The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington
By Pepe Escobar
October 11, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"RT"
-
Almost
six years ago, President Putin proposed to
Germany ‘the creation of a harmonious
economic community stretching from Lisbon to
Vladivostok.’
This idea represented an
immense trade emporium uniting Russia and
the EU, or, in Putin’s words,
“a unified continental market
with a capacity worth trillions of dollars.”
In
a nutshell:
Eurasia integration.
Washington panicked. The record shows how
Putin’s vision – although extremely
seductive to German industrialists – was
eventually derailed by Washington’s
controlled demolition of Ukraine.
Three years ago, in Kazakhstan and then
Indonesia, President Xi Jinping expanded on
Putin’s vision, proposing One Belt, One Road
(OBOR), a.k.a. the New Silk Roads, enhancing
the geoeconomic integration of Asia-Pacific
via a vast network of highways, high-speed
rail, pipelines, ports and fiber-optic
cables.
In
a nutshell: an even more ambitious version
of Eurasia integration, benefiting
two-thirds of the world population, economy
and trade. The difference is that it now
comes with immense financial muscle backing
it up, via a Silk Road Fund, the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the
BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), and an
all-out commercial offensive all across
Eurasia, and the official entry of the yuan
in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights; that
is, the christening of the yuan as a key
currency worth holding by every single
emerging market central bank.
At
the recent G20 in Huangzhou, President Xi
clearly demonstrated how OBOR is absolutely
central to the Chinese vision of how
globalization should proceed. Beijing is
betting that the overwhelming majority of
nations across Eurasia would rather invest
in, and profit from, a “win-win” economic
development project than be bogged down in a
lose-lose strategic game between the US and
China.
And
that, for the Empire of Chaos, is absolute
anathema. How to possibly accept that China
is winning
the 21st century / New Great Game in Eurasia
by building the New Silk Roads?
And
don’t forget the Silk Road in Syria
Few
in the West have noticed, as
reported by RT, that the G20 was
preceded by an Eastern Economic Forum in
Vladivostok. Essentially, that was yet
another de facto celebration of Eurasia
integration, featuring Russia, China, Japan
and South Korea.
And
that integration plank will soon merge with
the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union –
which in itself is a sort of Russian New
Silk Road.
All
these roads lead to total connectivity. Take
for instance cargo trains that are now
regularly
linking Guangzhou, the key hub in
southeast China, to the logistics center in
Vorsino industrial park near Kaluga. The
trip now takes just two weeks – saving no
less than a full month if compared with
shipping, and around 80 percent of the cost
if compared with air cargo.
That’s yet another New Silk Road-style
connection between China and Europe via
Russia. Still another, vastly more
ambitious, will be the high-speed rail
expansion of the Transiberian; the Siberian
Silk Road.
Then take the closer integration of China
and Kazakhstan – which is also a member of
the EEU. The duty-free Trans-Eurasia railway
is already in effect, from Chongqing in
Sichuan across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus
and Poland all the way to Duisburg in
Germany. Beijing and Astana are developing a
joint free trade zone at Horgos. And in
parallel, a $135 million China-Mongolia
Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zone
started to be built last month.
Kazakhstan is even flirting with the
ambitious idea of a Eurasian Canal from the
Caspian to the Black Sea and then further on
to the Mediterranean. Sooner or later
Chinese construction companies will come up
with a feasibility study.
A
virtually invisible Washington agenda in
Syria – inbuilt in the Pentagon obsession to
not allow any ceasefire to work, or to
prevent the fall of its “moderate
rebels” in Aleppo – is to break up yet
another New Silk Road hub. China has been
commercially connected to Syria since the
original Silk Road, which snaked through
Palmyra and Damascus. Before the Syrian
“Arab Spring”, Syrian businessmen were a vital
presence in Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the
largest wholesale center for small-sized
consumer goods in the world, where they
would go to buy all sorts of products in
bulk to resell in the Levant.
The
“American lake”
Neocon/neoliberalcon Washington is totally
paralyzed in terms of formulating a response
– or at least a counter-proposal – to
Eurasia integration. A few solid IQs at
least may understand that China’s
“threat” to the US is all about
economic might. Take Washington’s deep
hostility towards the China-driven AIIB
(Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Yet
no amount of hardcore US lobbying prevented
allies such as Germany, Britain, Australia
and South Korea from joining in.
Then we had the mad dash to approve TPP –
the China-excluding, NATO-on-trade arm of
the pivot to Asia that was meant to be the
cherry of the mostly flat Obama global
economic policy cake. Yet the TPP as it
stands is practically dead.
What the current geopolitical juncture
spells out is the US Navy willing to go no
holds barred to stop China from
strategically dominating the Pacific, while
TPP is deployed as a weapon to stop China
dominating Asia-Pacific economically.
With the pivot to Asia configured as a tool
to “deter Chinese aggression”,
exceptionalists have graphically
demonstrated how they are incapable of
admitting the whole game is about
post-ideological supply chain geopolitics.
The US does not need to contain China; what
it needs, badly, is key industrial,
financial, commercial connection to crucial
nodes across Asia to (re)build its economy.
Those were the days, in March 1949, when
MacArthur could gloat, “the Pacific is
now an Anglo-Saxon lake”. Even after
the end of the Cold War the Pacific was a de
facto American lake; the US violated Chinese
naval and aerial space at will.
Now
instead we have the US Army War College and
the whole Think Tankland losing sleep over
sophisticated Chinese missiles capable of
denying US Navy access to the South China
Sea. An American lake? No more.
The
heart of the matter is that China has made
an outstanding bet on infrastructure
building – which translates into first-class
connectivity to everyone – as the real
global 21st century commons, way more
important than “security”. After
all a large part of global infrastructure
still needs to be built. While China
turbo-charges its role as the top global
infrastructure exporter – from high-speed
rail to low-cost telecom – the
“indispensable” nation is stuck with a
“pivoting”, perplexed, bloated
military obsessed with containment.
Divide
and rule those “hostile” rivals
Well, things haven’t changed much since Dr.
Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski
dreaming in the late 1990s of a Chinese
fragmentation from within, all the way to
Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy,
which is no more than futile rhetorical
nostalgia about containing Russia, China and
Iran.
Thus the basket of attached myths such as
“freedom of navigation” –
Washington’s euphemism for perennially
controlling the sea lanes that constitute
China’s supply chain – as well as an
apotheosis of“China aggression”
incessantly merging with “Russia
aggression”;after all, the Eurasia
integration-driven Beijing-Moscow strategic
partnership must be severed at all costs.
Why? Because US global hegemony must always
be perceived as an irremovable force of
nature, like death and taxes (Apple in
Ireland excluded).
Twenty-four years after the
Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide, the same
mindset prevails;
“Our first objective is to prevent the
reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any
hostile power from dominating a region whose
resources would, under consolidated control,
be sufficient to generate global power.
These regions include Western Europe, East
Asia, the territory of the former Soviet
Union and southwest Asia”.
Oops. Now even Dr. Zbig “Grand
Chessboard” Brzezinski is terrified.
How to contain these bloody silky roads with
Pentagon “existential threats”
China and Russia right at the heart of the
action? Divide and Rule – what else?
For a confused Brzezinski,
the US should “fashion
a policy in which at least one of the two
potentially threatening states becomes a
partner in the quest for regional and then
wider global stability, and thus in
containing the least predictable but
potentially the most likely rival to
overreach. Currently, the more likely to
overreach is Russia, but in the longer run
it could be China.”
Have a pleasant nightmare.
Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical
analyst.
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