By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times I have a new book out, Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism. For those who don’t use Amazon, here is a mini-guide on how to order and buy the book. The journey of a book finding its readers is always an idiosyncratic, mysterious and fascinating process. To set the scene, permit me a short presentation
New Five-Year Plan aims for ‘high-quality’ economic reform, a tech leap forward and new era of common prosperity By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times It’s Lianghui (“Two Sessions”) time – the annual ritual of the Beijing leadership. The stars of the show are the top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; and the traditional delivery of a work report by the Prime
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times In the beginning, they were the Bamiyan Buddhas: the Western Buddha statue, 55 meters high, and the Eastern, 38 meters high, carved for decades since 550 A.D. from porous sandstone cliffs, the intricate details modeled in clay mixed with straw and coated with stucco. Xuanzang, the legendary traveling monk of the early Tang dynasty who journeyed to India in
By Pepe Escobar and first posted at Asia Times Moscow is painfully aware that the US/NATO “strategy” of containment of Russia is already reaching fever pitch. Again. This past Wednesday, at a very important meeting with the Federal Security Service board, President Putin laid it all out in stark terms: We are up against the so-called policy of containing Russia. This is not about competition, which is a natural thing
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times The late Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski for some time dispensed wisdom as an oracle of US foreign policy, side by side with the perennial Henry Kissinger – who, in vast swathes of the Global South, is regarded as nothing but a war criminal. Brzezinski never achieved the same notoriety. At best he claimed bragging rights for giving the
A more sovereign Germany closer to Russia and China may be the straw that breaks the US hegemon’s back By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times Last week we traced the necessary historical and geopolitical steps to understand Why Russia is driving the West crazy. And then, last Friday, right before the start of the Year of the Metal Ox, came the bombshell, delivered with customary
By Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times Have an auspicious Year of the Ox, everybody. And to celebrate it in style, fleetingly alleviating our burden in these times of trouble, let’s plunge into a dream within a dream, going back to the future for a game-changing moment in Chinese history. Chinese New Year’s Day, 1272. At the time, that fell on January 18. Kublai Khan,
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted on Asia Times Future historians may register it as the day when usually unflappable Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov decided he had had enough: We are getting used to the fact that the European Union are trying to impose unilateral restrictions, illegitimate restrictions and we proceed from the assumption at this stage that the European Union is an unreliable partner. Josep Borrell,
By Pepe Escobar with permission and cross posted with Strategic Culture Foundation It will be fascinating to watch how the (Dis)United States will deal with post-coup Myanmar as part of their 24/7 “containment of China” frenzy. The (jade) elephant in the elaborate room housing the military coup in Myanmar had to be – what else – China. And the Tatmadaw – the Myanmar Armed Forces – knows it better than
By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times So the Davos Agenda has come and gone. That was the virtual Great Reset preview, hosted by Kissinger acolyte cum World Economic Forum (WEF) oracle Herr Klaus Schwab. Still, corporate/political so-called “leaders” will continue to wax lyrical about the Fourth Industrial Revolution – or its mild spin-offs such as Build Back Better, the favorite slogan of the new
by Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times The virtual Davos Agenda is finally on, from Monday to Friday this week, promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF). No, this is not The Great Reset. At least not yet. The Agenda is the aperitivo towards the Great Reset apotheosis at the WEF’s Special Annual Meeting, which will take place this coming spring in Singapore. The Agenda’s
by Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times As the Exceptional Empire gets ready to brave a destructive – and self-destructive – new cycle, with dire, unforeseen consequences bound to reverberate across the world, now more than ever it is absolutely essential to go back to the imperial roots. The task is fully accomplished by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy , by
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times. It was hardly a secret throughout the Trump administration. Now, dying embers within sight, and with minimum fanfare, comes the declassification – virtually the whole document, minus a few redactions – of the US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific. Why now, no less than 30 years before the usual, standard US declassification/public record protocols apply? Don’t expect an answer
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times Synchronicity is definitely fond of mirror wonderwalls. The Julian Assange saga seemed to have entered a new chapter as he was, in thesis, on his way to – conditional – freedom this past Monday, only one day after the first anniversary of the start of the Raging Twenties: the assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani. The fate of the
by Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times One year ago, the Raging Twenties started with a murder. The assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi militia, by laser-guided Hellfire missiles launched from two MQ-9 Reaper drones, was an act of war. Not only
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted on Asia Times It’s one of those quintessential journeys that make people dream: Istanbul-Tehran-Islamabad by train. Let’s call it ITI. Soon, in early 2021, ITI will become a reality. But, initially, just as a freight train. The deal was recently sealed at the 10th meeting of the transport and communication ministers of ECO (Economic Cooperation Organization) in Istanbul. ITI’s official name is
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times When it comes to sowing – and profiting – from division, Erdogan’s Turkey is quite the superstar. Under the delightfully named Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the Trump administration duly slapped sanctions on Ankara for daring to buy Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile defence systems. The sanctions focused on Turkey’s defence procurement agency, the SSB. Turkish Foreign Minister
Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar discuss rent and rent-seeking, i.e., unproductive economic activity, in the US and China mainly but including the Russian, Iranian and Brazilian economies. In the first 15 minutes, an overview from Michael Hudson explains what happened in the US economy once jobs and manufacturing were offshored to mainly China. He proposes that even if China did not exist, the US economy has been changed to the
An astrological reading for Planet Earth at a time of Great Mutation By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. – Oscar Wilde Today all radio stations on Planet Earth should be playing this song. What the aptly named Fifth Dimension immortalized in their spring of 1969 psychedelic soul classic is now
A Back to the Future exercise: time-traveling to survey the sci-tech scene in the mid-1980s by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times I have been going through my Asia Times archives selecting reports and columns for a new e-book on the Forever Wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, out of the blue, I found this palimpsest, originally published by Asia Times in February 2014. It
