The Internationalism

F**k that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. This is what eleven years ago Joe Biden, an advocate of an unconditional withdrawal from Kabul, told Richard Holbrooke who feared for the Afghan women who had been pushed back into the darkness. Today, newspapers around the world are wringing their hands over the bad impression made by the liberal order and its values, and weeping crocodile tears for the girls of Kabul, who have been kicked out of schools and handed back to a dark, reactionary fanaticism. But the commander in chief of a West which claims to be an alliance for democracy has always considered freedom and human rights in Afghanistan to be myths for the deluded, not worth the lives of its soldiers. A hypocritical and impotent Europe has followed him, and today seems to fear only receiving a new wave of refugees. Let us take notes and learn this lesson. The bourgeoisie has written glorious pages, when its revolutions...

America has decided to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan; during the past twenty years, there have been an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 casualties among opponent militias and the Afghan population, as well as about 5,000 Western casualties among the US mission, the NATO mission and private military contracting forces. An intervention that began in 2001 as a response to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 th has, over two decades, turned into a war without end, in which the United States has seen its credibility as a world power and guarantor of global order put to the test. This is precisely why the decision to withdraw is controversial, in Washington and in other capitals. It has the air of a surrender in the face of domestic opinion marked by war-weariness; it is not known whether the conflict will really end; it is not known who will fill the void left by the United States and NATO, and how; the knock-on effects that the Afghan shock will hav...

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...

From the series The arms industry in the Middle East Europeans started selling weapons to the Middle East a century and a half ago, recalls the Economist . At the time, European armies began to adopt the breech-loading tifle and to sell the surplus of rifled muskets to rival Arab tribes . The fow of arms has never stopped since, but in the meantime the importance of the area has grown, attracting new sellers: Americans, Russians, Chinese and also emerging local groups. The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) EDGE conglomerate, with 12,000 employees and sales worth $4.7 billion, recently entered the SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) top 25 arms-producing companies in the world for the first time. An unstable but enormous market In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) there are three ongoing conflicts (Syria, Libya, and Yemen) and a heated dispute over gas resources in the easter Mediterranean. Recent diplomatic moves, such as the agreements between Israel and the...

David Petraeus, Commander of the US forces in Iraq and the Gulf in 2007-2008, then director of the CIA in 2011-12, described the elimination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani on January 3 rd in Baghdad as a defensive action , with which the Trump presidency restored a US deterrence , which was weakened by recent Iranian actions . This is a reference to the attacks conducted indirectly, unclaimed by Tehran, against the Saudi oil infrastructures on September 14 th 2019. In March 2008, when the forces under Petraeus’ command supported the Iraqi Army in the fight against local Shite militias, Soleimani sent a message to the American general: informing him that he was the person in charge for Iranian policies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza therefore the channel through which to define an agreement to resolve the various issues with Tehran. Petraeus holds the advisors of the Quds Force, the spearhead of the Pasdaran asymmetric operations, responsible for the killing of around 600 ...