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt as well as Jordan, which would be renamed Palesjordan after being forced to host all the Palestinian population of the present West Bank and Gaza forced into a massive diaspora ( new nakba).
Germán Gorraiz López- Political Analyst

Sent from my iPad

The War About Palestine Has Reached Its Next Stage

via Moon of Alabama

Last week Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahoo decided to escalate the tit for tat missile exchange with Hizbullah in Lebanon into a full fledged war.
There were several reasons for him to do so:

  • 60,000 settlers from north Israel have left their homes and will only return if the government can provide for their safety.
  • The radicals in his government want to eliminate Hizbullah and threaten to end the government should it not do so. (The realists know that this is an impossible aim.)
  • There may be some delusion that Hizbullah will falter under pressure and agree to a ceasefire that does not include Gaza.
  • There is a chance for Israel to drag the U.S. into a fight that would end up with a war on Iran. Netanyahoo has for decades tried to arrange for this.

Last week Israel launched a terror attack on Hizbullah operatives who were using pagers to receive alarms and orders. These people were part of the civil administration side of Hizbullah and not its armed fighters.
The following attack on a leading Hizbullah commander who was meeting with Hizbullah special force officers was more serious. But it will not damage Hizbullah’s operation. Every higher officer does have a designated successor who will immediately step in. Continuity of command within Hizbullah is guaranteed under almost any circumstances.
Both of those Israel attacks required a response from Hizbullah. The ‘strategic patience’ it had previously adhered to had reached its limits.
Its response to the Israel strikes are be part of a larger war that has now started.

The response was given in the form of missile strikes within a limited range from the Lebanon-Israel border. Some of these hit the city of Haifa. A harbor and industrial center some 40 kilometer south of the border.
Since October 8 2023 the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah has been uneven. There were eight times more strikes by Israeli on Lebanon than on Israel by Hizbullah. Israel is now publicly justifying its strikes as a ‘de-escalation through escalation’ policy which, it claims, will lead to a separate peace with Hizbullah. 
But the real aims of the Zionists are voiced by radical members of Netanyahoo’s cabinet:

Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis – 19:16 UTC · Sep 22, 2024
“Lebanon will be annihilated”. How an Israeli official’s slip of the tongue reveals that Israel’s genocidal intentions extend beyond Palestine. A direct result of US and EU backing of any war crime Israel chooses to commit whenever, wherever…
Embedded video

It is a scorched earth policy which is supposed to eventually lead to the occupation of south Lebanon and the restart of Israel settlements therein:

Sam Heller | سام هيلر @AbuJamajem – 7:03 UTC · Sep 23, 2024
Official Israeli claim that nearly every building in southern Lebanon conceals several missiles pre-excuses massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, attempts to sow division between Hizbullah and popular base.

Israel Defense Forces @IDF · 10h

IDF Spokesperson RAdm. Daniel Hagari exposing Hezbollah’s way of firing missiles from civilian homes, and how the IDF plans on dismantling it:
Embedded video

Since yesterday Israel launched a myriad of air strikes targeting alleged Hizbullah firing positions in civilian areas of mostly south Lebanon. Over the day some 400 people in Lebanon have been killed and nearly 2,000 have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands people living in south-Lebanon have fled or are fleeing northwards.
Hizbullah responded by targeting military installations and industrial installations for militarily relevant production. It is expected to soon use more sophisticated weapons to hit targets in Tel Aviv, 120 km from the border, and beyond.
While there will be many pictures of damage and casualties from Lebanon there will only be few reports of Hizbullah hits in Israel.
The Israeli government has (again) issued a general directive to all media to refrain from picturing and reporting of any damage. The military censors, which sit in every news room, will make sure that these orders are followed.
The war in the north will continue like this for days, weeks and months.
It is a war of moral attrition.
Which population will be first to call for an end of the fight?
How long will the pampered population of Tel Aviv sit for days and nights in bunkers without asking for change?
Will the Shia of Lebanon, who’s religion is endorsing suffering and the will to die as a martyr, be the first to cry for an end?
I for one will never bet against Shia religiosity or Hizbullah’s ability to sustain a fight.
While the war in the north is filling international news programming the Zionist genocidal war in Gaza continues.
Israel has plans to liquidate northern Gaza, which includes four big cities, by ethnically cleansing and starving the 1.3 million people living there.
Netanyahoo has officially considered these plans and is expected to follow them.
Gaza is at the core of the conflict. Should Israel agree to a ceasefire in Gaza the war in the north will also immediately come to an end. It is only Netanyahoo, and the Biden administration covering for him, who are blocking the way to a peaceful solution.

October Surprise?

by Serghey Markov (translated by Algora)

In October, cardinal decisions on Russia may be made. This will happen at a meeting of the leaders of the main Western countries, the USA, Britain, France, Germany. Perhaps they will decide to offer Russia a truce – before the elections, so that Harris wins.

Most likely, they will accept Russia’s ultimatum: agree to its terms of a truce. Or they will begin missile strikes on Moscow. Apparently, first in November, strikes on the Moscow region. And in January, strikes on Moscow.

Biden is flying to Germany especially for this meeting.

Another point of the negotiations is Europe’s support for the falsification of the elections in favor of Harris.

Russia Takes a Stand Against the “Future Pact”

The UN General Assembly voted almost unanimously for the Future Pact, which contains humanity’s plans to solve climate problems, end wars and combat inequality.
A wonderful pact. But Russia did not support it. Together with Belarus, Iran, the DPRK, Syria and Sudan.

Russia demanded that the UN Future Pact not violate the sovereignty of countries. So that it does not happen like this: the UN Secretary General tells some country that the organizing committee of the Future Pact is very unhappy with how the country’s government is fighting against Global Warming, so it was decided that now this country will be represented in all international organizations not by government representatives, but by special commissioners appointed by the US and the EU at the request of the UN Secretary General. And if they object, they will be bombed – for too much carbon dioxide emissions.

Besides, Russia really didn’t like that this entire Future Pact was developed under the complete control of the West. Give the West the future as well? – Russia definitely doesn’t want that.

Trump Bombshell: In Jail Before Electors’ Vote?

Former President Donald Trump will not be sentenced in his New York criminal case until after the 2024 election, Judge Juan Merchan announced today. The magistrate said, according to CNN, that he will pronounce Trump’s sentence on November 26.

Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to an adult film star who claimed an affair with the former president. But Trump’s actual punishment, which must be decided by the magistrates, was suspended for several months, reports CNN.

The small problem, we say, is that the de facto election of the future president is not on November 5, when only the popular vote takes place, but on December 17, when the electors make their decision. Which means we could have an unprecedented situation where candidate Trump gets jail time before the electors decide.

Russians Using Gold to Do Business, Skirt Sanctions

Authored by Mike Maharrey via MoneyMetals.com

Russian businesses are using gold to pay Chinese suppliers as a way to skirt economic sanctions.

According to the Russian website Russia’s Pivot to Asia, Russian businesses are buying physical gold in Russia and then transporting it to Hong Kong via courier. There, the gold is sold, and the cash is deposited into the bank accounts of Chinese suppliers to pay for goods and services.

With their access to dollars cut off, this gives Russian suppliers an alternative way to purchase supplies, and the process also shields Chinese banks from sanction threats.

Hong Kong is a free port and does not levy import duties on gold, and customs fees are minimal. According to Russia’s Pivot, “The process avoids all use of the banking system except for the deposits into secured Chinese bank accounts.

Hong Kong serves as a major Asian gold trading hub. Gold imports into the city totaled around $16 billion in 2023.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. and other Western nations imposed strict sanctions on Russia, including locking the country out of the SWIFT payment system.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system serves as the global economy’s superhighway. In effect, it operates as a global financial messaging service, facilitating cross-border payments. Since the dollar is the world reserve currency, SWIFT effectively facilitates an international dollar system.

The United States has taken advantage of its privilege as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, in effect, weaponizing the dollar for use as a foreign policy tool.

Without access to the SWIFT system, Russia has had to find workarounds to keep its economy going. Gold serves as the perfect alternative because it is money that other parties don’t control. In other words, using gold minimizes counterparty risk. While the U.S. can freeze dollar assets and lock other countries out of the dollar trading system, it has little or no control over the movement of physical gold.

Russia ranks as the world’s second-largest gold producer. The country also added a significant amount of the yellow metal to its central bank reserves in the years before the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s use of gold to facilitate business transactions takes de-dollarization to the next level.

As Nassim Taleb recently pointed out, global transactions are still generally labeled in dollars “as an anchor currency,” but central banks are increasingly storing their wealth in gold. In other words, the dollar still serves as the primary medium of exchange, but more and more countries are turning to gold as a store of value. This is evidenced by record central bank gold buying over the last several years.

By using gold as money in business transactions, Russia shows that the dollar really isn’t even necessary as a medium of exchange.

This isn’t to say the dollar is in imminent danger of losing its status as the reserve currency, but its strength is certainly being undermined. Other countries have watched how the U.S. has aggressively used the dollar, and they are naturally wary. This is why so many countries are diversifying away from the greenback and putting more of their reserves in gold.

The Madness of Antony Blinken

by Joe Lauria via Consortium News

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

Two years after the Pentagon shot down his ploy for a no-fly zone against Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. “top diplomat” has been at it again pushing an even more insane idea

On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.

A no-fly zone “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.

President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.

Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin backed him up:

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”

(The administration plan was, and apparently still is, to bring down the Russian government through a proxy counteroffensive and an economic and information war, not a direct military one.)

Blinken, who stepped out of line to speak above the heads of the president and the Pentagon, lost that round. It’s surprising he kept his job. But he survived and now he’s come back for more.

Relentless

Blinken’s recklessness emerged yet again last week when he peddled a story — eagerly picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times — that Biden would approve a British request to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.

The Guardian story on Sept. 11 said:

“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.

Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised.”

To fire British Storm Shadows, Ukraine would have to depend on British technical soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to actually launch them and on U.S. geolocation technology. German Chancellor Olaf Shulz revealed those British soldiers are already in Ukraine.

In other words, it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen.

The next day Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that launching such missiles into Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

Nevertheless, The New York Times ran a story on the same day with the headline: “Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia.”

The Guardian added:

“British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.”

Blinken’s words evidently raised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s hopes that he would satisfy his desire to strike Russia with his nation’s arsenal of long-range missiles, despite Putin saying that meant direct war with NATO.

Blinken and the British are trying to lead us to the brink.

Sanity in Arlington

Except that the Pentagon, the purveyor of the most monstrous violence in world history, has pulled the world back from it.

For at least the second time — publicly known — the Department of War secured peace from neocon recklessness fronted by Blinken.

Starmer was sent back on his chartered British Airways flight from the White House meeting licking his wounds. He’d evidently been led by Blinken to believe that it was a done deal: the U.S. would let Britain attack Russia with its long-range missiles using U.S. technology — even if the U.S. wouldn’t allow its own long-range ATACMS to be used.

The Times of London reported that Biden withholding approval “surprised British officials who had listened closely to hints from Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that America was edging towards authorising Storm Shadow, an Anglo-French weapon which relies on American GPS guidance systems.”

Starmer’s mania to strike Russia illustrates Briain’s continuing pathological hatred of Russia, extending back centuries, compared to a perhaps more tempered though determined American geostrategic rivalry with Moscow.

Biden’s Limits With the Neocons

Biden has proven himself a supreme warmonger, his advocacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq and his complicity in the genocide in Gaza as the most outstanding examples.

Like the two presidents before him, Biden allowed necons to worm themselves into positions of power in his administration. But the extent to which Biden himself is a neocon, as opposed to a traditional warmonger, is subject to question.

As a creature of Washington of more than half a century, he seems to respect the military’s judgement about military matters and, on his good days, understands that even America has limits.

Barack Obama let Hillary Clinton, the “Queen of Warmongers,” bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his. And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.)

Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the U.S. into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.

As a careerist, Blinken said what he had to say to get to where he is. Obama in 2015 wisely decided against arming Ukraine after the Nuland and Biden-led 2014 coup because he did not want to antagonize Russia, for whom he said Ukraine was a vital interest, while it was not for the U.S. Obama also feared U.S. arms would fall into the hands of “thugs” — meaning neo-Nazi Azov types, whom Obama was well aware of.

Blinken at the time was Obama’s deputy secretary of state. To support the president’s position, he told a conference in Berlin:

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

But once he was freed of the restraints of Obama, he joined Biden’s aggressive Ukraine policy at the top of the State Department. From that position, and with a power vacuum in the White House because of Biden’s dementia, Blinken has been openly pushing the neocon agenda, laid out plainly in the 2000 report of the Project for a New American Century.

And what is that agenda? In another age, before it became a dirty word, it would have been proudly proclaimed as imperialism. It contains all of the hubris and sense of invincibility and impunity of any empire in history.

PNAC plainly promulgates that no power or alliance of powers will be allowed to rise up to stand in the way of the neocons’ mad quest to harness American power to achieve world domination. An alliance of powers such as that of China, Russia and the BRICS countries, which has only accelerated in opposition to unhinged, neoconservative adventurism.

No matter the many disasters piling up, notably Iraq, Palestine and now Ukraine, the neocons are undeterred and unrestrained. It’s about power and murder but it is made palatable to themselves with flowery language about America saving the world for democracy.

Their belief in their own supremacy, cloaked in an American flag, remains fanatic, no matter the death and destruction they cause. They do not understand that American power has limits and to test that, they risk everything.

In 2019, Blinken teamed up with arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan to write a Washington Post op-ed arguing for more aggressive use of U.S. power abroad and against U.S. domestic trends towards non-interventionism.

With Kagan’s wife Nuland out of the Biden Administration and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan crucially siding with the realists, Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”

That was 30 years ago. The neocons are in the penthouse now and only the restraint of the Pentagon and Sullivan’s persuasion brought Biden back from the brink.

This time.