By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
John Bolton has been saying for years that he wants to overthrow the Iranian government, but this time he seems to have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News and former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and many other newspapers.
“I met John Bolton and interacted with him almost daily with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations Headquarters in New York, when he was the United States ambassador there between August 2005 and December 2006. Most of his diplomatic colleagues, officials and journalists were surprised that Bolton was appointed as the representative of the United States for his long and public disdain for the UN.
In 1994 Bolton had said publicly that “the United Nations Secretariat in New York has 38 floors and if I lost ten floors, nothing would change.” Even more revealing was when in that same conference he confessed that “no matter what the UN decides, the United States will always do what it wants”.
For Bolton, these frank admissions classify as signs of force, should not be taken as reasons for alarm.
He is a man without a sense of humor and, at least at the UN, he always seemed to think that he was the most intelligent person in the room. In 2006, he gave a conference at the United States mission to correspondents at the UN, on nuclear enrichment. Its objective was to convince the audience that Iran was close to having an atomic bomb despite a 2007 National Intelligence Calculation of the United States that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But arrogance may have finally defeated Bolton. At the top of that agenda has maintained the stated goal for years: bomb and overthrow the Iranian government.
Bolton has a very high judgment on himself, rooted apparently in a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness. He always seems angry and one can never define if the reason for the dispute is personal or diplomatic. He personally takes on political or other differences with nations that disagree with the positions of the government of the country he represents. In this field, he links his sense of personal power with that of the United States as a nation.
It is more than any ideology. It is fanaticism. Bolton believes that the United States is exceptional, indispensable and superior to all other nations … and is not afraid to say it in public. He is not the typical government official who moves from passivity to aggression. It is aggressive always. He is always willing to make intimidation personal in the name of the country he represents.
It is, of course, a vociferous instigator of the US coup in Venezuela and was the one who organized the “Brooks Brothers mutiny” that interrupted the vote count in Florida in the disputed presidential election of 2000.
Practice the common tactic in the US ruling class to describe the disobedient leaders who are about to be overthrown: Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Hitler Putin. This derives from a false rebirth of the glory of the USA after World War II: painting the adventures abroad as moral crusades, and not as naked aggressions in search of gain and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. It is unique in the purity of this pathology.
He was chosen for the position by a president with very limited knowledge of international affairs – except in the case of real estate.
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the six-nation agreement that caused Tehran to reduce its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for a relaxation of US and international sanctions. In response to increasingly stringent sanctions, Iran said on May 5 in Tehran that it would restart partial nuclear enrichment.
If this were a White House that worked properly, it would be the president who would order a military action, and not a national security adviser. “I do not think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are doing to him. “They are manipulating him,” former US Senator Mike Gravel told RT this week.
The New York Times recently reported: “Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing a confident Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States in the process of war. before the president notices. “
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the midst of so many terrible things happening in the world, it’s easy to be depressed by the torrent of bad news generated by the Trump administration in foreign policy matters.
Resistance to the edicts of the U.S. Empire is growing daily. We see it in the reactions towards the trio of idiots who make up the Triumvirate of War: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and John Pence.
Trump’s government has abandoned diplomacy to such an extent that only their crude and naked aggressions are evident. And it has gotten to the point that even the most accomplished diplomatic agents of Washington seem to have dispensed with subtleties as part of the tools of their profession.
Only the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, continues to speak in classical diplomatic language.
In his annual address to the diplomatic academy in Moscow, the Russian Foreign Minister hailed a new geopolitical era marked by multi-polarity. Lavrov explains that the emergence of new and rising centers of power to maintain stability in the world requires the search for a balance of interests and commitments.
He said that there has been a change in the center of global economic power from the West to the East and a markedly globalizing liberal order started losing its attraction and is no longer seen as a suitable model for all.
“Sadly, our western partners, led by The United States, do not want to agree on common approaches to resolve problems,” Lavrov said, accusing Washington and its allies of trying to “preserve their secular dominion of world affairs despite objective tendencies towards the formation of a poly-centric world order.”
He argued that these efforts were contrary to the fact that now, economically and financially, the United States can no longer solve the economy problems and other world affairs single-handedly.
“To fictitiously maintain its dominance and previous positions, Washington resorts to blackmail and economic coercion, making use of the media,” says Lavrov.
There is much to be drawn from this statement, which was published in Newsweek and many other media without much editorial comment.
Lavrov said he understands the conflict in its entirety and its depth in the psyche of US and European leadership, considering the feeling of ownership that does not abandon them.
This is what explains the intensification of aggression on the part of the Trump administration on the world stage.
Meanwhile, fear grows in the western halls of power.
Countries like Iran, Lebanon and Russia can do simple things like getting together to sign some kind of contract on oil exploration, or railroad financing, and the United States will freeze it out of the global financial system.
That is why the ultimate goal of this resistance is not a decisive and satisfying victory for all, but to survive long enough so that the opponent finally has no choice but that of stopping and going home.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo travels the world like a mobster. He lies about all matters and demands allegiance, but goes away empty-handed. Blackmail only works with the weakest and most isolated, like Ecuador, where what was at stake was “only” the life of Julian Assange. Ecuador is about to discover how expensive the generosity of the United States and the IMF are.
Such was the essence of Pompeo’s statement on the destabilization of Venezuela by China. It’s also why Maduro refused US and IMF aid, and why he had to pay for this with the destabilization of his country, through sanctions, threats and blackouts….
No wonder the ambassador of China in Chile exclaimed: “Mr. Pompeo has lost his mind.”
For Trump’s foreign policy team, the moment of truth is approaching. Will they start a war with Iran at the instigation of the newly re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu?
Empires don’t like to be disrespected; less still to be ignored. Therefore, there seems to be no possibility that Trump’s plan may work. The axis of resistance, despite all the small moves, is to win the war of attrition. The U.S. maximum pressure policy has a finite lifespan, because –like all things in economics– it has a temporary function.
And every small movement, every action big or small, whether in response to sanctions or behind-the-scenes pressure, changes the state of the conflict. And it is not in the nature of the people behind Trump’s policies to admit failure. They will continue to push until there’s a catastrophic outcome.
April 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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