by Claudiu Secara

We are seeing big, historic changes right now, these very days and this year, in the US and Israel. The equivalent of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia.

In a few words, we have the dismantling of the Anglozionist political structure. The old guard is disintegrating. Jacob Rothschild, age 87, just died. He was the leader of the aggressive clique, Soros, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer. Netanyahu is very much on his last legs. Israel seems to have lost the war against Hamas.

It’s like the times of Brezhnev, followed by Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev… We are going to see a lot of instability coming up before things stabilize.

The Ukraine debacle is a major loss of face for the Collective West, the loss of a military campaign, and further losses on a whole range of aspects. Militarily the West has been revealed to be a paper tiger; it could not sustain either the quantity or the quality of weapons and munitions that Russia could deploy on short order. Sure, if there were the will to go for an all-out confrontation, then the West could transition to a war economy and out-spend and out-produce Russia in military terms. The problem is that if the West did gird itself for this glorious sacrifice, Russia has promised unequivocally to use nuclear weapons.

So the West has to confront this dilemma: escalate, only to expedite the day of total, mutual annihilation, or take the losses now and look ahead for another day.

Another day? But what if there isn’t another day? Having faced the naked reality of military defeat, the West is now faced with the economic consequences. It just does not have the resources to maintain the standard of living that it was used to since WWII. The energy to power its industry is no longer available. Bad enough, but worse is the long-term deterioration of its social fabric, the deterioration of its labor quality.

Generation after generation corrupted by self-indulgence in a leisurely life style, lower and lower education standards, the destruction of family as the natural laboratory generating the perpetual army of ready-made warriors—the bedrock of the society, all the forms of deviance that were promoted by the old elite in order to maintain their status quo, all those signs of weakness that were just glossed over, they all are now converging together to undermine the Western edifice.

The departure of Nuland from the State Department is a telltale sign. Biden’s fading into decrepitude is like the unfolding of a biblical prophecy.

On the other hand, there are obvious signs that more people of influence, especially in the US, are preparing the ground for the end of the road for this 400-500 years’ journey.

Is it just a coincidence that on September 19, 2023, an obscure publishing house in Brooklyn released a book with the title “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories”? Maybe. Authored by a man whose name is Rothschild? Published in Brooklyn, NYC? The center of Jewish life in the US?

OK, coincidence. Let’s check the book’s endorsements. Who? CNN? The Washington Post? Bloomberg? Endorsing the “conspiracy theory” that the Rothschilds were the bad guys for the last 200 years, at least? What’s going on that we don’t know?! No one told us that it’s OK now to promote anti-semitism and to reveal the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Then there is the Tucker Carlson phenomenon. Under very obscure circumstances he was, or on his own, separated from Fox News after being promoted as the number-one talkshow host. Lo and behold, he now has an audience 10 times larger than Fox News and is by far the most watched platform in the world. And what is he saying? That Russia is right in the Ukraine war; that the CIA is very bad, undermining America and the world, and this has to stop. Right now. That the covid pandemic was/is a scam. That climate change is fiction. Etc.

Then there is Marjorie. Where did she pop up from? Marjorie Taylor Greene is also being promoted, and what she is propounding is nothing less than the conspiracy theories of the Rothschilds and the Jewish takeover of the world. Promoted by whom? By the Wall Street Journal, by Forbes Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Yorker, The [Jewish] Daily Beast, etc.

When did this all change ? I didn’t sleep much throughout these years, but honestly I didn’t catch the change of direction.

Finally, we have the International Court of Justice ruling on the genocide in Gaza. Yes, this is now the accepted view worldwide. The holocaust of WWII is being remanufactured under our gaze into its very opposite. Instead of the holocaust of the Jews, we now have the holocaust by the Jews. Interesting.

And then we have the Trump phenomenon. Only three years younger than Biden, Trump very closely recalls Chernenko/Andropov/Gorbachev all in one, following Brezhnev. What is Trump’s manifesto? A lot of buzzwords, just like Gorbachov’s. Ending the war in Ukraine. OK, and then? Stop illegal immigration. Just as Reagan promised, only to legalize all those already in the country. Drain the swamp. Yeah, we heard that before, while watching the worst warmongers being brought into his administration: Bolton, Nikki Haley, etc.

If we take Russia as a case study on how a superpower reformats itself from within, then we should see more false starts before it is really on the path of reinventing a new political entity. If Trump could be seen as the American Gorbachev and his distabilizing economic policies, then we are looking for the next Yeltsin and a whole string of prime ministers parading across the stage. It’s a long way till the system blows up, but we do see the start of it.

Former stalwarts of the system are now coming out of the closet as the voices of dissent. These are the first-level oppositionists, like the Long Parliament of 1640 on the eve of the English Revolution of 1642, or the Aristocratic Revolt of 1787-1789 in the French revolution of 1789, or pre-Kerensky government of February 1917 before the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 in the Russian Revolution.

Things get really, really hot, later on as the conflict unfolds.

by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR via Indian Punchline

Britain’s HMS Diamond deploys missiles to attack Yemen

From the standpoint of affirming ‘solidarity’ with the regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the October 7 attack, India has swung away to the far horizon and has unceremoniously dumped the US-Israeli axis, which provided beacon light to Delhi’s West Asian policies in the past few years.

From a strategic asset, the Israeli connection is becoming a liability for the Indian government. Delhi spurned Netanyahu’s repeated entreaties to brand Hamas as a terrorist organisation — by the way, India never pointed finger at Hamas for the October 7 attack. It has resumed the traditional stance of voting against Israel in the UN General Assembly resolutions on the Palestine problem. The Netanyahu-Modi pow-vows have become infrequent.

This is a far cry from the controversial gesture by PM Modi during his ‘historic’ five-day visit to Israel in 2017 to pay homage at the tomb of the founding father of Zionism Theodor Herzl in Haifa . It is doubtful if any Indian prime minister would repeat Modi’s feat in future. With reasonable certainty, it can be said that the future of Zionism in West Asia itself looks rather bleak.

Again, for reasons that remain obscure even today, India decided to be a strong votary of the ill-fated Abraham Accords that purportedly aimed at ‘integrating’ Israel into the Arab fold but, in reality, to isolate Iran in its neighbourhood. Delhi never provided a rational explanation for such a dramatic shift in the traditional policy not to take sides in the intra-regional fratricidal strife in West Asia or identify with the US hegemony in that region.

Delhi followed up by enthusiastically lining up with a surreal venture called ‘I2U2’ which brought together India and the UAE with the US and Israel as a condominium to promote the spirit of the Abraham Accords. In an extravagant gesture, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar paid a 5-day visit to Israel to participate in ‘I2U2’.

Above all, Delhi, which hosted the G20 Summit last year and was supposedly highlighting the rise of the Global South in the world order, instead ended up arranging photo-ops for the visiting US President who hijacked the event and instead catapulted a phoney, laughable idea as the main outcome of that historic event — the so-called India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC).

The US apparently incentivised Delhi by planting a patently absurd thought that IMEEC would toll the death knell for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China of course retaliated by just hoisting the BRI flag high all over the Maldives (population: 515,132 in the 2022 census) on India’s soft underbelly from where it is visible all over the subcontinent day and night.

However, Indian diplomats are quick learners and course corrections come naturally to them. Delhi has understood that such absurdities in its West Asian policy will do no good and may even be counterproductive as they raise hackles in the Arab Street. Thus, Qatar ticked off India recently by ordering the 15 Indian schools in Doha that cater to the needs of the largely-Hindu 700,000-strong Indian ex-patriate community to ignore Hindu holidays, especially Diwali.

Consistent with the championing of the Global South, India should have voiced support for South Africa’s brilliant initiative to petition the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to bring Israel to justice for its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. After all, it was in South Africa that Mahatma Gandhi had finessed the concept of resistance to racialism. But, alas, India lacked the courage of conviction and the moral fibre to do so.

It is too much to expect the ICJ to put Netanyahu in a cage and try him in the Hague court for his abominable acts against humanity. But there is a strong likelihood that with tacit western support, the ICJ may issue in the coming weeks some sort of interim order for a ceasefire. And in the present atmosphere, that can prove to be a game changer.

All this makes India’s decision to stay clear of the US’ harebrained idea of disciplining Yemen’s Houthis a sensible step. The theatre of the absurd playing out in the Red Sea with the Five Eyes in the cockpit is incredibly complicated. One main vector there is about the phenomenon of the Houthi resistance as such.

An old friend and Beirut-based editor-in-chief of the Cradle, Sharmine Narwani twitted about the quagmire in the Red Sea that awaits the Anglo-American attack on Yemen today:

“I honestly question whether the US or UK have carefully considered #Yemen‘s potential responses to this act of war. Ansarallah (Houthi) is an unusual member of the region’s Axis of Resistance. It marches to its own tune and its mindset is entirely devoid of western narrative grooming. There is no guessing at the full spectrum of its retaliatory palette, but I would not want to be an American or Brit in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, or any of the neighbouring waterways right now.

“It may be that Washington misread the Russian and Chinese abstentions at the UNSC yesterday (on Red Sea). Or, perhaps Moscow and Beijing dangled that bait so the US would miscalculate this badly. The Americans are now militarily engaged, supplying, or bogged down on 5 separate fronts: Ukraine, Gaza-Israel, Yemen, Iraq, Syria. US adversaries can easily hold out until the fatigue sets in; they are nowhere near depleted.

“Bottom line is I think the entire Global South is going to be wearing Abdul Malik al-Houthi t-shirts by springtime.”

Indeed, it is such prescience that is often lacking in India’s West Asia strategy. This is not a region for one-dimensional men. It has been a strategic mistake to be aligned to the US and its allies in the Indian Ocean under the rubric of ‘maritime security’. The erstwhile colonial powers are innovating Neo-mercantile mechanisms to transfer wealth to their metropolis. Why should Indians act as ‘coolies’, as during British rule?

Most important, India should be seized of the Renaissance that is sweeping through the Muslim countries in West Asia. It is epochal in its sweep and has cultural, political and economic dimensions — and will inevitably have far-reaching geopolitical significance. That is why, it becomes imperative that Delhi stops viewing the region though Netanyahu’s Zionist eyes. It is important to terminate India’s collaboration with the US and colonial powers such as France and the UK to interfere in the region on the pretext of maritime security in the Indian Ocean.

India has no reason to have institutionalised partnerships with the US Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT). In a conceivable future, the curtain could well be descending on the western military bases in West Asia. Delhi should grasp the reality that something fundamentally changed post-October 7 in the geopolitics of West Asia.

It is in sync with what Germans call the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) that Saudi Arabia is demanding that the security of the Red Sea is an international responsibility in cooperation with the riparian countries and UN support. Since 2018, Saudi Arabia has called for the establishment of a Council of States bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and in 2020, eight countries signed the Council’s founding charter, who include, ironically, Yemen. Saudi Arabia plans to host a summit meeting of the Council of States.

Today’s Anglo-American missile strike against Yemen should come as a rude awakening to India messaging that the very same western powers who are backing Israel are also escalating the conflict in Gaza and step by step transforming it as a regional conflict — all in the name of freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia, the regional superpower in the Red Sea, has called on the US to exercise restraint.

The US is internationally isolated, for their support for Israel – says Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Seismic shifts are taking place in geopolitics, in which the US has chosen total isolation by standing with Israel. 

“The world does not look to the US for leadership, the world looks at the US aghast! We don’t have a President in Biden, I don’t know what he is…We have the worst foreign policy imaginable” – Sachs does not hold back.

by SCOTT FOSTER

via Asia TimesChinese smartphone company Xiaomi on Dec. 28, 2023, revealed its forthcoming electric car, the SU7 sedan. Photo: CNBC / Evelyn Cheng

Chinese electric vehicle maker NIO and smart phone maker Xiaomi have ended the year with the announcement of new products challenging NVIDIA and Apple. This marks yet another advance in China’s efforts to develop its own semiconductor technology and eliminate dependence on imports.

On December 23, NIO revealed its first autonomous driving chip, which it claims is superior to the NVIDIA Drive Orin chips it is using now. The Shenji NX9031 SoC (System-on-Chip) will be used in the company’s new ET9 executive sedan, which was also presented at NIO Day 2023. Held in Xi’an, the event attracted more than 10,000 participants and attendees.

The ET9 is a long-wheelbase, four-door luxury EV priced at about 800,000 yuan, or $113,000 at the current exchange rate. Orders for the ET9 can be placed in China now, but deliveries are not scheduled to begin until the first quarter of 2025.

The first 5-nm Chinese automotive IC, the NX9031 will probably by fabricated by TSMC, Samsung Electronics or Intel Foundry Services. In theory, it could be made by SMIC, but that would be inefficient and more expensive. Under the sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor industry, SMIC does not have access to the advanced EUV lithography systems that IC foundries outside China use to make chips with 5-nm and finer processes.

The NX9031 features an Arm 32-core CPU (central processing unit), an NPU (neural processing unit), a graphics core and more than 50 billion transistors. It comes with low power, double data-rate LPDDR5X DRAM memory (probably Korean-made) and can process lidar (light detection and ranging) data.

An NPU, which mimics the human brain, deduces optimal solutions from available data. Lidar uses laser light to survey the environment, providing autonomous vehicles with 3D images of the road and traffic. The NX9031 will work with SkyOS, Nio’s vehicle operating system, which covers vehicle control, assisted driving, cockpit systems and mobile connectivity.

According to NIO CEO William Li, the computing power of the NX9031 is comparable to four NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs, the standard configuration currently used in NIO electric vehicles. These 7-nm chips are capable of up to 254 TOPS (trillion operations per second) each, or 1,016 TOPS in total. That is sufficient for smart driving today, says Vice President Bai Jian, but not for the next generation of autonomous vehicles.

NVIDIA has come to the same conclusion. Drive Thor, the successor to Drive Orin, is scheduled to go into production in 2025. It will have twice as much computing power as Drive Orin. What does this mean? NVIDIA Vice President Danny Shapiro explains:

“If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle. In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost.”

NIO established its IC design team in 2020. Led by Bai Jian, its purpose is to develop an independent smart driving capability including sensors, autonomous driving algorithms and now SoCs. Bai was previously an executive at Chinese smart phone makers OPPO and Xiaomi.

Xiaomi beats Apple to the draw

On December 28, Xiaomi revealed its first electric vehicle before thousands of people at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. At the event, CEO Lei Jun said that his company’s goal is to produce a dream car that can rival Porsche and Tesla.

The Xiaomi SU7 (SU stands for Speed Ultra), a four-door electric sedan designed by professionals who previously worked for BMW and Mercedes-Benz, is manufactured by BAIC (Beijing Automotive Industry Corp). It is equipped with NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs for assisted and autonomous driving and Xiaomi’s own operating system. Videos show the SU7 avoiding obstacles on the street and parking without a driver.

Deliveries of two- and four-wheel drive models are expected to begin within the next few months. Prices have not yet been announced, but benchmarking against the Tesla’s Model S and Porsche’s Taycan Turbo suggests that they might be as high as 700,000 to 900,000 yuan range – about the same as the NIO ET9.

Xiaomi plans to invest about $10 billion in its auto business in the next 10 years. “By working hard over the next 15 to 20 years,” says CEO Lei, “we will become one of the world’s top five automakers, striving to lift China’s overall automobile industry.”

Xiaomi’s plans appear to put Apple to shame. Last September, MacRumours reported that a semi-autonomous Apple Car equipped with neural processors still might be launched in 2026 – but that there have been so many delays since the project began in 2014 and so little information provided by management that the timeline is up in the air

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. It’s a core technology that we view as very important. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.” But it was in 2017 when he said that.

In any case, Xiaomi has beaten Apple to the draw, and so has Huawei, which announced its entry into the electric vehicle market in 2021. Now it is reported that Huawei plans to establish hundreds of new EV sales and service outlets in China over the next two years.

Under sanctions that have proved far from crippling, Huawei has developed its own automotive ICs and operating system. The Ascend chipset in its Mobile Data Center is capable of 352 TOPS, which enables Level 4 High Driving Automation. That means completely autonomous operation under certain conditions such as a defined route, highway driving or parking.

In the meantime, NVIDIA continues to supply more than a dozen Chinese automakers including NIO, Xiaomi, BYD, DENZA, Human Horizons, Ji Yue, Xpeng and ZEEKR (which is owned by Geely). ZEEKR was the first Chinese automaker to announce that it would adopt Drive Thor. Xpeng has reportedly asked NVIDIA to provide it with a custom designed version of Drive Thor.

At the end of November, it was reported that NVIDIA is looking to hire more than 20 specialists for its autonomous driving development team in China. That team is led by Wu Xinzhou, who joined NVIDIA last August. Before that, he was vice president of autonomous driving at Xpeng.

Chinese automaker Nio develops 5nm chip, claims a 4x advantage over Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processors, perhaps the most complex Chinese SoC to date

by Anton Shilov
via https://www.tomshardware.com

Nio, a major maker of electric vehicles from China, has developed its first 5nm processor for autonomous driving. The chip comes packing 50 billion transistors, comparable to Nvidia’s A100 processor for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The company believes that its system-on-chip is more advanced than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X, which it currently uses for its self-driving systems. Interestingly, the SoC (A System on a Chip) is set to be made using a 5nm-class process technology, reports CnEVPost.

Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC was developed by the company itself and packs 32 general-purpose Arm cores in total (including both Big and Little cores), a neural processing unit, a graphics processor, and an LPDDR5X memory subsystem. The system-on-chip can process data from LiDAR, which differs from processors used by Tesla that rely on data from video sensors. Since the unit is designed for autonomous driving applications, it complies with the ASIL-D risk and safety requirements.

The automaker says that its own chip is four times more powerful than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processor it uses today, though it has not mentioned any specific numbers. Meanwhile, it is evident that Nio wants to use its own silicon and no longer rely on Nvidia’s Drive Orin X.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect about the Nio Shenji NX9031 processor is that it is set to be made on a 5nm process technology, though it is unclear by whom. Unlike many of its Chinese counterparts, Nio is not blacklisted by the U.S. government, so it can order chips from TSMC, Samsung Foundry, or even Intel Foundry Services. Furthermore, since China-based SMIC doesn’t really offer automotive-grade leading-edge process technologies, we expect Nio to use the services of TSMC, Samsung, or IFS rather than its Chinese peers.

Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC will first be used for the company’s ET9, a premium sedan whose deliveries are set to start in Q1 2025, so the company will have enough time to test the processor and tailor software for it.

by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR via Indian Punchline

Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, New Delhi, Sept 11, 2023

European Union’s super bureaucrat Ursula von der Leyen chose April Fools’ Day last year to threaten China that it would suffer “reputational damage” in the world community for backing Russia’s Ukraine war. Being a civilisational state, China let pass that arrogant, presumptuous, egotistic remark.

The concept reeks of neo-colonial mentality. Saudi Arabia’s tryst with reputational damage has been of a different kind. The Kingdom has had spectacular success in overcoming the reputational damage related to the killing of the ex-CIA asset Jamal Khashoggi. It makes a worthy case study for India, which also is haunted by the spectre of reputational damage for allegedly committing trans-border crimes.

From an Indian perspective, there are seven “takeaways” from the Saudi experience. First, Saudi Arabia stood its ground; second, it sought no help from third parties to reach out to the power brokers in DC; third, it seized the initiative to set in motion an investigative mechanism of its own which came up with cognitive reasoning in a very short period of time; four, it followed up by sentencing the Saudi perpetrators of Khashoggi’s murder to imprisonment; five, it didn’t allow the “reputational damage” to impede normal life; six, it turned a new page so that “a new normal” became possible, which is resilient and geared for the long haul that is strengthening the Kingdom’s strategic autonomy; and, seven, in the final analysis, the “decoupling” from the US helped the Saudis to shake off the reputational damage.

Needless to say, the last point is the crux of the matter. Saudi Arabia’s assertion of strategic autonomy has taken myriad forms that caught the Biden Administration by surprise. This was not how Saudi Arabia was expected to behave under pressure with its ponderous decision-making process, the statecraft moving at a glacial pace, its comprador class among the elites only too eager to capitulate and the ruling elite’s unipolar predicament and so on.

But the “new normal” also dictated that Saudi Arabia did not get into an acrimonious brawl with the Biden Administration but instead subjected the latter to benign neglect of a kind that was most hurtful for the US’ interests and regional influence and bruised its vanities of being the only game in town in the Middle East.

In reality, Saudis had no alternative, given the profoundly troubling geopolitical reality that Khashoggi was being groomed by the Deep State in the US for a higher political destiny than that of a mere dissident — and that was something Riyadh couldn’t have tolerated, as the stability of the regime was being threatened from America, which was ironically the Kingdom’s provider of security and a strategic ally of several decades.

It takes years or even a decade to lick into shape a mole so that it can perform as a strategic asset like Khashoggi for the US intelligence, and the fury over his untimely murder surged in media attacks on the Saudi regime — targeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

However, as months passed, it became more and more difficult to demonise the Crown Prince under whose watchful eyes, the Kingdom embarked on a historic path of reform. Three major achievements through the past 5-year period can be seen as game changers. First, Vision 2030, the transformative and ambitious blueprint to unlock the potential of the people and create a diversified, innovative, and world-leading nation. The reform programme has already begun to show impressive results.

Two, OPEC+ which was the brainchild of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has liberated the world oil market from the US’ clutches through the past 5-year period and in turn put the two energy superpowers on the driving seat. The transition is hugely consequential in geopolitical terms. Incredibly enough, the new matrix fine-tuning the global market is taking place independent of American leverage. OPEC+ is working effectively, overcoming all external attempts to undermine it.

Three, Saudi Arabia’s induction as a full member of the BRICS — again, with Russian backing — is expected to carry forward the new impulses of the Kingdom’s independent foreign policy, which in turn is expected to galvanise the creation of a new international trade and financial architecture.

Although a sub-plot in this context becomes the normalisation with Iran, which at one stroke created a paradigm shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East region with the regional states steadily doing away with American midwifery in settling their intra-regional issues. A natural consequence of it has been the sharp decline in the US’ regional influence which has become evident during the current Israel-Palestine conflict.

All in all, the Saudi compass is laying the foundations for an emerging regional power that is destined to contribute to the international system and the world order. The US has understood that it lost the plot and is moving with alacrity to mend fences with Saudi Arabia. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in June last year came tantalisingly close to an act of atonement. That was only to be expected.

A few examples from the last month alone testify to the dynamism of Saudi diplomacy and the total collapse of the US’ strategy to “isolate” the Kingdom — visit by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil (a BRICS member state, which is due to join OPEC+ in January); winning the bid in a landslide in secret ballots to host the World Expo 2030 (Saudi Arabia won 119 of the 165 votes, easily defeating South Korea and Italy thanks to the huge backing by the Global South); the $7 bn local currency swap agreement with China’s Central Bank (latest sign of strengthening relations with China and a step toward delinking from the petrodollar); leading by example the OPEC+ decision on voluntary cuts of oil production “to ensure a stable and balanced oil market” (revealing at the grouping’s virtual meeting on November 30 that it would be continuing its 1 million barrels per day reduction, ie., roughly 45 percent of total production cut of 2.2 million bpd envisaged); and, of course, placing itself at the front and centre of high-stakes public diplomacy over the Gaza war, with China again as its preferred partner (while a Saudi-Israeli normalisation, which might have been a major foreign policy win for the Biden Administration, has become politically radioactive for Riyadh.)

The moral of the story — especially for countries like India — is that firmness tempered with tact and patience pays. The Saudi secret lies in avoiding nasty confrontation but instead quietly, systematically shaking off the critical dependence on the US by diversifying the Kingdom’s external relations.

The mother of all ironies in all this is that the US not only assassinated a senior Iranian general in a third country and the then president in the White House even bragged about it. Equally, the US took revenge on Osama bin Laden and dumped his corpse in the high seas.

It has kidnapped dozens of Russian nationals travelling abroad and locked them up in prisons in an attempt to persuade them to work for the US intelligence. Now, in June, with a similar objective, the US intelligence kidnapped an Indian transiting through Prague. Evidently, the US intelligence was stalking him on Indian soil.

It is a frightening thought that the Five Eyes may have penetrated the core of the Indian security establishment. Yet, state secretary Blinken vows not to let go India, the US’ indispensable partner for the undoing of China. It almost seems as if he knows something about Indian statecraft that we do not. Indian diplomacy has truly tied itself in knots.

They were kept together, Hamas tried to provide medicine daily, food was scarce and they were not subjected to torture or ill-treatment.

Recommended: the prolific work of Prof. Michael Hudson. His early seminal work ‘Super Imperialism’ was ignored by the left (its intended audience) and instead was adopted by the CIA as a manual on how to drive its hegemony. It made him the highest paid analyst on Wall St and, among other things, he showed how the US Global Military Industrial Empire expenditure exactly mirrored the US Current Account Deficit.

Further study with Harvard Anthropology Department placed his work within a broader context and a much longer timescale, examining the history of debt and financial organization in the Ancient Near East. There autocratic rulers were established to protect the 95% from the inevitable emergence of a wealthy oligarchy who would expropriate and turn them into debt-slaves. As no economy on the planet has ever managed to grow faster than compound interest on debt, regular ‘debt jubilees’ or wiping the slate clean of private debt obligations, kept the oligarchs down and the state functioning long-term. With the population both able and willing to transfer resources to the centre for infrastructure and self-defense, the Debtors Rights were paramount, based on ability to pay.

This changed in the Hellenic and Roman Empire which provide the foundations of Western Law. Creditors Rights became paramount, and oligarchies emerged which, once they had exploited the 95%, dispossessing them and forcing them to work as serfs on their latifundia (plantations), then needed to look to move beyond the domestic frontiers.

Until eventually the oligarchs found that everyone, including the mercenaries hired to defend the Empire, hated them. So much so that the Roman Senate itself ended up supporting the so-called ‘barbarians’ to come and destroy these oligarchs.

It is no coincidence that the Western elite and their public architecture, White House, Capitol etc. mirror the creditor-based Roman Imperial models.

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/05/the-arc-of-time-pro-creditor-history/

https://michael-hudson.com/2019/06/food-blackmail-the-washington-consensus-and-freedom/

The michael-hudson.com site is a goldmine, maintained by his students, is extremely searchable using tags.

Uncritical support for the American stance on the Israel-Hamas war will prove to be some Western governments’ downfall

by Graham Hryce via RT
Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is on the verge of splitting, as yet another political crisis has engulfed Britain – and over the past few weeks it has become apparent that major political parties in the West are paying a heavy price for uncritically supporting America’s latest proxy conflict in Palestine.

Prime Minister Sunak sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman because she sought to ban pro-Palestinian protest marches. Her disagreement with the PM over this issue came hard on the heels of serious disagreements between them over other “culture war” issues, namely immigration policy and multiculturalism.

Sunak’s dismissal of Braverman and his appointment of David Cameron (now Lord David) as Foreign Secretary were desperate and ill-judged acts, of the kind to be expected from a fourth-rate politician like Sunak.

Braverman has not gone quietly. Her resignation letter accuses Sunak of incompetence, treachery and lack of principle, amongst other failings, and some Conservative MPs have already fired off letters to the 1922 Committee expressing their lack of confidence in Sunak.

The prime minister’s extraordinary decision to bring back Cameron from his richly deserved political exile simply beggars belief.

Cameron created the entire Brexit debacle, led the unsuccessful Remain campaign, helped turn Libya into a failed state, and was hell bent on invading Syria until the UK parliament stopped him. Since petulantly retiring from politics after the Brexit referendum succeeded, he has occupied his time by getting involved in shady financial deals.

Peter Hitchens, the conservative commentator, described Sunak’s actions as “an open declaration of defeat and purposelessness” – and journalist John Crace characterised Sunak and the Conservatives as “a Prime Minister and a government in a death vortex”.

Surely Sunak cannot remain prime minister for much longer, and a split within the Conservative Party now seems inevitable – with Braverman and her right-wing supporters leaving the party at some point to perhaps join forces with Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to form a new Trump-like populist movement.

Nor has Kier Starmer’s Labour Party escaped unscathed from the acute emotive divisiveness engendered by the Israel-Palestine conflict that has torn the Conservative party apart over the past week.

Starmer has had to endure a revolt from 56 of his MPs (including a number of shadow cabinet members) who strongly disagree with his unwavering support for America’s refusal to accept an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

These Labour MPs openly defied their leader, and voted in the House of Commons in favour of a failed motion brought by the Scottish National Party (SNP) – yet another major UK party recently rent asunder by internal divisions and corruption – calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

In Australia, bitter political divisions have also emerged over the conflict in Palestine, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government deeply divided over the ceasefire issue (even though it formally supported America’s opposition to a truce) and coming under concerted attack from the conservative opposition parties, who uncritically support America’s position on Gaza.

The opposition has branded Labor politicians who have called for a ceasefire as antisemites, and insisted that pro-Palestinian protest marches – there have been many in major Australian cities over the past few weeks – be banned.

PM Albanese, who won an election in May last year, now finds himself in charge of a fractured government that appears increasingly unlikely to win a second term in office.

There seems to be a very strict correlation between craven support for American foreign policy and political incompetence amongst politicians in the West.

Similar bitter political divisions, accompanied by mass pro-Palestinian protest marches, have emerged recently in most Western countries, including America – and Germany, France, Austria and Hungary have now banned pro-Palestinian rallies altogether.

It is a curious circumstance that purportedly liberal democratic governments that uncritically support America’s foreign proxy conflicts find themselves curtailing free speech and the right to protest in their own countries.

Be that as it may, it is clear that the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October, and the Netanyahu government’s ongoing response to them, have deeply destabilised Western democracies and exacerbated deep-seated, pre-existing ideological and political divisions within them.

How has this self-destructive political chaos come about?

Palestine, unfortunately, has now become a classic “culture war” issue in the West, as a result of almost all Western governments uncritically supporting the blank cheque that the Biden administration has given to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government in respect of Gaza.

Rational debate on the topic has become virtually impossible in the West, with both sides hurling emotive charges of ”antisemitism” (redefined so as to encompass any support for the Palestinian cause or any criticism of Netanyahu’s actions) and “genocide” at each other, whilst at the same time ignoring the complex historical context that gave rise to the current phase of the conflict.

In fact, when the UN secretary general recently pointed out that the October 7 attacks had an historical background – a demonstrably true statement – the Israeli Ambassador to the UN demanded that he be sacked immediately. So much for rational debate.

It is inevitable that a ceasefire in Gaza will have to take place, and a political settlement will have to be negotiated at some point. It is most unlikely, however, that the Netanyahu government will be in power long enough to negotiate such a settlement.

Recent polls in Israel show that support for Netanyahu is collapsing, and media outlets within Israel that previously supported him are now calling for him to step aside – not only because he failed to prevent the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, but because he has no realistic strategy for negotiating a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert – who, unlike Netanyahu, is committed to a two-state solution to be negotiated between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government – said recently in an interview with ABC in Australia that Netanyahu “has to be fired… he is not fit to govern, and has no strategy to work towards peace”.

Olmert – who is a fierce opponent of Hamas – has accused Netanyahu of empowering the militant group since becoming prime minister by refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority – on the grounds that Netanyahu, just like Hamas, refuses to accept that a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians is possible.

Olmert has also condemned Netanyahu for refusing to distinguish between Hamas terrorists and innocent civilians in Gaza, and causing international support for Israel (he means in the West because such support does not exist elsewhere) to rapidly dissipate since the October 7 terrorist attacks.

Olmert’s criticisms of Netanyahu are substantially correct. Members of Netanyahu’s government have recently stated that Israel intends to occupy Gaza after the present conflict ends, and that the two million Palestinians that reside in Gaza should be driven out of the territory.

And behind this unedifying global spectacle stands a bloated and declining American empire, still committed to promoting proxy foreign conflicts – notwithstanding the debacles it has created in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in recent decades.

Major Western political parties and politicians now have a clear choice: they can stop uncritically supporting America’s disastrous proxy foreign wars, or risk being torn apart by the bitter internal conflicts that such ill-judged backing inevitably gives rise to.

President Macron of France is the only Western leader who seems to appreciate this.

Recently Macron bravely called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and strongly condemned Netanyahu’s ongoing killing of innocent civilians and blatant disregard for international and humanitarian law.

Whether or not other political leaders in the West will have the courage and intelligence to heed President Macron’s example is extremely doubtful. But events in the UK last week make perfectly clear the fate that awaits those politicians who refuse to do so.

American Forces in Syria attacked local militia in “Self Defense” – What? And that is being said with a straight face by all pundits in the US and it’s vassals. 

Such abominable claim is never challenged by the prestitute media in the mainstream and most of the alternative media. Only rare voices of sanity bring this false claim to the public scrutiny.