A Boomerang Policy: From Paris to Paris

Backdrop To The BalkansThe tiny South-Central Balkan country of the Republic of Macedonia is in dire straits right now, but most of Europe – let alone the rest of the world – has no idea that this is the case because the Mainstream Media narrative is that the state’s two-year-long political crisis was “resolved” when the patriotic VMRO-DPMNE government of Nikola Gruevski was replaced in a “constitutional/electoral coup” that followed Color Revolution and even Hybrid War provocations. The author wrote about this in a Sputnik piece at the time from May 2017 titled “The Macedonian Crisis Isn’t Over, and a ...

The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...

The Consequences of WWI and the YugoslavsThe end of WWI in November 1918 as a consequence of the military collapse of the Central Powers and the following series of peace treaties of Versailles on June 28th, 1919 between the Allies and Germany, of St Germain on September 10th, 1919 with Austria, of Neuilly on November 27th, 1919 with Bulgaria, and finally of Trianon on June 4th, 1920 with Hungary, produced major border changes in Central, South-East, and East Europe as the continent saw the emergence of several of new states and the enlargement of others fortunate enough to be on ...

There are many definitions and/or understandings of war. However, from the very academic point of view, war can be understood as an armed conflict between at least two sides usually but not necessarily states fought usually for some (geo)political goals. The focal conceptual idea of war is the use of force between large-scale political subjects like states, empires, or coalitions. Historically, wars have been fought mainly for the control of certain land for different reasons ranging from a purely political one to a purely economic one or a combination of several of them.Many types of war and warfare can be ...

The massive artillery bombardment of the peoples of the Donbass, that has been raining down shells and fire on them since Christmas, is a war crime of horrific proportions designed to terrorise the people and bring their refusal to be subject to the NATO-installed regime in Kiev to an end. It is also becoming clear that it has a political purpose, which is to increase anti-Russian, pro-NATO propaganda among the Ukrainian people to influence them to vote to join NATO in a referendum, the consequences of which will be dramatic because a vote for NATO will be a vote for ...

Since Soviet Russia’s 1991 dissolution, successive US administrations governed increasingly lawlessly and recklessly – Bill Clinton worse than his predecessors, Bush worse than him, Obama worst of all, at war with multiple invented enemies throughout his tenure – from inaugural day to the present.A neocon Hillary Clinton presidency succeeding him risks the unthinkable – possible WW III. America’s rage for dominance, its wanting planet earth colonized, and increasing belligerence toward Russia and China points to eventual confrontation.Unknown is to what extent, but when conflicts begin, they take on a life of their own. Starting them is easy, resolving them another ...

The term Back Door Man has several connotations. In the original blues song written by Willie Dixon, it refers to a man having an affair with a married woman, using the back door to flee before the husband comes home. During the Gerald Ford Presidency, Back Door Man was applied to Dick Cheney as Ford’s White House Chief of Staff and his “skills” at getting what he wanted through opaque means. More and more as Cabinet choices are named, it looks like the entire Trump Presidency project is emerging as Henry A. Kissinger’s “Back Door Man,” in the Cheney meaning of ...

One of the most confounding aspects of Donald Trump’s election as 45th President of the United States is that in the space of a year – indeed less than a year – a man with zero political experience has destroyed two of America’s most entrenched political dynasties: Bush and Clinton.Just pause on this for a moment, and place it in the context of someone who when he first appeared on the political stage as a candidate for the Republican nomination was met with ridicule and scorn. Consequently, a mainstream media and liberal commentators for whom politics is an exclusive club, ...

At the very beginning, it must be noticed that before the outbreak of WWI in the summer of 1914 it was not both either Poland or Ukraine as the state on the political map of Europe. Poland was considered a historical region while Ukraine was a geographical one. Poland was divided at the end of the 18th century between three powerful neighbors – the Kingdom of Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire while the present-day territory of Ukraine between the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria, Austria-Hungary) which took its western part including Lvov (Lemberg/Lwów) and the Russian Empire possessing its ...

Every day signs are looming larger than life as we know it in the wealthiest nation on earth that it’s about to crash and burn, forever changing not for the better. The latest wake-up call arrived in a Guardian article earlier this week. The story features a secret prison not unlike the CIA torture detention centers all over the world whereby the Chicago police hold rounded up US citizens for hours or days at a time for interrogation. The same internationally illegal roundups of suspected “potential terrorists” (which by latest Gestapo America standards can easily be you or me) that the CIA ...

The wars in the Middle East continue to rage unabated. Over the weekend a Russian war plane was struck down by an Al Qaeda affiliated group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and once again stoked fears of widening the struggle in Syria between US and Russian proxy forces. It is yet another reminder of the ongoing and seemingly endless wars being waged in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere around the globe.Our transition into this never-ending war paradigm, fashioned out of the events of the post 9/11 era, seeks only to benefit and further cement the pre-existing alliance between the US military ...

Antisemitism needs an excuse and Netanyahu sadly provides it every day on the Israeli- Gaza border.  His heavily armed snipers have gratuitously killed over 200 unarmed Palestinians at the March of Return protest and injured over 10,000 at the border since 30 March 2018 in a sickening exhibition of state sponsored violence that has brought death and disability to those actively, and largely legitimately, demonstrating for return of their land and property.You cannot deprive 2m of their human rights, enshrined in international law, without consequences. Israel is not an island in the sky and the dispossessed Palestinian people are very ...

The Balkan political environment is shaped-amongst other- by the existence of two political strains of Islam, the Wahhabis, related to the Saudis & Gulf states and the Muslim Brotherhood ones, related to the Turkish-Qatar axis.In both cases networking developed under a series of upturns since the 1990’s and is inexorably related to wider events of interest such as the ongoing wars in the Middle East and the culminations in countries such as Turkey, Egypt but also EU , Western European ones; including direct security affairs.Nowadays we are witnessing a massive buyout of land and corporations by mostly UAE, Kuwait and ...

The Cold War 1.0It is a pure historical fact that “in a sharp reversal of its withdrawal from Europe after 1918, after the end of World War II Washington employed all available tools of public and cultural diplomacy to influence the hearts and minds of Europeans”[1] as a strategy of the US-led Cold War policy against the USSR,[2] and after 1991 against Russia up today. Undoubtedly, the US succeeded after 1990 to transform herself into a sole global military-political hegemonic power – an unprecedented case in the world’s history.[3]It is usually and generally considered that the end of the USSR ...

A new Foundation for the Study of Democracy (FSD) report is titled “War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture of the Donbass region residents.”It provides graphic evidence of horrendous Kiev war crimes Western media ignore.Earlier articles discussed Kiev’s dirty war. It deliberately targeted civilian neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and infrastructure.It used of cluster munitions, white phosphorous and other chemical weapons, as well as cold-blooded murder of hundreds of captives.Most were abducted civilians. They were brutally tortured, murdered and secretly buried. Eyewitnesses exposed the crimes.FSD’s report provides more damning evidence of junta torture, inhumane and degrading treatment.Over 100 former ...

Maybe it is the best agreement ever signed… Maybe by applying it, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will enter an era of great friendship and enormous prosperity…Maybe… The only small detail is the majority of the deputies of the Greek Parliament do not know the agreement is so good. Their parties declared they are opposing the agreement and they won’t ratify it. Even the An.Ell. party, which is the junior partner of SYRIZA in the government, does not know how profitable is this agreement. They said they would vote No to the agreement when introduced in the ...

Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...

Russia, Oil and RevolutionBy the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire had a virtual monopoly over the United States, and even many foreign countries. In 1890, the King of Holland gave his blessing for the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company, which was mainly founded to refine and sell kerosene from Indonesia, a Dutch colony. Also in 1890, a British company was founded with the intended purpose of shipping oil, the Shell Transport and Trading Company, and it “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and eventually, “the two companies merged ...

In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the progress of the Thaci government in its progress in “European integration and economic development.”1Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people  appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push ...

The World of ArabsThe world of Arabs (the WoA), as a distinctive part of the globe, is of extreme significance for both global politics and the global economy. On the other hand, this region is featured by slow democratic development, political instability, religious extremism (Islamic fundamentalism), and many reasons for long-time inter-ethnic conflicts especially on the Israeli-Arab relations and regional insecurity. It is quite obvious that the WoA needs comprehensive political, social, and economic reforms which the Arab Spring’s protesters clearly requested in 2010−2013. The crucial issues of reforms are about national development and governance, a succession of political authority, ...