{"id":80065,"date":"2016-09-26T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=80065"},"modified":"2016-09-21T14:24:47","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T13:24:47","slug":"un-general-assembly-convenes-amid-global-military-escalation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/09\/un-general-assembly-convenes-amid-global-military-escalation\/","title":{"rendered":"UN General Assembly Convenes amid Global Military Escalation"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Sep 2016 – <\/em>The 71st United Nations General Assembly convened this week beneath the shadow of a series of global crises that threaten to throw humanity into a new world war.<\/p>\n

This was the backdrop against which US President Barack Obama gave his final address to the Assembly on Tuesday. Obama\u2019s rambling speech, which at times appeared to be ad-libbed, was an exercise in self-contradiction and absurd lies, with Obama\u2019s depiction of the current geopolitical situation standing reality on its head.<\/p>\n

He declared, with a straight face, \u201cOur international order has been so successful that we take it as a given that great powers no longer fight world wars; that the end of the Cold War lifted the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; that the battlefields of Europe have been replaced by peaceful union.\u201d<\/p>\n

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born liars, others become liars, others have lies thrust upon them, but all three definitions apply to the current president of the United States.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s proclamation that the \u201cshadow of nuclear Armageddon\u201d has passed flies in the face not only of his own $1 trillion nuclear rearmament program, but the proclamation of the Union of Concerned Scientists that the US and China are \u201ca few poor decisions away from starting a war that could escalate rapidly and end in a nuclear exchange.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president, moreover, did not mention that the \u201cpeaceful union\u201d that replaced \u201cthe battlefields of Europe\u201d was in the midst of dissolution amid growing national antagonisms. Obama was speaking at the first UN General Assembly to take place since the vote by Britain in June 2016 to leave the European Union, giving rise to demands for copycat votes throughout Europe and warnings of a break-up of the entire Eurozone.<\/p>\n

As for \u201cthe battlefields of Europe,\u201d NATO is moving ahead with its deployment of 4,000 troops to the Russian border, with high ranking NATO officials announcing this weekend that all of the troops will be in place by May. Behind the scenes, in the documents of military think tanks, such border troops are spoken of as \u201ctripwires,\u201d creating the rationale for military escalation by NATO in the event of a conflict between the Baltic States and Russia, substantially increasing the chances of a full-scale war between the two most powerful nuclear powers.<\/p>\n

A substantial portion of Obama\u2019s remarks were devoted to hurling barbs at Russia, tacitly asserting that it is a society \u201cthat asks less of oligarchs than ordinary citizens\u201d and declaring that Russia is \u201cattempting to recover lost glory through force.\u201d But these declarations would have been directed far more appropriately at the US, the most unequal developed country in the world. The American ruling class has been engaged in unending war in the effort to counter its long-term economic decline.<\/p>\n

Obama framed his remarks as a reflection on the past eight years of his administration, as well as on the 25 years that have passed since the dissolution of the USSR. \u201cA quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before,\u201d Obama declared, adding that the US has \u201cbeen a force for good\u201d over this period.<\/p>\n

Contrary to Obama\u2019s half-hearted declarations, the past quarter century has abjectly failed to live up to the proponents of capitalist triumphalism, who declared that the fall of the USSR would usher in a new era of peace and democracy. The US, far from being \u201ca force for good\u201d over this period, has been the single greatest purveyor of destabilization, violence and disorder.<\/p>\n

Beginning with the First Gulf War in 1991, the US has been perpetually at war, having bombed or invaded Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria, and carried out destabilization operations in countless other countries.<\/p>\n

These wars are now metastasizing into an increasingly direct conflict with Russia and China. This is accompanied by the militarization of the major imperialist powers, including Japan and Germany, as ruling classes throughout the world prepare for military conflict.<\/p>\n

The General Assembly opened in the aftermath of Saturday\u2019s bombing of a Syrian army base by the US military, in a flagrant violation of the ceasefire brokered between the US and its proxies on one side, and the Syrian government, backed by Russia, on the other. The attack led to over 90 fatalities and was carried out with the assistance of British, Australian and German forces, potentially embroiling these countries in a military conflict with Russia.<\/p>\n

The bombing took place as Turkish President Erdogan, Washington\u2019s ally in the Syria conflict, said Monday that Turkey plans to dramatically expand the area of Syria under its direct control by more than five-fold, to 5,000 square kilometers. US ground forces are fighting alongside Turkish-backed insurgents, raising the danger of a clash between Russian forces operating in Northern Syria and US ground troops fighting alongside Turkey.<\/p>\n

But the conflict in Syria is just one in an innumerable series of global flashpoints throughout Europe and Asia. Last week, Japan announced it would participate in US-led patrols in the disputed South China Sea, sparking condemnation from China, which Japan invaded and occupied in the run-up to World War II.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in Kashmir, 11 more people were killed in recent days following an attack Sunday that left 18 Indian soldiers dead, in the heaviest fighting in years in the region. Were the conflict, escalated to a fever pitch by the US-led \u201cPivot to Asia,\u201d to escalate into a war between India and Pakistan, it would be the first ever war between two nuclear-armed powers.<\/p>\n

Any one of these or other complex conflicts\u2014in which multiple countries are each engaged in low-level proxy fighting and jockeying for their regional interests\u2014risks sparking an uncontrolled escalation, like the conflict that began in the Balkans in June 1914.<\/p>\n

Obama intended to make his speech an account of the \u201cprogress that we\u2019ve made these last eight years.\u201d In the end, all he succeeded in doing was to emphasize how much closer to global war the world has come during his administration.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wsws.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Sep 2016 – The 71st United Nations General Assembly convened this week beneath the shadow of a series of global crises that threaten to throw humanity into a new world war. Obama\u2019s proclamation that the \u201cshadow of nuclear Armageddon\u201d has passed flies in the face of his own $1 trillion nuclear rearmament program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}