Israel built, exploded ‘dirty bomb’ in nuclear test

Haaretz reports: Israel recently carried out a series of tests in the desert in conjunction with a four-year project at the Dimona nuclear reactor to measure the damage and other implications of the detonation of a so-called “dirty” radiological bomb by hostile forces. Such a bomb uses conventional explosives in addition to radioactive material.

Most of the detonations were carried out in the desert and one was performed at a closed facility. The research concluded that high-level radiation was measured at the center of the explosions, with a low level of dispersal of radiation by particles carried by the wind. Sources at the reactor said this doesn’t pose a substantial danger beyond the psychological effect.

An additional concern stems from a radiological explosion in a closed space, which would then require that the area be closed off for an extended period until the effects of the radiation are eliminated. [Continue reading…]

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Gottesdiener and Garcia: How to dismantle this country

They say that imperial wars come home in all sorts of ways. Think of the Michigan that TomDispatch regular Laura Gottesdiener describes today as one curious example of that dictum. If you remember, in the spring of 2003, George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of that country’s autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein. The invasion was launched with a “shock-and-awe” air show that was meant to both literally and figuratively “decapitate” the country’s leadership, from Saddam on down. At that time, there was another more anodyne term for the process that was also much in use, even if it has now faded from our vocabularies: “regime change.” And you remember how that all worked out, don’t you? A lot of Iraqi civilians — but no Iraqi leaders — were killed in shock-and-awe fashion that first night of the invasion and, as most Americans recall now that we’re in Iraq War 3.0, it didn’t get much better when the Bush administration’s proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, disbanded the Iraqi military and Saddam’s Baathist Party (a brilliant formula for launching an instant insurgency), appointed his own chosen rulers in Baghdad, and gave the Americans every sort of special privilege imaginable by curiously autocratic decree in the name of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

It now seems that a version of regime change, Iraqi-style, has come home to roost in parts of Michigan — but with a curious twist. Think of Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, as the L. Paul Bremer of that state. He’s essentially given himself regime-change-style powers, impermeable to a statewide recall vote, and begun dismissing — or, if you will, decapitating — the local governments of cities and school districts, appointing managers in their place. In other words, his homegrown version of regime change involves getting rid of local democracy and putting individual autocrats in power instead. What, you might ask yourself, could possibly go wrong, especially since the governor himself is going national to limn the glories of his version of austerity and autocratic politics?

As it happens, TomDispatch dispatched our ace reporter, Laura Gottesdiener, who has been traveling the underside of American life for this site, to check out what regime change in Michigan really looks like. As with all her reports, this time with photographer Eduardo García, she offers a grim but startling vision of where this country may be headed. Tom Engelhardt

A magical mystery tour of American austerity politics
One state’s attempt to destroy democracy and the environment
By Eduardo García

Something is rotten in the state of Michigan.

One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself — all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

If you’re thinking, “Who cares?” since what happens in Michigan stays in Michigan, think again. The state’s aggressive balance-the-books style of governance has already spread beyond its borders. In January, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed bankruptcy lawyer and former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr to be a “legal adviser” to Atlantic City. The Detroit Free Press described the move as “a state takeover similar to Gov. Rick Snyder’s state intervention in the Motor City.”

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Direct connection discovered between the brain and the immune system

Science Daily reports: In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically. Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, professor in the UVA Department of Neuroscience and director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”

“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said. “Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”

Kevin Lee, PhD, chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience, described his reaction to the discovery by Kipnis’ lab: “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation — and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding — that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s voters reject Erdogan’s bid for more power

The Daily Beast reports: Recep Tayyip Erdogan bent the constitution and election rules in a drive to become the all-powerful leader of this strategically important NATO country. But in parliamentary election on Sunday, Erdogan saw his high hopes come crashing down to earth as voters dealt him the first national defeat of his career.

Erdogan critics said the vote was a watershed moment for Turkey as the country spoke out against a leader who wanted all power for himself.

“The era of Erdogan is over,” declared historian Ahmet Insel.

Going into Sunday’s poll, Erdogan had called on voters to give his ruling party AKP at least 330 deputies in parliament in order to change the constitution and introduce a presidential system with him at the helm. As Erdogan’s plan did not include checks and balances to limit executive power, the opposition called the move a dictatorial power grab—and voters agreed. Not only did the AKP fail to reach the 330 deputies demanded by Erdogan, it lost so many votes on Sunday that it dropped down to 256 lawmakers; at least 276 are needed to form a majority government. “AKP government is history, Super President is history,” tweeted journalist Yusuf Kanli. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The deciding factor in this election was the emergence of the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, which came in fourth with 12 percent of the vote. For a political party to enter Turkey’s parliament, it has to pass a threshold of 10 percent of the total vote. The HDP did so and will command an estimated 78 seats in the 550-seat legislature, mostly won at the expense of the AKP.

It was a remarkable achievement for a party that was formed less than three years ago and has direct ties to the violent three-
decade Kurdish separatist insurgency in Turkey’s southeast. The war between the militant Kurd­istan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and the Turkish state has claimed 40,000 lives since it first flared in the early 1980s.

“From now on, HDP is Turkey’s party. HDP is Turkey, Turkey is HDP,” the party’s leader, Selahattin Demirtas, said Sunday evening at a news conference in Istanbul.

The party framed itself as a leftist movement for all Turks and boasted a diverse slate of parliamentary candidates, including representatives of virtually all of Turkey’s major ethnic groups, a large number of women and the nation’s first openly gay candidate. [Continue reading…]

Alev Scott writes: Turkey fulfilled the legacy of Gezi Park yesterday. What protesters could not accomplish two years ago has now been achieved. Such a resounding vote for change – for the first time in 13 years – means the ludicrously named Justice and Development party (AKP) has lost its majority. Nobody expected this. As the votes came in last night and the opposition’s amazed celebrations began, no one partied harder than supporters of the minority rights-focused Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), which blossomed out of the Gezi movement, and whose success in the face of intimidating odds proved the key to the AKP’s undoing.

There are now serious questions to be asked about Turkey’s political future in the wake of this extreme transformation, but on waking up this morning my overriding urge was to sing “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” and dance like a liberated Munchkin. Of course I’m talking about President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who failed to surface yesterday evening after his ambitions for an executive presidency had been crushed with satisfying finality – and about whom I would never have written such blasphemous sentiments if his party still retained a majority.

Being a writer in Turkey in recent years has meant self-censoring while admiring those braver than you – such as the journalist Can Dündar, who was sued last week by Erdoğan and now faces two life sentences for a “treasonous” news story. It has meant clothing your criticism in feeble witticisms and slightly despising yourself for scattering the word “alleged” into perfectly obvious accounts of government corruption. [Continue reading…]

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The link between police tactics and economic conditions cannot be ignored

Keith Ellison writes: A recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that blacks and Native Americans in Minneapolis are nine times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than whites. The study was released two weeks after 10-year-old Taye Montegomery was pepper sprayed while peacefully protesting against police brutality in Minneapolis. “At least I got maced and not shot,” Taye said.

Taye’s not being overly dramatic: young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than young white men in US.

The fatal encounter between Officer Wilson and Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri didn’t take place in a vacuum. Freddie Gray wasn’t the first black man thrown in the back of a van in Sandtown. Eric Garner wasn’t selling loosie cigarettes for fun. Harsh police tactics in black communities and a history of high rates of unemployment and poverty go hand in hand. [Continue reading…]

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Muslim Congressmen call on Obama administration to investigate armed rally at Phoenix mosque

Huffington Post reports: Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.) sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Thursday requesting a Justice Department investigation on whether armed protests outside a mosque in Phoenix violated the worshippers’ First Amendment-guaranteed freedom to practice religion.

“The decision to bring assault weapons to the mosque demonstrates intent to create a hostile environment to intimidate worshipers, a clear attempt to infringe on the First Amendment rights of the worshipers [sic],” the letter reads.

Last Friday, a biker gang of about 250 armed protesters, carrying assault rifles, pistols, American flags and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad assembled outside of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix. The mosque had previously been attended by the two gunmen from Phoenix who opened gunfire on an anti-Islam event featuring a controversial “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, in May.

The rally outside the mosque was organized by Iraq war veteran Jon Ritzheimer, who said it was in retaliation for the attack in Garland, as well as “to expose the true colors of Islam.”

“True Islam is terrorism,” Ritzheimer told CNN last week.

Ellison and Carson, the only two Muslims in Congress, allege that the armed protests could also be a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a bill passed in 1994. The law, they note, outlaws “‘attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.'” [Continue reading…]

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How national security gave birth to bioethics

By Jonathan D Moreno, University of Pennsylvania

Starting near the end of World War II and continuing until the 1970s, the US government sponsored radiation experiments on human subjects. Some of these experiments were conducted to understand the effects of radiation on atomic bomb workers. Others were to learn about the benefits of radiation for cancer patients. Many of the experiments were conducted in secret or not well understood by the public.

Twenty years ago, a committee appointed by President Bill Clinton reported on decades of radiation experiments conducted under the auspices of the federal government.

I was a senior staff member of that committee. Even though I had been teaching bioethics for 15 years, I was stunned to discover that my understanding of my field was drastically incomplete. I failed to appreciate that national security was the reason for many experiments in the history of medicine. After that experience, I published my book Undue Risk about human experiments and national security.

Unethical incidents often gave rise to ethical standards we now take for granted. But even when ethical standards were in place, there were times when they were grievously violated.

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Fish, crabs are losing homes as oceans lose oxygen

National Geographic reports: Atlantic cod, the storied catch of New England’s fishing industry, have little in common with bottom-dwelling rock crab, which are perhaps best known for swiping bait from lobster traps. But a largely unheralded byproduct of climate change–loss of oxygen in the ocean–will hit both dramatically by limiting where they can live, according to a new study published Thursday.

The oxygen losses accompanying global warming could reduce by 20 percent the amount of ocean suitable for cod and crab by the end of the century, according to the study in the journal Science.

The new research suggests this oxygen loss may shift and shrink marine habitats for a multitude of species globally, potentially upending marine food webs far more substantially than previously thought. [Continue reading…]

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The problem of translation

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: One Enlightenment aspiration that the science-­fiction industry has long taken for granted, as a necessary intergalactic conceit, is the universal translator. In a 1967 episode of “Star Trek,” Mr. Spock assembles such a device from spare parts lying around the ship. An elongated chrome cylinder with blinking red-and-green indicator lights, it resembles a retracted light saber; Captain Kirk explains how it works with an off-the-cuff disquisition on the principles of Chomsky’s “universal grammar,” and they walk outside to the desert-­island planet of Gamma Canaris N, where they’re being held hostage by an alien. The alien, whom they call The Companion, materializes as a fraction of sparkling cloud. It looks like an orange Christmas tree made of vaporized mortadella. Kirk grips the translator and addresses their kidnapper in a slow, patronizing, put-down-the-gun tone. The all-­powerful Companion is astonished.

“My thoughts,” she says with some confusion, “you can hear them.”

The exchange emphasizes the utopian ambition that has long motivated universal translation. The Companion might be an ion fog with coruscating globules of viscera, a cluster of chunky meat-parts suspended in aspic, but once Kirk has established communication, the first thing he does is teach her to understand love. It is a dream that harks back to Genesis, of a common tongue that perfectly maps thought to world. In Scripture, this allowed for a humanity so well ­coordinated, so alike in its understanding, that all the world’s subcontractors could agree on a time to build a tower to the heavens. Since Babel, though, even the smallest construction projects are plagued by terrible delays. [Continue reading…]

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The war over Syria’s gas fields

Yezid Sayigh writes: While much of the world’s attention has recently focused on the threat of pillage and destruction posed by Islamic State forces to the ancient Syrian desert city of Palmyra, damage to the energy supply and potential earnings is probably a bigger concern for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic State immediately followed its May 2015 capture of Palmyra with the seizure of nearby gas fields, depriving the regime of 45 percent of its gas and electricity resources, according to Syrian opposition estimates.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State has had its eye on the regime’s gas resources since at least July 2014, when it overran some of Jabal Shaer, part of an area containing massive gas fields said to produce 3 million cubic meters (106 million cubic feet) of raw natural gas (also known as crude gas) per day. This is compared to an estimated total national daily output of some 14.8 million cubic meters in 2014 according to Syria’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.

Lying roughly 150 kilometers (93 miles) northwest of Palmyra, Shaer supplies the Ebla processing plant at Furqlus to the west, which provides liquid petroleum gas (LPG, or clean or fuel gas) to electricity-generating stations that feed into the national grid. Regime forces retained control of the actual gas fields in Shaer in July 2014, but the Islamic State seized four wells in a new attack in late October. Assad’s Syrian Arab Army once again retook the area, though the Shaer gathering station was severely damaged and most wells were shut down. A reduced supply resumed from nearby Chinese-owned wells nearby to the Hayan treatment plant and processing facility, which commenced activity in 2009 and which serves as a major LPG, oil, and condensate reserve distribution center to power plants in several parts of the country. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat Al Nusra leader reveals his true colors

Hassan Hassan writes: Over the past few years, various Syrian rebel groups claiming to adhere to an Islamic agenda have found themselves forced to engage in double talk. It has long been recognised among Syria watchers that many of these groups adopted Islamic slogans to obtain funding, without necessarily having such an agenda. But more recently, some of these groups seem to have done the reverse.

Groups such as Ahrar Al Sham, Jaish Al Islam and Jabhat Al Nusra have tried to signal that they have national agendas that would not exclude other sections of Syrian society. But because they also have to consider their constituencies, their rhetoric has become contradictory or distorted.

Last week’s Al Jazeera TV interview with Jabhat Al Nusra’s leader, Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, is a case in point. Al Jolani tried to portray his group as part of the fabric of Syrian society. He even appeared to dress deliberately like a famous character in the popular Syrian soap opera Bab Al Hara, which has been shown on Arab satellite channels for the past few years. The character, Ageed Abu Shihab, is a heroic and brave leader of a neighbourhood in old Damascus during the French occupation of Syria.

Al Jolani clearly wanted to portray himself as a national hero. But his attempt may have backfired. He lost the plot as he went into detail with regards to these key subjects: religious minorities, the group’s affiliation with Al Qaeda and about the Muslim Brotherhood. [Continue reading…]

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On the ground in Libya there’s a weird kind of stability

Jamie Dettmer reports from Tripoli: The few Western reporters here echo the warnings of U.N. envoy [Bernardino] León and file stories justifiably reporting the country is “disintegrating.” But that word doesn’t quite capture the peculiarly Libyan ambiance and the extent to which the conflict across the country is a very, very Libyan one: earnest and deadly, certainly, but also comical and orderly — yes, orderly. Where else would you find one rival government responding to phone call pleas from the other for its share of the country’s subsidized goods, or one government continuing to transfer salaries to the bank accounts of the rival government’s fighters?

“We provide them with everything,” says Jamal Zubia, a spokesman for the Tripoli-run government’s foreign ministry. A bearded former exile who raised his seven children in Britain, Zubia rubs his hand over his bearded face and chuckles when asked whether he considers it odd for a rival government to fund the activities of the other.

“Yes, we pay the salaries of their fighters,” he says. “We pay the social security payments and child benefits for everyone in Libya. We pay for the schools, we pay the fighters and even the police service, too, in the East. We transfer the money for the fighters because many of them were members of the Libyan armed forces or were warriors in the uprising against Gaddafi.”

The Tobruk government recently published its own budget but it is basically a fiction. Money is disbursed by the central bank and the bank only responds to orders from Tripoli’s Minister of Finance. Like the country’s investment authority, the central bank is now based out of Malta. On Friday Tobruk announced a new central bank under its control but how it will be funded is unclear.

Abdulgader Hwili, a senior member of the mainly Islamist government of the General National Congress (GNC), the parliament in Tripoli, also reacts with a laugh about the cash transfers to fighters loyal to Gen. Haftar. This is a family squabble, he tells me. “I have eight brothers — four of them support Tobruk,” he says. “So they are our family — we have to pay them.”

Hwili says the familial nature of the confrontation between Tripoli and Tobruk is limiting the violence and he hopes it will lead to a deal between the two governments—the one now in Tobruk was a House of Representatives elected last year to replace the Islamist-dominated parliament that is still in Tripoli but has refused to step down.

The stay-put parliament’s partisans, known as Libya Dawn, or Fajr, often are associated with the effort by Turkey and Qatar to spread the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their opponents sometimes fall in line with efforts by the Saudis, Emiratis and Egyptians to crush it. Haftar takes Egypt’s new President Gen. Abdel Sisi as his anti-Islamist role model. But the situation is at once more complicated than that, and, from a Libyan perspective, simpler.

Hwili says that while the U.N. sponsored talks are likely to fail — the next round of negotiations is slated to start this week in Morocco — he has hopes that face-to-face talks between the two sides already being planned for later will succeed in hammering out a peace deal and perhaps a national unity administration.

Like other lawmakers here, Hwili doesn’t think either side can win the war — a point emphasized in a soon-to-be-published study by Libyan academics sponsored by the German think tank Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. “No military action is able to make any territorial gains and end the war in its favor; this paves the way for a political dialogue to end the crisis,” the report argues. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration criticizes Egypt in report to Congress

The New York Times: Egypt is moving away from democracy, stifling freedom of expression, arresting thousands for political dissent and failing to hold the security forces accountable for “arbitrary or unlawful killings,” the Obama administration has determined in a formal report to Congress.

The administration concludes in the same report that Egypt is nevertheless too important to national security to end the roughly $1.5 billion a year it receives in American aid, most of it military. But after making that conclusion, the report proceeds to recite a discordant litany of the Egyptian government’s abuses and failings, apparently seeking to stop just short of the kind of embrace Washington once gave the strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Quietly submitted to Congress on May 12 without public announcement, the report captures the awkwardness of Washington’s rapidly shifting views of Egypt: first backing President Mubarak, then the 2011 revolt that ousted him, and now rebuilding ties with a new strongman, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

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Sheldon Adelson’s ‘secret’ desert conference to plot against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement

David Palumbo-Liu reported on Saturday: If you did not know that this weekend some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world will meet in the Las Vegas desert to plot a massive and well-financed campaign against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, it’s not your fault. At the time of this writing, none of the mainstream media had covered it. You would have to be a reader of news sources such as the Jewish Daily Forward or Haaretz, or Mondoweiss, to find out anything about this “secret” conference.

As the Forward reported, “Leading Jewish mega-donors … summoned pro-Israel activists for a closed-door meeting in Las Vegas to establish, and fund, successful strategies for countering the wave of anti-Israel activity on college campuses. The meeting … is hosted by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and was organized by several other top Jewish funders, including Hollywood entertainment mogul Haim Saban, Israeli-born real-estate developer Adam Milstein and Canadian businesswoman Heather Reisman.”

Most important, “The initiative … did not come from students on the ground, nor did it emerge from work of the many organizations involved in pro-Israel activism on campus. Instead, it is an idea coming from wealthy Jewish philanthropists who have decided to take action.” This is not at all dissimilar to how Adelson and others have tried to combat BDS via national and state politics, as I have reported previously. As such it connects up with many instances of these and other outsiders trying to stifle discussion of Israel-Palestine on college campuses. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. Supreme Court strikes down ‘born in Israel’ passport law

The Washington Post: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the president alone has the power to recognize foreign nations, and it struck down as unconstitutional a congressional attempt to allow Americans born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on passports.

President Obama and President George W. Bush had said the 2002 passport law embraces the interpretation that Jerusalem belongs to Israel, something the executive branch has long held should be settled by the parties in the Mideast. They refused to let the State Department honor such requests.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said Congress has a role in managing the nation’s foreign affairs but not in recognizing foreign nations and governments.

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Alfred McCoy: Washington’s Great Game and why it’s failing

It might have been the most influential single sentence of that era: “In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” And it originated in an 8,000 word telegram — yes, in those days, unbelievably enough, there was no email, no Internet, no Snapchat, no Facebook — sent back to Washington in February 1946 by George F. Kennan, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow, at a moment when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was just gaining traction.

The next year, a reworked version of Kennan’s “Long Telegram” with that sentence would be published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the prestigious magazine Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X” (though it was common knowledge in Washington who had written it).  From that moment on, “containment” of what, until the Sino-Soviet split, was called the Soviet bloc, would be Washington’s signature foreign and military policy of the era. The idea was to ring the Soviet Union and China with bases and then militarily, economically, and diplomatically hem in a gaggle of communist states from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in Eastern Europe to North Korea on the Pacific and from Siberia south to the Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union. In other words, much of the Eurasian land mass.

And then, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the face of the Earth in 1991, that was that. Along with the former Communist world, containment as policy was dispatched to the dustbin of history — or was it? Strangely enough, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy points out today, if you look at Washington’s military bases (which, if anything, were expanded in the post-Soviet era), its conflicts, and the focus of its foreign policy, American attempts to “contain” the heartlands of Eurasia, especially Russia and China, have never ended. Given the passage of almost a quarter of a century since the Cold War era, the map of those garrisons and the conflicts that go with them still looks eerily familiar.

And here’s an even stranger thing, as McCoy again makes clear: the U.S. was not the first imperial power to put its energy into “containing” Eurasia. In 1945, when World War II ended with Great Britain and its empire hollowed out and in a state of exhaustion, the U.S. inherited a no-name version of “containment” policy from the British before Kennan even thought to use the term. It’s odd to realize that “containment” as imperial policy has a history that is now, in a sense, more than two centuries old. It’s strange enough, in fact, that McCoy turns his attention to the subject to help make sense of the edgy U.S.-China relationship for the rest of this century. Tom Engelhardt

The geopolitics of American global decline
Washington versus China in the twenty-first century
By Alfred W. McCoy

For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn’t know it in Washington, though. America’s political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years. Consequently, they have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are in the process of undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades.

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