How is it possible for a 25-minute meeting to cause Lionel Barber (lead picture, centre), current editor of the Financial Times, to report “one of the most fascinating interviews I have conducted during my 32-year career at the FT”, concluding with this last line: “there are tentative signs that there is more method in the madness than critics suspect”?
Barber was talking about meeting President Donald Trump (front, right), in which almost nothing was said by Trump which had not been reported before — except for a threat of US missile attack on North Korea’s nuclear weapons depots and missile-firing sites. Trump’s threat, as transcribed by Barber, was “if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you. [And do you think you can solve it without China’s help?] Totally.” Trump may not have said or meant this. That’s because, the newspaper qualifies, “this is an abridged transcript that has been edited for clarity.”
One US war target Trump was more or less clear about in Barber’s interview: he omitted to mention Russia or President Vladimir Putin. (more…)
by Editor - Wednesday, April 5th, 2017 No Comments »
There have been many, many advertisements for the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but none as alluring as those he composed and performed for himself.
Now that he has died, and his body is to return this week from Oklahoma for burial near Moscow, there will be many more advertisements. Some will be eloquent for not turning him into the crude symbolism which marred much of his poetry and the Russian intelligentsia from which he came, and which continues to discredit itself a little bit more each year since 1991. Better to remember Yevtushenko’s beautiful blue eyes, and his taste for clown costumes on and off stage.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Lubiniecki has been the commander of the Canadian military mission in western Ukraine since March. The location of his Canadian base at Starichy is as far west as it’s possible to be from the war front in the Donbass, before the Canadians would be camping on Polish soil.
Like Chrystia Freeland (lead image), Canada’s Foreign Minister, Colonel Lubiniecki’s family is from this region known as Galicia (also as Volhynia). Instead of training local soldiers and giving speeches at cadet graduation ceremonies in Ukraine, Lubiniecki should be called back to Canada to explain what he is doing, and for whose benefit. Is the Canadian colonel training Galicians to fire rocket-propelled grenades at Polish targets? (more…)
“Question: Is Putin’s political obituary in the western press a little premature? Answer: There’s been no conception, no baby here, no bath water.” (more…)
by Editor - Wednesday, March 29th, 2017 No Comments »
Paying bribes to your enemies to switch sides and become your friends is as old as monkeys and men (and women). As gang and warfighting strategies have evolved, corruption with money was always to be preferred to force with arms because corruption is much cheaper, and the results more predictable, at least in the short run.
A new book on corruption in the former Soviet states of Central Asia provides a handy reckoner of the colossal sums of money which have been exchanged to sustain the ruling regimes, or to change them. Alexander Cooley’s and John Heathershaw’s “Dictators Without Borders, Power and Money in Central Asia”, just published by Yale University Press, is also an encyclopedia of palaces owned in the UK, France and the US by the rulers of the Central Asian states and their hangers-on; the names and fates of the principal opposition leaders in exile from those states; a dossier of renditions, arrests, and assassinations carried out by the Uzbek and Tajik security services abroad; and case studies of the billion-dollar larcenies of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz bankers, Mukhtar Ablyazov and Maxim Bakiyev; of the Uzbek heiress Gulnara Karimova; and of the Tajikistan Aluminium Company (Talco) controlled by the Tajik President Emomali Rahmon.
The new book is also a valuable balancer on the side of independent research and antidote for the propaganda to be found from US and UK Government-funded think-tanks such as the Carnegie Endowment, Brookings Institution, Freedom House, and Chatham House. (more…)
The Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled unanimously today in Luxembourg that acts of the European Union are lawful without the requirement for evidence meeting any standard of proof or truthfulness. A press release will do. (more…)
The Russian economic recovery went sharply into reverse in February, according to the latest report from Rosstat, the federal state statistics service. But voter approval for President Vladimir Putin remains super-stable at a level unknown in Europe or the rest the world.
So if you are bent on fighting Russia, as the generals now in charge of US policy in Washington say and do, what opportunity is there for toppling Putin before the presidential election due in March 2018? One veteran of high-level Russian policy in Europe predicts: “The trouble for Putin will come when the World Cup starts in June of next year. But that’s after he is elected in March. Noone realizes, not yet, how much trouble the football competition will cause, with thousands of visa-free foreign agitators in the country calling themselves fans, and half a billion people watching on TV.” (more…)
by Editor - Thursday, March 23rd, 2017 No Comments »
On Tuesday December 6, Rex Tillerson, then chief executive of ExxonMobil oil company, met then President-elect Donald Trump in New York, and was offered the post of US Secretary of State. God was watching on high and acted faster than Tillerson could. (more…)
by Editor - Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017 No Comments »
There is a Fiona Hill on each side of the Atlantic.
One is joint chief of staff for Prime Minister Theresa May in London. The other Fiona Hill (lead image, right) is also British. She was appointed this month to be senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council (NSC) in Washington. Between 2006 and 2009 Hill was the Russia desk officer on the National Intelligence Council under President George Bush, then President Barack Obama.
The White House announced Hill’s appointment by an anonymous leak to Foreign Policy magazine on March 2. The leaker claimed Hill had been selected at least a fortnight earlier by the NSC’s chief of staff Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant-general, before Michael Flynn was forced to resign as the National Security Advisor on February 13; and before Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster was put in Flynn’s place on February 17. The announcement of Hill sandbagged her position, but Hill was nervous about confirming it. “Hill did not immediately respond to a request for comment,” Foreign Policy reported. (more…)
Optimists believe that in time the truth always wins out. Skeptics believe men and women are liars by nature, so machines are necessary to catch them out. Pessimists believe that by the time that happens it will be too late to make a practical difference. Politics, the pessimists add, is about gain, not about truth. So is journalism.
Here are two stories about the difference between Australia and Canada in the way in which lying by ministers of state has been caught out recently on the subject of the civil war in Ukraine. Australia and Canada are former British colonies, whose head of state is still the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. They are also parliamentary democracies, and members of US treaty alliances which encourage them to fight in US wars in exchange for US protection if they are attacked. That’s the political practice, if not quite the truth. (more…)
