Liberal World Order, R.I.P.

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More comment from a mainstream perspective.

The coup in Niger puts spotlight on nation’s uranium

Tensions are building in Niger just days after a military junta ousted its democratically elected government. A coalition of West African states issued an ultimatum Sunday to Niger’s putschists, threatening military intervention if deposed President Mohamed Bazoum is not returned to power by Aug. 6. Members of the regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), suspended relations with Niger and shut their land and air borders with the country. While ECOWAS meekly stood by in recent years as juntas supplanted civilian leaders in Burkina Faso and Mali, the crisis in Niger may mark a different phase in regional politics.

“This is where the junta in Niamey may have miscalculated. They may have assumed a weak ECOWAS response just like in Mali and Burkina Faso,” Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told the Financial Times. “But ECOWAS has drawn a line in the sand. Defense planners have been tasked to plan an intervention — it’s not bluff.”

Upping the ante, the Malian and Burkinabe regimes put out their own joint statement Monday, warning that an ECOWAS intervention in Niger could prompt a military response from their states. Western powers, chiefly France and the United States, are being more circumspect, keen not to fan the flames of anti-Western feeling that surged around the coups in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali. The Biden administration is so far unwilling to label what happened in Niger formally as a “coup,” as that determination would trigger immediate blocks on the security aid that Washington provides a country seen as a bulwark both against Islamist extremist threats and encroaching Russian influence in the region.

The coup-plotting generals seemed to be digging in their heels, though it’s far from clear whether all of Niger’s military apparatus is fully behind the putsch. Over the weekend, their supporters demonstrated in front of the French Embassy in the capital, Niamey, threw stones at the compound and attempted to set it on fire before being dispersed by security forces. Some waved Russian flags or bore signs celebrating Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Amid escalating anti-French rhetoric, the junta allegedly said that it was suspending exports of uranium to France. The radioactive ore is impoverished Niger’s main export and has, over the years, brought the country into the global spotlight — most notoriously in 2003, when dodgy intelligence about a possible Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of Nigerien “yellowcake” uranium formed part of the American case to launch the “preemptive” invasion of Iraq.

Niger is the world’s seventh-biggest producer of uranium, possesses Africa’s highest-grade uranium ores, and is one of the main exporters of uranium to Europe. France, the country’s former colonial ruler, is a major importer of Nigerien uranium, which helps power the massive French civil nuclear industry.

On Monday, a statement from France’s Foreign Ministry indicated that a falloff in uranium from Niger would have minimal impact, because “our supplies are extremely diversified.” The ministry said Tuesday it would evacuate French and other European nationals from the country.

But some analysts suggest the impasse may have a kind of snowball effect, forcing European governments to reconsider further punitive action against Russia, one of the world’s biggest exporters of uranium. “It could have consequences at the EU level. Uranium — and nuclear power in general — is still not subject to sanctions,” Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, an energy expert at the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris, told Politico. “If the situation in Niger gets worse, this would certainly complicate the adoption of sanctions on Russian uranium in the short term.”

Orano, a French state-backed nuclear energy company, has major stakes in three uranium mines in Niger, though only one is in operation. Located far to the north of Niamey, closer to the dusty border with Algeria, the mines have been more vulnerable to Islamist militants than coup-plotting militants. A colonial expedition in search of copper in the late 1950s turned up the uranium, and Orano, formerly known as Areva, has operated in the country for the better part of half a century.

In a part of the world deeply sensitive to the French colonial legacy, the extraction of uranium can be a smoldering issue. Environmental watchdogs have documented over the years incidents of negligence and abuse, in which dangerous levels of radioactive waste were left among the local populations living near the mines. Earlier this year, France-based investigators found that 20 million tons of waste left near a recently depleted mine was spreading a potentially lethal radioactive gas known as radon, contaminating groundwater and endangering over 100,000 people living in adjacent communities.

A decade ago, the Nigerien government engaged in protracted negotiations with Orano over a new contract, angry over the cut in royalties afforded to Niger by the French company. Oxfam, an international advocacy group, highlighted the clash at the time between one of the world’s poorest countries and Orano as a “David vs. Goliath” struggle. The dealings were also shrouded in allegations of corruption in the years thereafter.

Now, given the uncertainty of the moment, new questions surround Niger’s uranium industry. What will happen to France’s interests? Will other countries — chiefly, Russia — find opportunistic accommodation with the junta and finagle concessions in natural resources? Before the coup, Niger was already exploring options for energy investment, including the cultivation of a new uranium mine, with China.

But given the enduring presence of French companies in Burkina Faso and Mali, no matter the anti-Paris disposition of the juntas there, there may be little change to the current status quo. “In most of Niger’s coups d’état, the uranium sector was never fundamentally in question,” Emmanuel Grégoire, director emeritus of research at the Research Institute for Development, a French government agency, told Le Monde. After the 1974 coup, which overthrew the country’s first post-colonial government, Grégoire said that “negotiations took place because the French had imposed contracts that were financially detrimental to the Nigeriens, but there was never any question of kicking them out.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...r-france-coup/

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Blurb

Many people may not realize that BRICS, both the concept and the term, was created by Goldman Sachs in 2001. De-dollarization, the destabilization of Europe, the rise of BRICS, the potential new BRICS currency, and the pivot to Asia, are all occurring by design

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Another update

Stumbling Toward 2033

Simplicius explains his perspective on the decline and fall of Clown World:

The general gist though of what’s happening now is that the world is hurtling toward a nexus point, a sort of singularity moment, because the entire 20th century’s worth of hyper-financialized “capitalism” has reached a near-breaking point.

The type of system in the West relies on parasitism and labor theft to keep its own luxurious standards afloat, as well as mediate the endless debt expansion and ever-ballooning inflation. They needed globalism to do this, as globalism allowed a new form of parasitizing the rest of the world by smudging out economic borders between countries and creating a predatory pipeline enabling the “too big to fail” corporations and banks in the West to keep themselves afloat by increasingly robbing the rest of the world via offshoring and other globalist techniques.

The problem is, that too has come to its end, as most developing nations like China have reached a level where it’s no longer profitable to use them for slave labor, and infact they’re in turn becoming so powerful that they threaten to form new economic blocs that could entirely usurp the Western money cabal’s rule of the globe.

One of the ways the West has been kept afloat is via the anchor of the U.S. dollar, which was made possible by secret coercive deals with all vassals to prop it up by way of purchasing U.S. government treasuries and bonds—in short, financing all U.S. debt.

But now that too has reached its limit as China and other traditional purchasers are no longer buying, and are in fact dumping, the treasuries. This is leading to a point of no return, where the entire Western financial system has no way out, no further quick “saves” like before.

In the past, they used several emergency stopgap measures to buy themselves a few more years of time. The financial crash of 2008 was the first crack heralding the end of the system. They pumped trillions upon trillions to keep the system afloat, but by the 2020s it was obvious time was running out and final collapse was again close. So they panicked and rolled out the Covid hoax to save the system one final time. Under cover of the Covid falseflag, they managed to sneak another few massive trillions into the system to get a last few precious years.

But now they’ve run out of options. Only the final tried and true method could save them: instigate some type of global war/conflict, which is mostly why they provoked the Ukrainian conflict at the time they did, after years of it being frozen.

As you said, things are now moving at breakneck speeds and the power elite are hanging by a thread, as they’re being assailed and losing on almost every front: from social media, where they’ve failed to stop the onslaught of ‘truth’ destroying most of their fake “Fact-Checking” fronts and Ministry of Truth attempts (Nina Jankowicz, etc.); to the global geopolitical flashpoints where they’re besieged, from Ukraine to the MidEast; to the Covid and “Climate Change” hoaxes, which are taking a beating in the public forum; the ‘paradigms’ are crashing all around.

Now I believe hyperinflation has truly begun in the U.S. Forget Biden’s cooked numbers, everyone who’s paying attention can see the prices for everything are skyrocketing YoY.

So where is it all leading? I believe the turmoil is only just beginning. Sure, there’s potential for a major culmination to happen by election time, or 2025, but I personally think it will drag out a bit longer both in U.S. and Europe as well.

Large new movements are growing in Europe, we’ve seen the wave of conservative and ‘right wing’ candidates sweeping many countries. The citizens are up in arms and angrier than ever, with major protests getting steadily more violent in France, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and everywhere in between. Insanely totalitarian new laws are being rolled out everywhere, from the new proposed clampdowns in Ireland, to the crazy anti-free-speech laws in Germany and the EU at large with their DSA.

There’s still far more “room for growth” in terms of the degradation and disaffectation in society. I believe this trajectory will continue for another few years, with A.I. developments adding the final ‘unpredictable’ black swan momentum which could veer everything into untold and unforeseen directions.

That’s why I don’t see a final collapse or major historic ‘events’ happening until closer toward 2030, but it’s very possible it can happen sooner.

What I find fascinating is the way in which what was deemed impossible and borderline insane when I first pointed out the observable trajectory back in 2004 gradually became conceivable in the late 2010s and is now increasingly becoming seen to be inevitable in the early 2020s. That doesn’t mean I was correct, of course, as even the seemingly inevitable is only a probability, but it is rather fascinating to see the way public opinion has shifted so massively over the last two decades.

https://voxday.net/2023/11/29/stumbling-toward-2033/

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Blurb

This past week, the world has reflected on the death of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. As Nixon's national security advisor, he was notorious for his ultra-realist approach to international politics, which saw the policy of triangulation with China and the Soviet Union that was pivotal in bringing China into the Western sphere and ultimately helping the emerging economy become a global power. But also the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, in a failed attempt to solicit concessions from the North Vietnamese. Such unscrupulous foreign policy is again on display over Gaza. The silence with which the Western powers have embraced the slaughter and the tacit, if not open, approval of Israel's behaviour evokes a long-standing memory in the global south about a racist colonial logic. Today, we would like to explore this with our very own elder statesman', Dr Mahathir Mohamed.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been Malaysia's longest-serving prime minister for some 22 years. He has stewarded Malaysia through a difficult period; today it is a thriving economy. He came back to power briefly after winning a resounding victory in 2018. Dr Mahathir has seen first-hand in his 98 years the rise of America and the establishment of Israel, but also the sorry state of much of our ummah - and today, we would like to tap into his extensive knowledge and wisdom.

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Blurb

The events of the past 6 weeks have exposed the sheer double standards that apply to the implementation of international law. The so-called liberal international order has been found to be nothing short of hypocritical. Gaza has exposed not only this duplicity but also the very ideas that undergird such a system. Today, we explore these ideas. Many surmise that the West has taken a wrong turn, and if only they return back to their original noble enlightenment values. Yet Gaza unveils a more unsettling truth. That the values of secular liberalism have always remained connected to European chauvinism. Their unbridled support for a settler colonial project and the ease with which they absorb genocide reveals the unsettling nature of liberalism. This is the argument of my guest today, Hasan Spiker.

Hasan Spiker is a philosopher and comparative scholar of Islamic, Greek, and modern thought he studied at the University of Cambridge, where he received his MPhil in philosophy and where is carrying out his doctoral research. He also studied the Islamic sciences. His new book, Hierarchy and Freedom: An Examination of Some Classical Metaphysical and Post-Enlightenment Accounts of Human Autonomy, was released this year.

Salaam

Another update.

Blurb

Craig Murray is a retired British Ambassador turned activist. In this powerful message recorded in early April, he explains cogently why Israel's systematic breaking of international law and the West's complicity in that are leading to dire consequences for all of us. Attacking embassies, bombing civilian infrastructure, executing non-combatants, intentionally starving a besieged population, and other war crimes break are a breach of norms enshrined in the Geneva Convention, the Vienna convention, and other foundational multilateral treaties that make up the fabric of the international world.

International law only works when the international community actually believes in it. There is no supra-national police man who could enforce these laws with due authority. Hence, the laws only carry weight to the extend that all states agree they should be kept. The systematic breaking of these laws—with limitless impunity—and the support for that by the Collective West will hunt us all. We might all become Palestinians if our states decide that they are not bound anymore by the conventions of old and the principles of humanitarianism.



Related.

Israel land grab law 'ends hope of two-state solution'

Salaam

Another update, continuing on the same theme.

Blurb

Imam Tom Facchine is the research director of the Department of Islam and Society at Yaqeen Institute. And a prolific speaker and commentator on Islam and philosophy. He discusses the US empire, American exceptionalism, liberalism and US Muslims abandoning Biden.

Salaam

Just to demonstrate how out of touch ruling liberal elites are, of all people the pathetic Blair has been suggested as an arbitrator to help end the Gaza conflict.


Blurb

British political commentator, Tom Gross breaks down ‘the historic circling of an issue,’ following reports the former British PM could play a key role in the post-war rebuilding of Gaza





But then again overseeing a genocide, maybe he is suited, given his record.

Salaam

Another update.

Why BRICS Can’t Replace the G7

The new organizations will not be carbon copies of their Clown World predecessors:

We can state with certainty that groups such as the BRICS and, at the regional level, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cannot replicate the model that has made the Western world so successful. Firstly, the objectives of its members are not to exploit the rest of humanity. Consequently, the level of coordination of national policies also cannot reach such a high degree. Simply because, by participating in BRICS, for instance, countries do not address the most fundamental issues of survival or achieve development objectives. In other words, everything the West creates is aimed against the rest of the world, and there are no exceptions. Those who now oppose the West, whether through confrontation like Russia or through the pursuit of softer alternatives like India and the Arab countries, do not initially orient their policies towards combating all humanity. Therefore, they will find it difficult to create an alternative form of institutional cooperation.

Second, the organizational structure of new alliances of countries from the Global South cannot be based on a ‘single leader’ model. Thus, large countries such as Russia, China, and even India have not joined the Western bloc because, due to their structural differences, they cannot accept the unquestioned authority of another major power to fulfil all of its demands, as Western Europe does with the United States.

Now the Global South is seeking to establish its own institutions but, for objective reasons, it still has a long way to go in understanding how these institutions can function without being replicas of Western models. This applies even to more specific areas of cooperation, which are strictly regulated within the West in accordance with internal power hierarchies.

However, the theoretical aspect of the issue is equally interesting. In this regard, even the very concept of “international order” may prove to be controversial and even unacceptable in some respects in the future.

The fact is that the entire conceptual framework which allows us to discuss international politics in a relatively consistent manner, was developed under specific conditions that were inherent in world events over the past five hundred years. This implies that we cannot currently determine how relevant well-known concepts of international reality will be in the coming decades.

For instance, the “Westphalian order” is a concept that emerged as a result of the legal resolution of an intra-European conflict between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, with little relevance to the rest of the world. However, due to the dominance of Western powers, this order — as a mechanism for interstate relations — has since spread across the globe.

In essence, the current system has been imposed on other countries. A notable example is China, which became “connected” to the Westphalian system through the military aggression of European powers in the early 19th century. This could lead to a situation where the words used by political leaders and scholars become meaningless.

This is another good sign that the most powerful of the sovereign nations, China and Russia, harbor no objective to replace the USA. But we already knew this; if China wanted to replace the USA, it would not have cancelled the planned “jump to China” in 2015 that was intended to accomplish precisely that.

https://voxday.net/2024/07/07/why-br...eplace-the-g7/






A Futile Warning

As this lengthy article in Foreign Affairs suggests, some of the smarter clowns realize that BRICS isn’t going away, and that as long as Clown World continues to rule in such a shamelessly hypocritical and unbalanced manner, most of the unaligned nations of the global East and South will choose BRICS over subjugation to Clown World.

The technology competition between China and the United States may lead to the erection of a digital iron curtain and the emergence of two separate and incompatible technological spheres, which would make fence-sitting more challenging. Finding a common denominator in the grouping will become more difficult, particularly on sensitive geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine. Those differences might make the bloc less influential on the international stage, even as its efforts to advance alternative currencies to the U.S. dollar gather strength.

For the United States and other Western powers, the dynamics inside BRICS underline the necessity of taking the grouping—and the underlying dissatisfaction with the current order—seriously. It is entirely reasonable for rising powers such as Brazil to search for hedging options and to feel dissatisfied with how the United States has steered the existing system. Western powers should focus on not making things worse by, for example, trying to scare middle powers away from joining BRICS, which smacks of paternalism and quasi-colonial interference. In the same way, Western attempts to warn middle powers in the global South about being too dependent on China have proved ineffective.

Western countries can do more to not alienate those middle powers seeking greater space for maneuver and to ensure that BRICS does not become an anti-Western bloc. They should spell out more clearly how certain sanctions relate to violations of international law, and try to be consistent in applying those sanctions against all violators—not just against geopolitical adversaries. Countries in the global South want to escape the hegemony of the dollar when they see Western countries, for instance, freezing Russian central bank reserves in 2022 as a response to the invasion of Ukraine but receiving no punishment for similarly unlawful military interventions in the Middle East and Africa. Wealthy countries can also be better problem solvers for poorer countries, including by sharing technology and assisting with the green transition. And the West should make more genuine efforts to democratize the global order, such as by doing away with the anachronistic tradition that only Europeans head the IMF and only U.S. citizens lead the World Bank.

Such actions would build trust and undermine Chinese and Russian attempts to enlist the global South to an anti-Western cause. Rather than bemoaning the emergence of the BRICS, the West should court those member states that have a stake in making sure that the grouping does not become an overtly anti-Western outfit intent on undermining the global order.

It’s somewhat amusing that after admitting how all of the previous predictions of the inevitable failure of BRICS for the last 18 years have been wrong, the Foreign Affairs analysts point to the material signs of its success – more than 40 countries asking for permission to join BRICS – as evidence the expansion of the group’s membership and influence will somehow damage the international bloc by reducing the cohesiveness between the neutral faction (Brazil and India) and the anti-Clown faction (China, Iran, and Russia). This, of course, completely misses the point, which is that neither faction has any intention of submitting to, or obeying, the hypocritical and self-serving dictates of the so-called “neoliberal rules-based global order” that we call Clown World.

And the solution recommended is impossible at the present. By any and every standard of so-called “international law”, Israel should be as heavily sanctioned by the “rules-based world order” as Russia is. Israel is observably bombing civilians in Lebanon and engaging in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, while Russia is fighting a war to defend Russians living in historically Russian territory who were under attack for more than a decade by the foreign, Clown World-installed, Kiev regime. Every sanction that has been applied to Russia should, under any sane, rational, or fair standard, have also been applied to Israel. Even more egregiously, many of those anti-Russian sanctions have also been applied to Belarus, which hasn’t done anything at all to any of its neighbors.

Simplicius notes: Israel continues to pummel Lebanon, proving itself to be the only country in the world that can literally bomb and invade all of its neighbors at will without serious international consequences. Note I said consequences, not ‘condemnation’. There’s plenty of the latter to go around, but it doesn’t lead to anything tangible because all global institutions are co-opted, captured, and compromised by the Hydra, and as such only pay lip service to tragedies perpetrated by their clients and masters alike. Isn’t it interesting how—just to take one small example of many—the Chess world’s FIDE organization has banned not only Russia but even Belarus merely as offhand accomplice, yet Israel, for an actual holocaust it’s committing on its neighbors, has not been banned. The same goes for the Olympics, EuroVision, and other contests; it’s quite incredible when you think about it.

It’s not as if anyone doesn’t notice this. Regardless of how far you think Israel’s right to defend itself should extend, everyone around the world has seen that the rules of the “rules-based world order” are unjust and are applied unevenly, which is why they quite naturally no longer want any part of it. Because, obviously, if major powers like China and Russia can be sanctioned, how much more easily can smaller nations be subjected to the same treatment if they don’t submit slavishly to Clown World’s unending demands?

The rulers of Clown World have simply never understood that the king is not above the law, he is more strictly bound by the law than any of his subjects. And when he refuses to be bound by the law, he ceases to be legitimate and thereby loses the Mandate of Heaven.

Unless Clown World ceases to be what it is, the rest of the world will prefer the alternative, any alternative, that promises not to punish them for doing no more than pursuing their reasonable national interests. Which is why, I suspect, more than a few nations that are presently under the domination of Clown World will seek to free themselves from it, beginning with Turkiye, and followed soon after, one would expect, by Hungary and Switzerland.

https://voxday.net/2024/09/26/a-futile-warning/







The Expansion of BRICS

BRICS will be growing significantly next month.

The next wave of BRICS expansion will be announced at the group’s annual summit in the Russian city of Kazan in October, Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov has claimed. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Ryzhenkov predicted that BRICS could add at least ten new members, while expressing optimism that his own country’s application for membership will be approved.

“The first wave of enlargement, as we all expect – those who have submitted such applications – will take place at the Kazan summit,” Ryzhenkov told RIA Novosti. Russia is “formulating the list of these countries that will be in the first wave of enlargement,” he added.

As the current holder of the BRICS chairmanship, Russia will host the group’s annual summit in Kazan from October 22 to 24. Earlier this month, Belarusian First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lukashevich said his country is in the first pool of BRICS candidates, along with Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Thailand.

Several other countries, including Türkiye, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso, have also shared their intent to join. Founded in 2006 by Russia, China, India, and Brazil, the organization accepted South Africa as a member in 2011. Earlier this year, it expanded to welcome four new member states – Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the UAE. So far, at least 34 countries have expressed interest in joining, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated at a senior BRICS meeting earlier in September.

The three most significant countries in that first set are Vietnam, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Clown World has been working hard to try to separate Vietnam from China, and “the Prussians of Asia”, as Lee Kwan Yew described them, are historically the most aggressive nation in Asia. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and is closely tied economically to China, and Nigeria is the most populous and most advanced African state. Between them, just those three countries have 150 million more people than the entire European Union.

The inclusion of Palestine is also significant, as while BRICS is not a military alliance, the economic power it wields is already formidable, and a boycott by BRICS would be potentially be more devastating than the US sanctions regime on Russia have been. The biggest news, of course, would be if Türkiye is allowed to jump the queue, especially if it exits NATO in the process.

https://voxday.net/2024/09/30/the-expansion-of-brics/