By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
Last month marked a decade since President Barack Obama declared, standing before a crowd in Prague, the United States’ commitment to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. However, today we are on the top of that world, but with more weapons, not less.
The future of the United States-Russia Arms Control agreement to reduce the threat of both superpowers instigating a nuclear war –a bilateral tradition that goes back to the governments of Nixon and Brezhnev– looks bleak.
Once that both countries officially abandon the treaty on Non-Proliferation of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) next August, only the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) will remain in force as a formal agreement limiting the size and range of the nuclear arsenals between the two major nuclear-weapon states. And as if that weren’t enough, the New START expires in February 2021.
The Trump administration says it is considering extending the new START, but there are reasons for skepticism about this affirmation.
U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has set standards in the United States by abandoning the Iran’s Nuclear Treaty and the INF Treaty, is a very likely advocate of dismantling the New START as well.
In fact, Bolton has already loudly referred to the participation of the United States in that treaty by calling it “unilateral disarmament”. According to what has been published, Trump himself rejected Putin’s offer to extend the New START during the first official telephone conversation that they held.
Russia is still supposed to be interested in extending the treaty beyond 2021, and President Vladimir Putin has already extended an open invitation for talks with a view to an extension.
The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, expressed a similar interest at this year’s Munich security conference.
Putin manifests his disinterest in bilateral agreements and prefers a multilateral framework based, as he explained in 2012, on the fact that the US and Russia could end up “disarming endlessly while other nuclear powers accumulate weapons.”
But without these agreements, Moscow and Washington could be heading towards a new arms race: a possibility that the Russians and Americans seem to have grasped. (According to a recent survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Analytical Center, seven out of ten Russians (72%%) and 70% of Americans fear that their countries will move toward a new arms race.
But there is still room for hope. Most Russians (87%) and Americans (74%) are in favor of reaching an agreement to limit nuclear weapons.
In 1982, three-quarters of Americans favored freezing nuclear weapons production (75%), according to a joint survey by NBC News and Associated Press. Most of the U.S. public also disagreed with Reagan’s assertion that the freeze movement was being manipulated by foreign interests to weaken the country (48%). Reagan soon changed course.
The Nuclear Freeze campaign –which included a million-person US protest calling for an end to the arms race– is considered to have forced Reagan’s hand to begin negotiations with Gorbachev in 1985.
By 1982, three-quarters of Americans were in favor of freezing the production of nuclear weapons, according to a joint survey by NBC News and Associated Press.
Most Americans also disagreed with Reagan’s assertion that the freezing movement was being manipulated by foreign interests to weaken the country (48 %). Reagan soon changed course.
By 1982, the United States had lived 35 years of Cold War. Americans had practiced protection exercises since primary school and most remembered the missile crisis in Cuba and the constant threat of nuclear war.
This partly explains why, despite the support we see among the American people to a new arms control agreement and the sensation that a new arms race looms above our heads, only 54% of Americans opposed the U.S. decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty.
Today, the INF’s decision has been turned into a partisan issue, with 73% of the Republicans supporting Trump’s decision to withdraw and 74% of Democrats who oppose him. The challenge for defenders of arms control today is to break with the partisanship that surrounds the decisions on arms control.
According to Lily Wojtowicz, associate researcher at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs which studies Russian and American public opinion: although 78% of Americans describe Russia as a rival and not as a partner, they all support the search for new restrictions on the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia (90 % of Republicans, 89% of Democrats, and 84% of Independents).
May 20, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Right now, there’s a good chance that the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, be very brief. The word impeachment is already part of the current language in the media and social networks in the South American giant.”
At least that’s what Andrés Ferrari Haines, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, wrote in an article published, on May 21, by the Argentinean newspaper “Página 12”.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, warned in Buenos Aires that an electoral victory of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s would represent the risk of turning Argentina into another Venezuela.
Curiously, says the newspaper, his father is achieving in Brazil what mercenary Juan Guaidó could not achieve in Venezuela: to have protests everywhere promoting the rule of law and opposition to the President.
An historic march took place on Wednesday, May 15, in which nearly two million people took to the streets in 200 Brazilian cities to protest against the budget cuts in education. It was a turning point in the rejection of President Jair Bolsonaro, his children and several personalities close to him.
Those who, during his electoral campaign, thought that his violent and bellicose style was part of an electoral strategy to attack his opponents are realizing that this is a trait of his personality.
It seems that his capacity for dialogue is zero, and he can only express himself aggressively –even if this might not be his intention.
One could think that Bolsonaro, together with his sons, tried to strengthen his image in a direct relationship with his electoral base, discrediting sectors that were part of the coalition government, such as the military, which occupy several positions in allied political parties.
Even more serious, in the field of the economy, has been the appointment of his “super minister” Paulo Guedes, an extreme neoliberal choice, submissive to U.S. capital, especially to those that seek the extreme exploitation of natural resources and the control of state financial institutions and companies such as Petrobras.
In his strategy, Guedes placed all his chips in favor of the approval of a brutal reform aimed at preventing an “inevitable” economic catastrophe. Here he is meeting great resistance in and out of parliament.
It is a strategy of submission to private activity that launched Minister of Education Weintraub who, summoned by Congress, in the midst of a student protest, made it clear that the objective was not to cut the educational budget, but to extinguish the public education system.
In line with his President, the minister ignored the students and affirmed that “the graduates of the Brazilian public universities don’t know anything.”
Reality, however, has demonstrated the opposite: public schools are at the top of the list in the national ranking –with only two or three private ones– in the front rank. Even more so: the public ones are among the first in comparisons with those in emerging countries, and some have reputable placements at the international level. Thus, it is clear that there is no basis whatsoever for the government project aimed at dismantling public education to the benefit of private education that the minister so much praises.
For his part, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo aligned Brazil’s foreign policy to the United States in a moralistic crusade that identifies “globalization” with a process driven by “cultural Marxism” and climate risks with a “communist conspiracy”, even at the expense of losing important foreign markets.
Meanwhile, the economy comes to a standstill, the stock market falls and the dollar soars.
In addition, it has become known that consulting firm A.T. Kearney removed Brazil –for the first time—from the top 25 destinations for the United States investors. During the government of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil was in the third place.
Bolsonaro was losing so much support in the last week that even his “guru,” astrologer Olavo de Carvalho, predicted that he will abandon politics in Brazil.
The Brasil LIbre [Free Brazil] Movement, a great player in the fall of Rousseff and in the anti-PT wave, also announced its breaking up Bolsonaro.
The students are calling for a mobilization on May 30 and, in addition, they have joined the General Strike, on June 14, against Bolsonaro’s reforms.
The main print media, O Globo de Rio and Folha do Estado de Sao Paulo, in their editorials are very critical of the political maneuvers of the President and his attacks on democracy.
Investigations of corruption and illicit association against one of his sons, Flavio, are growing every day, and affect nearly one hundred people who were hired or moved fortunes in connection with his office, including the President’s wife herself.
May 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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