TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The joint naval drills of Iran, Russia and China in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman were aimed at countering US influence in the region, an American political analyst said.
“The three countries appear to have as their primary objectives the protection of the security of these routes, and countering the influence of the US in the region,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim in an interview.
Iran, Russia and China have begun a four-day joint maritime exercise in the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman area.
The “Marine Security Belt,” as the event is codenamed, will last until Monday. On Wednesday, Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, the spokesman for Iranian Armed Forces, said the event was meant to promote the security of international trade in the strategic regions, adding that sharing experience in maritime rescue operations was also to be pursued in the maneuvers.
PressTV. Listen here.
The United States is magnifying and overstating the growing threat posed from China and Russia to justify maintaining the country’s armed interventions and its military–industrial complex, an American analyst in Virginia says.
“We have to understand that the United States regards Russia and China as insurgent nations against US hegemony,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
The US “now sees Russia and China as much greater geopolitical rivals than it did perhaps some years ago,” Preston told Press TV.
“We also have to consider that the United States military–industrial complex is extremely powerful…and it’s clearly necessary for the expenditures that are provided to the military production to be justified somehow,” he added.
Pentagon chief says plans to shift US military focus to Russia, ChinaUS Secretary of Defense Mark Esper says he aims to shift the American military
President Donald Trump’s administration has shifted focus away from the Middle East and toward countering Russia and China, two countries seen increasingly as a threat by Washington.
US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on Friday that China and Russia were the Pentagon’s top two priorities, as they pose a challenge to the world order through their rising military power and various tools of influence.
“Both nations are rapidly modernizing their armed forces and expanding their capabilities into the space and cyber domains,” Esper said during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Esper also said that it is important to develop fifth-generation wireless technologies to counter China’s 5G developments.
The US has been implementing an Indo-Pacific strategy, a combination of military and geoeconomic policies in the hopes of containing China’s military expansion in the Pacific and the Indian oceans.
My thoughts on the “trade war” with China. Watch here.
This week US president Donald Trump declared a national emergency over IT threats. Trumps long awaited executive order forbids U.S. companies from purchasing telecommunications equipment manufactured by firms posing a “national security risk”.
Needless to say, I think Caleb is overly enthusiastic about China (interestingly, I know Libertarians who are Sinophiles as well). But his takedown of the Western Left is refreshing. Caleb is also being overly optimistic about the interest of young people in “socialism.” Yes, there is a growing number of Millennials who identify as “socialists,” but for them that only means the Canadian healthcare system and free college tuition (i.e. neo-Rooseveltian liberalism). Very few young people would have a clue about ideas like nationalization of the means of production and a centrally planned economy or, alternately, workers control of the means of production on the syndicalist model.
I bash John Bolton on Iranian television.
Asia Times
China’s ambassador to Damascus has reportedly told Syrian media that Beijing is prepared to aid the government’s push to retake territory throughout the country.
Speaking to Syrian pro-government daily Al-Watan, the envoy, Qi Qianjin, expressed China’s support for what he referred to as Syria’s war against terrorists, according to a dispatch from the Middle East Media Research Institute.
stability of our countries. We – China and its military – wish to develop our relations with the Syrian Army. As for participating in the Idlib operation, it requires a political decision.’ He denied that there were military advisers or special Chinese forces in Syria today.”
By
Forbes
The reason China is in Africa is simple; to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did during mercantile times, except worse. The corporations owned by the Chinese state are trying to turn Africa into another Chinese continent. They are squeezing Africa for everything it is worth.
This is the view several African politicians have. The Zambian politician Michael Sata was one of them. At least he was before being elected President of Zambia in 2011. He wrote a paper presented to Harvard University in 2007 that said “European colonial exploitation in comparison to Chinese exploitation appears benign, because even though the commercial exploitation was just as bad, the colonial agents also invested in social and economic infrastructure services Chinese investment, on the other hand, is focused on taking out of Africa as much as can be taken out, without any regard to the welfare of the local people.”
PressTV. Listen here.
The Islamic Republic of Iran stands in the way of the United States totally dominating the Middle East, according to American political analyst Keith Preston.
Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on a Bloomberg report which has revealed that China has rejected a US demand to cut Iranian oil imports despite Washington’s attempts to bring down the Islamic Republic’s oil sales to zero
Bloomberg quoted informed officials as saying that the US had been unable to persuade China to cut Iranian oil imports and that Beijing’s purchases from Tehran last month remained unchanged.
This is a blow to US President Donald Trump’s efforts to isolate Iran after his withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal with the country, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), they said.
Beijing, however, agreed not to increase purchases of Iranian crude, said the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Preston said that “it appears that what is happening is that the United States is trying to increase the amount of international pressure that is exercised against Iran in particular isolate Iran and impose even stronger economic pressure by trying to prevent Iran by selling oil to China.”
“The United States is doing this because the United States regards Iran as its primary obstacle when it comes to expanding American influence in the Middle East and the influence of America’s chief allies which would be Saudi Arabia and Israel,” he noted.
Press TV. Listen here.
US President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy with China and Europe is a “double-edged sword,” bolstering domestic manufacturing and narrowing the trade deficit while hitting the American consumer with rising prices, says an analyst.
“Tariffs on imports have multiple economic effects and depending on what kind of economic values you assign to a particular policy, they can be beneficial or they could be negative,” Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, said in an interview. More…
The withering away of the antiwar movement during the Obama era, and the failure of the Left to oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the position of the Atlanticist-Zionist-Wahhabi axis (or to even take notice) indicates that US imperialism will have to be defeated externally rather than internally. This will be achieved by a combination of ongoing military defeats by fourth generation warfare forces, and the rise of counter power on a geopolitical level. On the former point, the US is now 0-5 in the 4GW conflicts that have been fought over the last quarter century (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria). Meanwhile, the “triangular resistance” of the BRICS, Shia-led Resistance Block, and the Global South is rising to create a multipolar rather than unipolar world. The US has largely retreated from Latin America, and will gradually do the same in Asia and Africa in the future.
By Tom O’Connor
Newsweek
China and Russia may be devising a plan to attack U.S. forces in the event of an imminent war breaking out on the neighboring Korean Peninsula, according to two former military officials.
Lieutenant General Wang Hongguang, the former deputy commander of the western Nanjing Military Region, warned “the war on the Korean Peninsula might break out anytime between now and March next year”; his comments came during a conference hosted Saturday by ruling Communist Party newspaper The Global Times. The following day, the nationalist outlet expanded on the retired general’s remarks with insight from Chinese military expert, commentator and author Song Zhongping, who said China could potentially engage U.S. forces if they posed a threat.
China once had a massive anarchist movement in the pre-Mao years.
China has neoliberals and neocons all-a-tizzy about various dangers allegedly posed by a third world country on the other side of the planet. The border between China and the United States is Japan and the Pacific Ocean on one side and Eurasia, Africa and the Atlantic on the other. American hawk nightmares of Chinese power projection are ridiculous, unless one believes the formerly communist clusterfuck economy of the Sino Empire has Star Trek technology.
Nonetheless, there are certain advantages China does have. It has a huge physical productivity, which its vampire economy of CCP and crony corporations leech off of – mostly through export licenses and tariffs/taxes collected along the port cities. This can be funneled into a variety of ends, most of them stupid, including a huge military industrial complex.
It is reasonable to assume that the Chinese are both competent engineers and used to utilizing large armies. In any land war confrontation with the ChiCom Empire would be a nightmare for any nation. They would run out of stockpiles and money very quickly if they mobilized everything – but if they selectively deployed their armies in waves, their ability to throw fresh troops and equipment at invaders should give pause to even the United States military.
The Chinese seem to be culturally xenophobic and content to accept buffer states rather than world domination. They do, however, pose a danger to the region by empowering and punishing regimes of materially inferior states around them. The CCP are definitely not the heroes in Chinese history, but they may have cleared the old medieval chaff away to the point where SinoAnarchism can make a come-back.
The bosses of the Eastern wing of global gangster capitalism apparently decided to take out an unreliable capo.
By Adrian Blomfield
The Telegraph
The general behind Zimbabwe’s coup may have sought Chinese approval days before the army launched its takeover of Robert Mugabe’s government, it emerged on Wednesday.
Mr Mugabe remained under house arrest, still president of Zimbabwe if in name alone, a prisoner of once slavishly loyal generals who now hold the country’s fate in their hands.
As the former British colony faced a deeply uncertain future under military tutelage, a trip to Beijing by Gen Constantine Chiwenga, the head of the armed forces, last week has reignited concerns about rising Chinese influence in Africa.
The general held high-level meetings with officials from the Defence Ministry, and visited a school to observe a Shaolin Kung Fu class.
Although the Chinese foreign ministry insisted Gen Chiwenga’s visit was a “routine visit”, analysts have suggested that Beijing may have given the rebellious army chief its tacit blessing in advance.
Press TV. Listen here.
US President Donald Trump’s plans to reduce Washington’s foreign interventionism and focus on issues like immigration are part of a foreign policy plan that seeks to separate Russia from China and Iran, says an American analyst.
Keith Preston, director of attackthesystem.org, made the remarks while discussing Trump’s directives to curb immigration.
On Wednesday, the new president signed executive orders to begin the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico and to crack down on states that harbor immigrants.
Following his campaign pledge to ban Muslims from entering America, Trump is also expected to sign another executive order which blocks the entry of Syrian refugees and suspends the entry of any immigrants from Syria and other Muslim countries like Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Yemen.
“He is apparently going to follow through with many things he said he was going to do on the campaign trail and I think primarily what he is aiming to do right now is to establish his own credibility,” Preston told Press TV on Wednesday..
The best analysis of the Trumpian approach to foreign policy I have seen to date.
By Pete Escobar
South China Morning Press
China, Russia and Iran are the three key players in what promises to be the Eurasian Century.
Donald Trump may be The Joker; The Fool; The Ace of Spades; the ultimate trickster. What nobody can tell for sure is how this shifty chameleon will seduce, cajole, divide and threaten these three countries in his bid to “Make America Great Again”.
Considering the composition of his cabinet, as well as his motormouth twittering, the world according to Trump sees radical Islam as the No 1 threat, followed by Iran, China and Russia.
The strategy of Henry Kissinger, Trump’s unofficial foreign policy guru, is a mix of “balance of power” and “divide and rule”. It will consist of seducing Russia away from its strategic partner China; keeping China constantly on a sort of red alert; and targeting Islamic State while continuing to harass Iran.
All this has the potential to backfire splendidly. Even a real “reset” with Russia, of the non-Hillary Clinton kind, is not exactly assured.
Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, may in fact be a cipher, a privileged ExxonMobil dealmaker, or a Trojan Horse for Kissinger’s views. Tillerson is a trustee of the hardline Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank, along with Kissinger.
