By Pepe Escobar and cross posted with Strategic Culture Foundation China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration. What do the three sovereigns
By Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times. Seven years after being launched by President Xi Jinping, first in Astana and then in Jakarta, the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly drive the American plutocratic oligarchy completely nuts. The relentless paranoia about the Chinese “threat” has much to do with the exit ramp offered by Beijing to a Global South permanently indebted
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism , published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives. Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of
Football deity played on the global pitch non-stop, a wild life of dizzying highs and demonic lows forever in the public eye By Pepe Escobar with permission and cross-posted with Asia Times His life was a running planetary pop opera for the ages. From Somalia to Bangladesh, everyone is familiar with the basic contours of his story – the pibe from Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires (“I
by Pepe Escobar and first posted at Asia Times Four geoeconomic summits compressed in one week tell the story of where we stand in these supremely dystopian times. The (virtual) signing of RCEP in Vietnam was followed by the equally virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Moscow, the APEC meeting hosted by Malaysia, and the G20 this past weekend hosted by Saudi Arabia. Cynics have not failed to note the spectacular
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted on Asia Times Ho Chi Minh, in his eternal abode, will be savoring it with a heavenly smirk. Vietnam was the – virtual – host as the 10 Asean nations, plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, on the final day of the 37th Asean Summit. RCEP, eight years in the making,
By Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times The massive psyops is ongoing. Everyone familiar with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) knew how this would imperatively play out. I chose to frame it as a think tank gaming exercise in my Banana Follies column. This is a live exercise. Yet no one knows exactly how it will end. US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances
by Pepe Escobar and cross-posted with Asia Times A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept. Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed
by Pepe Escobar with permission and cross-posted with Asia Times Whatever the geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences of the spectacular US dystopia, the Russia-China strategic partnership, in their own slightly different registers, have already voted on their path forward. Here is how I framed what is at the heart of the Chinese 2021-2025 five-year plan approved at the plenum in Beijing last week. Here is a standard Chinese think tank interpretation.
By Pepe Escobar with permission and cross posted with The Strategic Culture Foundation Less than a week before the game-changing U.S. presidential election, the real heart of the geopolitical and geoeconomic action is virtually invisible to the outside world. We’re talking about the fifth plenum of the 19th Chinese Communist Party (CPC) Central Committee, which started this past Monday in Beijing. The plenum congregates the 200 members – and another
by Pepe Escobar with permission and cross posted with Asia Times What happens on November 3rd ? It’s like a larger than life replay of the famous Hollywood adage: “No one knows anything.” The Dem strategy is crystal clear, spawned by the gaming of election scenarios embedded in the Transition Integrity Project and made even more explicit by one of TIP’s co-founders, a law professor at Georgetown University. Hillary Clinton,
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times The whole planet has every reason to be terminally puzzled at how all those lofty Enlightenment ideals Thomas Jefferson embedded in the 1776 Declaration of Independence ended up with…Trump vs. Biden. Jefferson borrowed freely from Locke, Rousseau, Hume to come up with an eminently quotable Greatest Hits, featuring “self-evident” truths such as “all men are created equal”, “unalienable rights”,
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, is the world’s foremost diplomat. The son of an Armenian father and a Russian mother, he’s just on another level altogether. Here, once again, we may be able to see why. Let’s start with the annual meeting of the Valdai Club, Russia’s premier think tank. Here we may follow the must-watch presentation of the
by Pepe Escobar and first posted at Asia Times No Washington-designed “maximum pressure” has been able to derail a crucial milestone this Sunday: the end of the UN arms embargo on Iran, in accordance with UN Security Council 2231, which has endorsed the 2015 JCPOA deal. The JCPOA – or Iran nuclear deal – was unilaterally ditched by the Trump administration. But that, notoriously, did not prevent it from engaging
by Pepe Escobar and cross posted with Strategic Culture Foundation The whole planet is enthralled, appalled, shocked and awed by the spectacle of democracy as enacted under the shadow of messianic imperialism – complete with a slew of slimy, smoking gun October Surprises. We’re in total Frank Underwood territory. And as befits the ultimate “society of the simulacrum” pictured by Baudrillard back in the swingin’ 1980s, all those similarities with
By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times Chinese scholar Lanxin Xiang has written a book, The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, that is arguably the most extraordinary effort in decades trying to bridge the East-West politico-historical divide. It’s impossible in a brief column to do justice to the relevance of the discussions this book inspires. Here we will highlight some of the key issues –
By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times Few geopolitical hot spots across the planet may rival the Caucasus: that intractable, tribal Tower of Babel, throughout History a contentious crossroads of empires from the Levant and nomads from the Eurasian steppes. And it gets even messier when one adds the fog of war. To try to shed some light into the current Armenia-Azerbaijan face off, let’s
by Pepe Escobar with permission – first posted at Asia Times Let’s cut to the chase: with or without a sanction juggernaut, China simply won’t be expelled from the global semiconductor market. The real amount of chip supply Huawei has in stock for their smart phone business may remain an open question. But the most important point is that in the next few years – remember Made in China 2025
by Pepe Escobar and with permission cross-posted with Asia Times It took one minute for President Trump to introduce a virus at the virtual 75th UN General Assembly, blasting “the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world”. And then it all went downhill. Even as Trump was essentially delivering a campaign speech and could not care less about the multilateral UN, at least the picture was clear enough for
By Pepe Escobar with permission from the author and first posted at Asia Times The concept of “History in the making” has been pushed to extremes when it comes to the extraordinary public service being performed by historian, former UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray. Murray – literally, and on a global level – is now positioned as our man in the public gallery, as he painstakingly documents
