[Rei Murasame]

In case anyone missed it:

Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of America’s leading strategic thinkers. He was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter at the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and during the ensuing hostage crisis. He spoke with The WorldPost about the recently negotiated agreement with Iran on its nuclear program.

WorldPost: How do you see the impact of the Lausanne agreement on the Iranian outlook? Does this signal an opening to the world in the same way as the early days of China's opening to the U.S.? Since your time dealing with Iran at the time of the revolution, the whole legitimation of the regime has been its anti-American stance. Now what?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: The impact of the Lausanne agreement on the Iranian outlook can be quite significant. It undermines the outlook that has predominated in official Tehran over the last two or so decades. It introduces the possibility of the Iranian elite seriously considering even some forms of cooperation with the United States.

However, there are also significant differences between this opening and the earlier Chinese opening to the United States engineered first by Nixon and Kissinger and then transformed into more [of] a formal relationship by President Jimmy Carter. The Chinese at the time were increasingly not only hostile to the Soviet Union but concerned that the Soviets might actually take direct action against them. An opening to America thus had a sense of urgency to it. It was focused initially, at least, largely on economic issues as well as some informal signals of possible political collaboration. Those signals under Deng Xiaoping, became more formally a strategic accommodation with a strong and overt anti-Soviet sting to it.

WorldPost: What are the strategic implications from the U.S. side of what some are already calling Obama’s "pivot to Persia?"

Brzezinski: The strategic implications for the United States are, in the short-run, that it reduces the possibility that the United States will be driven into a war against Iran, which would then contribute to a wider outbreak of violence and disorder in the region as a whole. Very few countries in the immediate proximity of Iran really wish that to happen. And neither do the established major countries which participated with the United States in the tentative accommodation that is now underway.

If this effort at achieving some stability and continuity in consolidating a wider and deeper accommodation with Iran is successful, it will be a major contribution to tempering conflict in the region. It is quite evident that, currently, the obvious alternative is escalating chaos, possibly complicated by a further and potentially more significant regional war which some of the critics of the agreement seem to be advocating without much concern for its consequences.

WorldPost: What seems to have been lost in the controversies surrounding the Iran deal is the fact that China signed on as a guarantor. China has also worked with the U.S. on trying to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions -- thus it is a "non-proliferation partner." And China also has a climate change deal with the U.S..

Brzezinski: You make a very important point here: China is a major power and China in effect has signed on as a guarantor of the process. Equally important is also the fact that Russia has done pretty much the same. In other words, there is a shared understanding among the major powers about the importance of stability and on the avoidance, therefore, of reckless adventurism.

That arrangement, assuming it lasts, also maximizes the possibility of the American-Chinese relationship becoming more substantive. I say this despite the recent mishandling of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank issue, where close allies of the U.S. such as Great Britain, France and Italy joined up despite Washington’s admonition not to. But that in some respects is not as critical as wider strategic cooperation, which both countries need to promote and consolidate.

One has to conceive that both non-proliferation and climate change are long-range issues, regarding which current U.S.-China cooperation is only at a very early stage of developing. That relationship can go either way and, in any case, it will not be significantly productive for some time. Thus the decision of the Chinese to cooperate with the United States on Iran is at the moment one of the more important aspects of the evolution that the America-Chinese relationship is still undergoing.

Great Game II continues on.

[Political Interest]

I knew American strategic thinkers would take such a position. In any conflict between China or Russia the United States will side with the Chinese.

Washington would love for Beijing to have poor relations with Moscow. The Sino-Soviet split was a good period for American foreign policy.

The Asia Pivot is not designed to contain China. Its purpose is to enhance the American position in the Asia-Pacific zone and come to a balance of power with China.

[Rich]

Its disgusting that we're allying with the Mandarin expansionist aggressors again. It was wrong when Nixon did it. Its even more wrong now. No with Soviet Communism gone and Russians restored to self rule, we should be seeking an alliance with Russia to combat the two great forces of tyranny in the world today, Islam and Mandarin expansionist, supremacist aggression.

[Frollein]

Of America and Russia, America would be the partner that would be impossible to control for China. It would never be an equal relationship, so I don't see how China would favour it, especially since America is opposing its designs in the Chinese sea. The most advantageous thing for China is to keep American influence in Asia low.

[Typhoon]

US-China and US-Iran is like trying to stick the two north poles of a magnet together; following a brief association the two will fly apart, that is if the forces required to bring the two together can even be applied. To seriously consider such relationships would take decades of effort and a heavy application of amnesia for one side of the pairing.

Is Brzezinski even aware of Tikrit?

[benpenguin]

Well, Sino-US relation is basically like a dysfunctional marriage, they are in bed while hating each other , and China is even keeping a Russian concubine.

Its disgusting that we're allying with the Mandarin expansionist aggressors again.

Why not? US is already an expansionist aggressor allying with a whole bunch of expansionist aggressors. Why not China? What's disgusting is the knee-jerk China hate from your end. Well, in any case, feeling is mutual.

The Asia Pivot is not designed to contain China.

That's hard to believe when they are sailing warships to our regional rivals by the droves, trying to convince their friends not to join AIIB, and negotiating a transconteniental trade agreement that conveniently doesn't include China.

[Igor Antunov]

US considers military patrols of Beijing's artificial islands in South China Sea

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... -china-sea

US-China ties will continue to deteriorate until we have a fully fledged cold war again. Same in regards to Russia on the European dominions front. US is Bankrupt, and in rapid relative decline, this will be the last hurrah of this imperialist, neoliberal power. This is strictly a Chinese millennium already.

[Rei Murasame]

Wow, so much failure at geography in this thread.

Are any of you aware that Iran, the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia, are nowhere near the South China fucking Sea? Why the fuck is anyone even talking about the South China Sea in this thread as though it somehow 'disproves' what Brzezinski is saying? These are two different administrative zones that are handled in two different (and deliberately contradictory) ways.

Hello, geostrategy. Assist China in one zone, and counter-balance them in the other. It's really obvious.

Also:

In the U.K., we have the best geography teachers in the world!

I'm glad to have benefited from that at least! Apparently Political Interest has also benefited from it.

[quetzalcoatl]

Great Game II continues on.

LOL, sure it does. After all, our implementation of the Brzezinski Doctrine in the Ukraine was such a resounding success. This is the guy that actually believed we would be able to deny Russia access to its Sevastopol warm water port. US foreign policy owes more to the late Jimmy Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, than any of the fulminations of Brzezinski or Kissinger. We have picked the wrong horse time after time after time. Saudi Arabia over Iran. Chiang over Mao. China over Russia. But the gambler's dream never dies - we'll hit lucky street tomorrow.

By now it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the US is perhaps the most inept imperial power of the modern era. (Well, there's Italy under Mussolini, but never mind) The US's interests are best served by being a defensive continental power, and curbing the compulsion to constantly stir the pot.

[Rei Murasame]

I think that the USA would probably get a lot further a lot faster if they simply banned people like you from living inside it. Only you isolationists could sit around hamstringing every single operation, and then have the gall to complain that the horse is having some difficulties winning the race when you've been cutting away at its hamstrings with a blunt knife.

So far, despite all the pro-Russian hamstringing treachery that has been going on, the USA has done quite well to get this far, and hopefully they can push a bit further. I don't think that anyone in the mid-1980s could have anticipated just how devastating the collapse of the USSR would be for Russia, or how they would be reduced to the stage of having to fight for a tiny slither of the eastern section of Ukraine.

What has been accomplished is noteworthy, a rollback of the frontiers of that empire, a rollback so large that it almost boggles the mind.

"Is this really you, Russia, who used to stand astride the Danube, now brought low and made to fight for mere crumbs in Crimea and Donbass?" That is the gravity of what has happened so far. And there is more to come.

Brzezinski should have an award conferred on him, when he finally passes away, his grave should be a monument to Prometheism, because he has done so much to advance the cause of ethno-nationalist liberty in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia. He has done more than any charity handout group, and more than any leftists will ever hope to accomplish, in damaging the Russian Empire and humiliating the Russian Orthodox Church as well.

When all of this is over and we've won - and we will win - we'll be able to greet the dawn and look out onto the new order in Europe and Asia as it emerges and know that everything has been worth it.

[quetzalcoatl]

I think that the USA would probably get a lot further a lot faster if they simply banned people like you from living inside it. Only you isolationists could sit around hamstringing every single operation, and then have the gall to complain that the horse is having some difficulties winning the race when you've been cutting away at its hamstrings with a blunt knife.

At first I was thinking, WTF, is Rei acutally this clueless. Of course you really do have a clue, you just prefer to blow smoke when it suits your tactical interests (your tactical interest being, in this case, having the US fight a proxy war to serve your particular vision). The US was fervently isolationist throughout most of its history. Even today the public will enjoy a certain level of cowboy adventurism, as long as we don't have to stick around. This is the sticking point, and it's why the US is such a lousy imperial power. It has nothing at all to do with a handful of pacifists/isolationists/whatever (incidentally I'm not one, but that's another story). Americans are not and were never pacifists, they are lazy. They could give a shit about glory - Patton understood this. If they have to kill you, they will simply go about it with either a) mass scale production efficiency, or b) proxy armies backed up by drones.

Even within a Great Game framework, you can hardly expect the US or anyone else to fall on the sword of your particular fantasy. You must find your own recruits, and lead them into battle. We will be cheering you on, while watching on TV and drinking a cool one.

Brzezinski should have an award conferred on him, when he finally passes away, his grave should be a monument to Prometheism, because he has done so much to advance the cause of ethno-nationalist liberty in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia.

I like the guy, he's fun to read and listen to. He's mostly free of the cant you tend to hear in academia. One of his schemes (enticing Russia to invade Afghanistan) actually worked out, so props.

[Rei Murasame]

I don't even know where to begin to respond to all those fantasies you are spinning now. You don't own America. This may come a surprise to you, but America's interests are not decided by you.

They are decided by the transnational corporate interests which have trampled your so-called 'democracy' into the floor. People like me will always get it right, because people like me understand this. So while you pine for isolationism and harp on your own 'laziness', your own politicians will make it so that you will be paying tax money for any and all military operations which take place, because they answer to the defence companies, the industrial conglomerates, and the financial services companies which fund their election campaigns.

After they get into power, you cannot recall them.



And while you contemplate that, I'll have a cup of tea. Three cheers for war, tea, and taxation. This isn't 1776. This is 2015.

If your leaders decide that you are going to war, then that is where you are going.

[quetzalcoatl]

This may come a surprise to you, but America's interests are not decided by you.

You mistake interests for actions, but I take your point. Both interests (and ensuing action) will be determined by the transnational elite. The same observation applies to everyone who posts here.

After they get into power, you cannot recall them.

Back at ya. Once you give in to the Great Game, you put the gamer in charge. You are handing King Leopold an engraved invitation to rule you, and it matters exactly zilch if Leopold is a Prometheus or just a putz. Empire devolves into private endeavour without exception, and you will not be able to contain the demon any more than anyone else. Your dream of fascism will die, and you will become just another client state of transnational capital.

But of course you can't 'get it right' as you put it, because there is nothing to get. You are a passive observer, not an agent. You can't give Leopold an invitation, you can't in fact do anything at all. The Marxists waiting for the revolution, you with your conjunctures, me with my memory of a nation that went up in smoke...we're all illusionists. The one small pleasure you can take is observing the downfall of your enemies, but you will have to be content with that.

[Rei Murasame]

I'm not the same as you, because I'm a willing part of this system. I'm happy to support it in doing whatever it's going to do now, and I'm happy to benefit from it.

If we are going to have a world of transnational capital, then I want to get what I can get out of it. So I am not merely waiting, I also have an interest in what happens in the now. You're pining for a dream that went up in smoke (by your own admission), whereas I know that my future is linked to what happens in these events.

I feel great, because things are going in the direction that I had hoped they would go.

[Igor Antunov]

But of course you can't 'get it right' as you put it, because there is nothing to get. You are a passive observer, not an agent. You can't give Leopold an invitation, you can't in fact do anything at all. The Marxists waiting for the revolution, you with your conjunctures, me with my memory of a nation that went up in smoke...we're all illusionists. The one small pleasure you can take is observing the downfall of your enemies, but you will have to be content with that.

This is simply fact. Another sad fact is that the most viable revolutionary movements today are those of the Islamists. They're actually out there doing something. Whatever Rei or any number of closet neoliberals are spouting is going to die right there with them on their computer chair.

[Rei Murasame]

Oh look, the whole, "asymmetrical warfare out in the bush, is much more real than merely supplying weapons to people" argument. The decaying bloated corpses of jihadists would suggest otherwise.

Stay butthurt Igor, the fact that I can say these things from such a far distance away from the battlefield is sign of just how superior we are. Also, this is not 'closet neoliberalism', this is 'cheesegrater in your face cynical neoliberalism'.

The hardest and most brutal revolution that is taking place right now is the neoliberal revolution. It is the great destroyer, it destroys everything it comes in contact with, it's like if Oxyclean were an ideology, it'd be neoliberalism. It will destroy political Islam. It will destroy Russia. It will destroy anything that it cannot co-opt. It's not entirely perfect, but it will do for now, as long as it serves that purpose, until it is sublated.

[Frollein]

China urges caution from US over South China Sea disputes

China has warned the United States not to take “risky or provocative actions” in a dispute over territorial claims in the South China Sea, as Washington contemplates a stronger stance in the area.

The US defence secretary, Ash Carter, concerned about China’s rapid expansion of artificial islands, has asked staff to look at options including sending ships and planes closer to reefs claimed by Beijing, the Wall Street Journal reported.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference: “We are seriously concerned about the remarks on this issue by the US, and we think the US needs to make a clarification.”

She said China respected the freedom of navigation for international traffic in the area, but that did not allow warships and military planes to enter territorial waters and airspace.

“China will resolutely safeguard its own sovereignty. We call on the relevant parties to be cautious with their words and actions, and not take any risky or provocative actions,” Hua said.

The US has long insisted that it does not take sides in the complex territorial disputes in the region, but there have been growing tensions in recent months over China’s aggressive land reclamation projects in the Spratly Islands.

Several regional powers including the Philippines and Vietnam have overlapping claims to the area, mostly uninhabited reefs and atolls that lie in one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

For years those claims were contested mostly by ships or between officials, but in recent years Beijing decided to reinforce its claims by expanding its territory. Since last year, building projects have quadrupled the size of artificial islands in Chinese-claimed areas, to 2,000 hectares.

The projects include an airstrip that could be large enough for fighter jets and surveillance aircraft, the Wall Street Journal quoted the defence intelligence provider IHS Jane’s as saying.

The report said the change in US stance would involve flying over and sailing close to artificial islands that were only reefs before the latest building project. China says its territorial waters extend for 12 nautical miles from the land, a line that the US has challenged verbally but until now ordered its navy to respect.

Some regional allies want the US to take a stronger stance in challenging China, while others fear that ratcheting up the pressure only raises the risk of military confrontation and could encourage Beijing to speed up building work even more, the report said.

The White House would have to sign off on any change in the US posture, and the Wall Street Journal said it had declined to comment.

Behold the Sino-American frandship!

China will want to keep the Americans out and the Russians down. Right now, the Russians need the Chinese, hence the Sino-Russian revival that Atlantis was so delighted of. The Americans, OTOH, are meddlers of the worst sort. With their track record, why would China want them as partners?

[Ganeshas Rat]

Hearing Brzezinski saying something about Russia is like hearing turks saying something about Armenians. I mean, have you really known before, Armenians built their parliament on the Muslim children cemetery to stomp dust and ashes of Muslim babies everyday?

[Rei Murasame]

Behold the Sino-American frandship!

Geography failure continues.

These are two different administrative zones that are handled in two different (and deliberately contradictory) ways.

[Frollein]

Rei, I'm aware that Iran is nowhere near the Chinese coast. That doesn't mean that diplomatic tensions over their territorial claims will not spill over into other areas, even if their interests there should match. If China has reason to think that America is trying to undermine their efforts there (in their own backyard), it's logical to assume that they will try to undermine them everywhere, despite whatever else your favourite Pole might claim. It's a matter of trust.