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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56890.htm

Biden Just Announced Date for WWIII

The Biden administration this week brazenly announced its intention to walk over China’s red line warning on Taiwan. The move by the US is a recklessly provocative step that dares an inevitable military response from Beijing.

If that happens then all bets are off for a full-scale military confrontation between the United States, its allies, and China. It is not alarmist to say such a clash would escalate into World War III.

Australia and Britain are explicitly committed to a military alliance with the United States in the Asia-Pacific through the recently formed AUKUS pact. Russia will be obliged to defend China.

The date in question is December 9-10 when the Biden administration plays host to a so-called “Summit of Democracies”. This week the State Department announced a list of “participants” that include 110 countries. China and Russia are not invited, among other excluded nations.

Most provocatively, the separatist Chinese territory of Taiwan is invited to attend the video conference. The US is careful to refer to Taiwan as a “participant” not as a “nation”. Nevertheless, this semantical device aside, the invitation is a blatant violation of China’s sovereign claim of authority over Taiwan.

China’s claim to Taiwan as being a part of its integral territory is recognized by the United Nations and, at least in theory, by the United States with its One China Policy since 1979.

The island of Taiwan has existed as a self-governing territory since China’s civil war ended in 1949 with communist victory. The nationalist opponents fled to Taiwan. China retains the right to reunite Taiwan under governance from the mainland. Beijing has warned it will do so by military force if Taiwan ever declares independence.

Washington maintains a position of “strategic ambiguity” whereby it acknowledges a One China Policy while also simultaneously offering US commitments to help Taiwan with military defence.

Since Joe Biden took the White House in January, his administration has taken this ambiguity to dangerous levels. At one point, Biden has overstepped policy by explicitly stating the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a confrontation with China.

At a teleconference summit on November 16, China’s President Xi Jinping admonished US policy on Taiwan as “playing with fire”. Xi drew a red line that Washington must desist from inciting separatist ambitions of the Taiwanese government.
The announcement this week of the “Summit of Democracies” and specifically the invitation of Taiwan while excluding China is about as bold as it can get by the Biden administration in undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That it comes only days after a verbal commitment from Biden to Xi that the US adheres to One China Policy and is not seeking Taiwan’s independence makes the provocation all the more contemptuous.
 
Biden’s ratcheting up of tensions with China is not out of the blue. For more than a decade, successive administrations under Obama, Trump and now Biden have been targeting Beijing as its top national security threat. Washington continually accuses China of aggression in the Asia-Pacific which is an inversion of reality. Taiwan has become a spearhead for Washington to antagonize China with. Under this administration, arms sales to Taiwan have increased as well as US naval and air force maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait under the cynical pretext of “freedom of navigation operations”.
 
President Biden has made “democracy versus authoritarianism” a theme of his White House. Calling a summit of 110 participating countries for the summit on December 9-10 is an arrogant attempt to demarcate the world into a false dichotomy whereby presumed virtuous nations are under the benign leadership of the United States.
China has slammed the summit as an artificial polarization of nations into so-called allies and enemies in what is a throwback to the Cold War decades. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this divisive manipulation of international relations is simply a ploy by the United States to exert its hegemonic ambitions.
 
China says it is not up to the United States to define what is democracy and what is not. Beijing asserts that “democracy belongs to all humanity”. It’s not just about holding cycles of elections. In the case of the United States, its “democracy” is dominated by two parties bankrolled by Wall Street capitalists and plutocrats. Its record on poverty, inequality, racism and warmongering is plentiful to roundly negate pretentious claims of “democracy”.
 
In any case, back in August when the Biden administration first announced its plans for a “democracy summit” Beijing warned Washington not to use the forum to incite Taiwanese tensions. If the US persisted, China said it would order military planes and warships to Taiwan.
There is an unmistakable sense that China has had it with US provocations. The mainland has been making military preparations for a showdown over Taiwan. This insane move by Washington to call a “summit of democracies” – how bitterly ironic – could well be the final act of American treachery. War is on the cards and we just got a date.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56893.htm

The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come in an end.

For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and – “there is no alternative.”

But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new era.

The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.

Why?

The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult if not impossible for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.

That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”

However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamize had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”

And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.

In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.

The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.

Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.

With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.

That is why like a crazed wounded animal, during the decline of the white West all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.

But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition....