Your source for foreign policy news.
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In the rather prescient 1998 film The Siege, CIA agent Elise Craft (Annette Benning) - speaking about counter-terrorism - lectures her FBI colleague Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) that: "In this game, the most committed wins." Well, that truism couldn’t apply better to the current situation in Ukraine, and the very real - if generally misunderstood - possibility of armed conflict between Russia and the US/NATO. To wit, there is an enormous and decisive gap - Biden and media rhetoric aside - between Moscow's intensive, and Washington's/Brussel's minimal, commitment regarding Ukraine and the east end of Eastern Europe writ large.
In other words, Russia has demonstrated a will, and deployed military capacity, to win - and win fast - if this thing goes hot, that America and its divided, and oft-impotent, NATO allies simply can’t match. Therefore, the West would lose - full stop - to say nothing of the reality that it shouldn’t even consider fighting in the first place. That makes the whole matter pure madness, and the fact that Biden and Blinken won't admit this inconvenient truth, well, blatantly criminal.
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By Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)
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As tit-for-tat escalations continue in northern Yemen, the UN is warning that civilians are, as so often, getting the worst of things. January is set to be the deadliest month for Yemen's civilians since the war began in 2014.
With Yemen's Houthis firing missiles into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Saudi-led attacks on densely populated cities like Sanaa have soared. Northern Yemen's struggle to import medicine makes it difficult for hospitals to treat the wounded.
In addition to death tolls in Saana and Saada, mounting airstrikes have also increased the number of internally displaced Yemenis. With food scarce, the plight of the displaced is even more harrowing than usual.
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In Washington the global US military empire is a bipartisan affair. With a trillion dollar yearly military budget, there are plenty of opportunities for both the position and the opposition parties to thrust snouts deeply into the trough.
While Ron Paul was in Congress and GW Bush was president, we did a good deal to craft a bipartisan antiwar coalition in opposition to the Iraq war and other Bush-ite neocon misadventures. Then Obama was elected and pursued the same policies of global military empire - but with a better smile - and our coalition disintegrated. Suddenly the Democrats (with a couple of exceptions) were uninterested in the antiwar issue.
Such is the case now, when Obama’s great "success" - the US-led coup in Ukraine - is back in the headlines. Now Obama's second fiddle is "in charge" of things and those under him who pull the levers are determined to solidify their “great achievement” of peeling Ukraine away from its neighbor and dropping that basket-case into the lap of Brussels and Washington.
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Washington and Kyiv continue to be at odds over the threat of a Russian invasion. On Friday, a day after speaking with President Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed Western powers for creating a "panic" by claiming Russia is planning to invade.
"There are signals even from respected leaders of states, they just say that tomorrow there will be war. This is panic - how much does it cost for our state?" Zelensky said during a press conference.
Since early November, the US government and US media outlets have been warning Russia will invade despite repeated denials from Moscow. Over the past week, Ukrainian officials have been pushing back on the US narrative.
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US troops are back in combat in Syria, joining forces with the Kurdish SDF in serious fighting in and around Hasakeh, where ISIS prison raids have turned into two weeks of fighting with hundreds dead.
This has amounted to the biggest fight with ISIS since the 2019 fall of the Caliphate. The news of the battle is that ISIS in Syria is getting stronger, but also that US troops that remain in Syria are going to get dragged right back into this fight.
The Hasakeh fight started over a prison full of ISIS detainees, and while that is mostly over, SDF fighters are on the hunt around the city looking for ISIS hideouts.
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The US and Iran are still at odds over "significant issues," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Monday as the Vienna nuclear deal talks are on pause.
"Important and significant issues remain regarding the removal of sanctions that have not made an agreement possible so far," Khatibzadeh said. He reiterated Iran's calls for guarantees that the US won’t withdraw from the nuclear deal again.
Despite the differences, Khatibzadeh still said "very significant progress" was made during the previous three weeks of negotiations. The talks were put on pause Friday and are expected to resume sometime this week. Participants on all sides have said the negotiations are at the point where "political decisions" need to be made.
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