by PATRICK BOND

Three months before taking power in 1949, Mao Tse-tung wrote of the solidarity required for the Chinese people’s revolution, remarking that a “principal and fundamental experience” was to “unite in a common struggle with those nations of the world which treat us as equals and unite with the peoples of all countries.” Mao warned, though, of “domestic and foreign reactionaries, the imperialists and their running dogs.”

Fast forward to last week (March 9), as Indian writer Arundhati Roy rebuked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government: “Some of you will remember how we used to joke about that florid, overblown Chinese communist term, ‘Running Dog of Imperialism.’ But right now, I’d say, it describes us well.”

Are BRICS rising? Or spalling? Or running (dogs)?

Does the critique of Modi’s allegiance to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu apply more broadly, when we consider the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, now adorned with five (or six) others? In 2023 at the Johannesburg summit, new BRICS were added: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with Saudi Arabia an ambiguous invitee (Riyadh has never formally accepted). In early 2025 another new full member joined: Indonesia.

And at the Kazan Summit in 2024 hosted by Vladimir Putin, there were more ‘partner’ invitations – a category reflecting the bloc’s indigestion after the 2023 expansion – offered to Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, all of which were accepted. (Only Algeria and Turkiye turned down partner status.)

As a result of the apparent strengthening of the bloc, by July 2025, geopolitics podcaster Ben Norton could  remark with unparalleled BRICS-hype:

“The Non-Aligned Movement was founded in the 1960s by former formerly colonized countries almost all with socialist governments, the initial founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, saying that they refused to go along with US imperialism in the first cold war against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. So, BRICS is now bringing back this anti-colonial mantle. They’ve picked up the anti-colonial mantle and they’re fighting against US dollar hegemony which is a which is a form of imperialism. They’re fighting against western imperialism.”

But the BRICS bloc is not up for this fight, it is now apparent. In a March 9 Johannesburg discussion with leading local political broadcaster Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Tricontinental director Vijay Prashad warned,

“If the BRICS countries don’t wake up to the reality of trying to stop this conflict by any means possible, trying to stop this conflict now, if they don’t recognize this reality, the entire project of peace and development is in jeopardy.”

Likewise, just after the Trump-Netanyahu regimes began bombing Iran, ambitious hopes for BRICS were promoted by renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs on March 2:

“It’s not only Trump but there’s no brake, there’s no foot on the brake. This is only an accelerator towards expanded war right now. And the only way that it can stop is if the BRICS countries – and that means India, that means Brazil, that means Russia, that means China, that means South Africa and others – and it’s Iran, which is a member of the BRICS, says, ‘This is not the way the world can work.’ They have to stand up to American hegemony. This is the only way the world can be safe. And so this is actually a responsibility of the BRICS right now, which is the only standing bulwark against America’s global empire.”

This ‘only standing bulwark’ is, in reality breaking up, or ‘spalling,’ i.e. (as I’ve mentioned before), a construction-industry term referring to a process in which – mainly due to the freezing-thawing cycle – “a wall’s masonry and bricks crack, crumble, flake, and even pop out of the wall.”

Expel running-dog India, along with any other Israel-collaborationist 

From hype to hope to helplessness seems like the inevitable emotional slide-away for BRICS-watching multipolaristas. By March 11, one of the most ebullient of multipolar journalists, Thailand-based Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, despaired – on Danny Haiphong’s podcast – that the BRICS bloc was now spalling beyond repair. So Escobar boldly recommended that one in particular be popped out by the others:

“India betrayed two top BRICS sequentially, Russia and Iran. That’s extremely serious. This would be grounds for expulsion of India from BRICS… The problem is what’s going to happen to BRICS this year, considering that India is the BRICS chair in this year when they betrayed two BRICS.”

The next day, Escobar told a podcast hosted by a former Fox News legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano,

“BRICS would have grounds to expel India considering that India betrayed sequentially two top BRICS, founding member Russia and a new member Iran in several levels because of American pressure. When the Trump administration told India you cannot buy Russian oil, the Indian said okay, okay, master.”

(Tehran was forgiving: on March 14 two tankers carrying liquefied natural gas to India were allowed through the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps this reflected compensation for both countries’ pain when Tehran’s battleship Dena was sunk by a U.S. submarine’s torpedo on March 4 – killing 87 Iranians – just after it left naval exercises in the Indian city of Visakhapatnam. As a former Indian military officer, Arun Prakash, complained to The Guardian, “The U.S. navy could have sunk this ship anywhere on the way back to the Persian Gulf. We are supposed to be friends and partners of the USA. To bring the war to right to our doorstep was a perverse act.” But one that New Delhi didn’t have the guts to criticise.)

On March 11, Escobar diagnosed the bloc’s feebleness:

“At the moment, BRICS is in a coma. It’s very painful to admit it, but we have to be realists. It’s in a deep, deep coma, blown up by one of its founding members. And obviously, don’t expect anything coming from Brazil or South Africa.”

Escobar recalled that on February 26,

“48 hours before the decapitation strike that killed Ayatollah Khamenei and very important people at the top of the government in Tehran, Modi was in Israel being best buddies with the war criminal Netanyahu. Because he wanted to clinch weapons deals with Israel, which they did, by the way. So we have a founding BRICS member completely aligned with Israel, which for the other BRICS, practically, all the other ones and the partners as well, this is unthinkable.”

But sadly, it’s not so ‘unthinkable’: the harsh realities of economic alignment to the Tel Aviv genocidaires can be discerned when BRICS hucksters open their minds and finally question the actual content of supposedly-multipolar ‘thinking’, which is oriented first and foremost to profiteering.

Internationalist 360 or more

by YANG XIAOTONG

Beijing’s muted response shows that when core interests are at stake, even close partners are expendable.

February 28, 2026, will be remembered as the day the law of the jungle returned. On that fateful day, the United States and Israel, in flagrant violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, launched Operation Epic Fury, “raining death and destruction” on Iran.

Although it was not the first time that the US and its Israeli ally had used negotiations to lull an enemy into a false sense of security before attacking, the US-Israeli assault nonetheless caught Iran off guard. Several high-ranking Iranian officials were killed in the strikes, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Yet the attacks failed to achieve the regime change the US and Israel had anticipated. The Iranian government, bruised and bloodied but undefeated, endured.

In response, Iran attacked US military installations and diplomatic missions in the Middle East and Israel with drones and missiles. While the retaliation inflicted some damage, it fell short of deterring further attacks in the face of the other side’s overwhelming military superiority. On the contrary, US strikes intensified, culminating in the largest yet on March 10. With Iranian missile stockpiles and launchers falling dangerously low, it has become apparent that without outside intervention, Iran is fighting what could be its last stand.

China’s muted response

With Russia preoccupied with its own war, Iran waited to see whether its only other ally capable of going toe to toe with the US, China, would come to its aid. The answer came quickly. Two days into the war, during a regular news conference at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, business continued as normal, as if the US and Israel had not just attacked one of China’s comprehensive strategic partners. When it became clear that China would remain silent, an Iranian journalist protested. Only then did the ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, reluctantly condemn the US-Israeli assault.

In the days that followed, China became a vocal critic of the attacks. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi argued, “Might does not make right,” warning that the attacks proved that “the world has regressed to the law of the jungle.” Yet for all his strong words, Wang stopped short of explicitly naming the US or Israel as the aggressor, even if there was little doubt which countries he meant. Furthermore, China offered Iran little substantive assistance beyond rhetoric.

While China contacted several Middle Eastern countries and sent a special envoy on a diplomatic tour of the region, a move that helped prevent Iran’s neighbours, many caught in the crossfire, from joining the fray, it made no attempt to directly confront the US, the country ultimately responsible for the war, let alone send Iran military aid.

China’s response remained muted even when Iran, in a bid to provoke international intervention, closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital maritime corridor through which 40 percent of China’s imported oil passes each day. Faced with a direct threat to its economic lifeline, Beijing’s only response was to call for all parties to cease hostilities and return to the negotiating table. Its priorities were clear.

That priority, of course, is Taiwan.

Iran is not as important

One month before the US-Israeli attacks, during the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump held a phone call. In the US readout, the conversation covered a range of topics, including rising US-Iranian tensions.

In the Chinese version, however, the focus was on China-US relations and Taiwan while rising US-Iranian tensions were omitted. Xi reiterated that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, stressed its importance to China and China-US relations, and drew a red line at its independence. Xi also warned Trump that the US must proceed with utmost caution regarding planned arms sales to Taiwan.

Al Jazeera for more

by JUE LIANG

You’ve seen it in bookstores – the metallic turquoise spine peeking out from the shelf under “Eastern Religions.” Or, perhaps, another of its more understated editions rendered in muted tones. It is “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” arguably the most well-known Tibetan Buddhist text outside Tibet.

It was first translated by American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz in 1927. The book’s philosophy of death and rebirth as spiritual practice was adapted in 1964 by Timothy Leary, the founder of psychedelic studies, to guide psychedelic experiences. Actor Richard Gere narrated the audio version of the book in 2008, helping introduce it to a broad audience.

As someone who studies Tibetan Buddhism, I’m often asked: What is “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”?

Most famous book in Tibetan Buddhism

In the Princeton University series “Lives of Great Religious Books,” there are only two texts representing Buddhism. One is the “Lotus Sutra,” the most popular Buddhist scripture on universal compassion, flexible teaching methods and potential for Buddhahood for all beings; the other is “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

Originally, the book was not even called “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” – and this book is not just about death.

The full title of the original Tibetan text from the 14th century translates as “The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States.” In Tibetan, it is shortened to “Bardo Thodrol,” which loosely translated to “liberation upon hearing.”

The English title took off with Evans-Wentz’s first translation. But Evans-Wentz translated only a part of the book, and the translation was based on oral commentary rather than the Tibetan text.

The first full translation was done in 2007 by scholar and translator of Tibetan Buddhism Gyurme Dorje. It has been endorsed through an introduction written by the Dalai Lama, the most recognized Tibetan Buddhist leader of our time.

The 11 chapters of the book teach one how to seize every opportunity to become enlightened, even in the least possible place. It all starts with the teaching of bardo.

The six ‘bardos’

The Tibetan word bardo means “intermediate state” or “the state of being in-between.” In its origin in Indian Buddhist teachings, the bardo, or “antarabhava” in Sanskrit, refers to the time period between the end of this life and the beginning of the next.

The Conversation for more

by SALLY NASSER

“Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” said the families of young Palestinian men to Swedish journalist Donald Boström when they saw their dead bodies stitched “from the abdomen to the chin.” Israeli soldiers had returned their bodies days after they disappeared from Gaza and the West Bank during a 1992 organ donation campaign in occupied Palestine, launched by Ehud Olmert, then Israel’s minister of health.

More than three decades later, the same suspicions have resurfaced. Last month, more than 1,000 kidney donors gathered for a group photograph during a ceremony celebrating 2,000 living kidney donations in occupied Palestine. The event was organized by the Israeli nonprofit Matnat Chaim (gift of life) which applied to the Guinness World Records for official recognition.

The application was not initially welcomed. In December 2025, when Matnat Chaim first contacted Guinness to register the record, it was rejected for “political reasons.” In a statement at the time, Guinness said it was aware of “just how sensitive this is at the moment,” adding that it had stopped processing applications from the Palestinian Territories or Israel since 2023, except for those submitted in cooperation with a UN-affiliated humanitarian relief agency.

According to Israeli media, the position of Guinness has since changed following legal pressure to resume submissions from Israel. While the annual record-keepers of the “greatest of human achievements” have not yet officially certified Israel’s record, zionist media have promoted the ceremony as evidence that organ donation rates inside the settler population are now among the highest in the world.

Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, Director-General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, has called for an independent international investigation rather than international accolades.

Taking into consideration the religious restrictions over organ donations and the small settler population of Israel, this issue poses questions over the accuracy of such a milestone. So where do all of these donations come from?

Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, Director-General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, has called for an independent international investigation rather than international accolades.

“The same authority withholding Palestinian bodies for years now boasts unprecedented ‘donation’ figures,” Al-Bursh said. “Did this generosity appear overnight? Or are there silent bodies excluded from the celebration? The occupation has stolen organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.”

These accusations intensified during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Medical teams and rescue workers tasked with exhuming bodies from mass graves reported signs of organ removal. At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, out of the 392 bodies found, 165 disfigured bodies remained unidentified.

“The bodies arrived stuffed with cotton, with gaps suggesting organs were removed. What we saw is indescribable,” a doctor at Nasser Medical Complex said, calling it a “violation of the sanctity of the dead and human dignity.”

The allegations first surfaced during the First Intifada. In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, then chief health official in the occupied West Bank, told reporters that organs, particularly eyes and kidneys, were being removed from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.

Euro-Med Monitor has documented similar cases across the Gaza Strip. It reported that the Israeli army confiscated bodies from Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the Indonesian Hospital, and areas along Salah al-Din Road, a route designated for displaced civilians heading to the central and southern parts of the strip. While the organization said dozens of bodies were later transferred via the International Committee of the Red Cross for burial, it warned that Israeli forces continue to withhold many others.

Medical examinations of some of the returned bodies revealed signs of organ removal, including “missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts,” confirmed the organization.

The allegations first surfaced during the First Intifada. In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, then chief health official in the occupied West Bank, told reporters that organs, particularly eyes and kidneys, were being removed from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs. At the time, international media ignored the testimony from Palestinian medical officials, a pattern that will repeat itself in the years to follow.

The issue resurfaced in 1999 when US anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes launched an investigation into organized “transplant tourism.” Her research led her to Yehuda Hiss, a pathologist and forensic specialist at Israel’s Forensic Institute Abu Kabir.

In a July 2000 interview, Hiss admitted to harvesting skin, bones, corneas, cardiac valves, and other tissues from bodies undergoing autopsies. He acknowledged that consent was only required for autopsies, while families were never informed of the organ harvesting that was conducted during autopsy. “Whatever was done here was off the record, highly informal,” Hiss said. “We never asked permission from the family.”

Al-Akhbar for more

by YUMNA ZAHID ALI

Gaza conflict didn’t start in 2023; it is rooted in 75 years of dispossession, occupation, systemic blockade

The war did not begin on October 7, 2023, no matter how loudly that date is repeated to erase the long history of occupation and conflict that came before it. October 7 is used as a licence to forget, a convenient starting line that allows seventy-five years of dispossession, occupation, siege and repeated military assaults to be reduced to historical ash.

But the testimonies of the oppressed do not work that way. Wars do not begin when the powerful decide to start counting; they begin when people are uprooted from their land, dignity, safety and any right to futurity, and Gaza’s story begins in 1948, not in 2023.

In 1948, during what Palestinians call Al-Nakba, or ‘The Catastrophe’, the creation of the State of Israel came with the forced displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral land. Entire villages were cleared, homes demolished or seized, and families sent into exile under the illusion that it was only for a short time.

It was not. Those refugees were never allowed to return, and Gaza became one of the places where their descendants were compressed into a narrow strip of land where loss was perpetuated, not remembered. When Gaza is bombed today, it is not just a city under fire; it is a refugee camp built on an unresolved crime.

In 1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip following the Six-Day War, placing its population under military rule and control. From that moment forward, Gaza’s residents did not control their borders, their airspace, or their freedom of movement. Daily life was regulated by an occupying power that could decide who travelled, who entered, who passed through a checkpoint, who received medicine, and who would have their name crossed out. This was not a temporary emergency measure; it was the normalisation of domination, and it hardened a sense of injustice, not because Palestinians rejected peace, but because they were never offered freedom.

By 1987, that pressure escalated into the First Intifada, a mass uprising driven largely by civilians who used protests, strikes and civil disobedience to confront decades of occupation. It was not an armed invasion but a civilian-led revolt born from humiliation and dehumanisation, and it was met with ferocious military force, mass arrests, beatings and live ammunition. This was the state screaming its only truth: “We have the guns. Your justice is a fantasy. Obey.”

The 1990s brought the Oslo Accords, which were sold to the world as a peace process but felt to many Palestinians like an agreement to keep talking about – an agreement that would never come. While a Palestinian Authority was created, real sovereignty never followed, and Israel retained decisive control over borders, armed enforcement and colonisation. Settlement expansion continued in the West Bank, occupation remained intact, and Gaza was targeted for further degradation. What was presented as a diplomatic solution over time revealed itself as management of the conflict rather than its resolution, breeding disillusionment instead of reconciliation.

In 2005, Israel announced its unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza, withdrawing settlers and soldiers from inside the strip while keeping its chokehold over its airspace, territorial waters, population registry and all land crossings. Gaza was not freed; it was sealed. Its people could not move, trade or rebuild freely, and the territory became dependent on an occupying power that claimed it was no longer responsible while still maintaining a remote-controlled siege. This contradiction was the catalyst for what followed.

When Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006, Gaza was placed under a strangling blockade by Israel, with Egypt’s cooperation and Western backing. This was not a counterterrorism operation; it was collective punishment imposed on over two million people, most of them civilians, many of them children still in diapers. The blockade crippled Gaza’s economy, restricted food, medicine, fuel and construction materials, and trapped every last soul in a sealed enclosure. Despair deepened, and the world largely accepted it as necessary.

What followed were repeated military assaults that reinforced the reality of Gaza as a place where civilian life was expendable. In 2008-2009, Operation Cast Lead killed around 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while Israel lost 13 people, several from friendly fire. In 2012, Operation Pillar of Defence left 167 Palestinians dead in just eight days.

In 2014, Operation Protective Edge devastated Gaza over 51 days, killing more than 2,200 Palestinians, over 500 of them children, and flattening densely populated city quarters while Gaza remained shrink-wrapped and unable to shelter its people. Each assault cycled back to the same four words: ceasefire, rubble, blockade, trauma.

The Express Tribune for more

by SASAN FAYAZMANESH

The second US war on Iran in less than a year has raised a burning question in popular media: What is the rationale for the war and why is it changing? Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else? The press in the US has not been able to make sense of this changing justification. But this is curious. Was the media asleep over the past few decades?

A quarter of a century ago, I delivered a presentation on US foreign policy towards Iran at an economics conference. My presentation concluded by stating that US policy in the Persian Gulf region had been a series of “regrettably shortsighted policies,” borrowing a phrase from former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. I argued that these policies had served to prolong the life of the theocratic government in Iran. I believed that without the constant threat of foreign enemies, this government would have had no one to blame for its social and economic problems but itself.

In my paper, I outlined how Israel and its lobbying groups in the US were the primary architects of US policy. I explained how they had developed three justifications, or “sins” as I referred to them, to justify punishing Iran:

1) the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,

2) support for “terrorism,” and

3) opposition to the Oslo “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians.

However, I contended that Israel’s true objective had always been to overthrow the Islamic Republic, a goal now commonly known as a “regime change.” The rationale behind this objective was that Iran and Iraq were the only two countries in the Middle East that posed a barrier to the creation of Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael), which was intended to encompass the West Bank, Gaza, and potentially more.

The conference paper was published as an article in an economics journal and, later expanded into a two-volume book. In the book I discussed the original three sins and noted that Iran’s opposition to the Oslo peace process was eventually abandoned as Israel itself moved away from the process. However, over time more sins were added to the remaining two. I referred to it as a “menu option” for overthrowing the Iranian government. For instance, the neocons in the George W. Bush Administration expanded the menu to include accusation of Iran destabilizing Afghanistan, harbouring Al-Qaeda, lacking democracy, being ruled by unelected individuals, violating human rights, not protecting the rights of women, not being forward-looking and modern, etc.

I also argued that the neocons had used a menu option to attack Iraq as well, even though Israel was pushing them to attack Iran instead. But they could not get Bush, an intellectually challenged president, to go along and bomb Iran. Afterall, before attacking Iraq Bush had visions of talking to God.

Counterpunch for more

by ARCHISHA MUKHERJEE

Chinese biotechs advancing clinical programs, securing approvals and executing licensing deals at dizzying new speed

The continuous stream of drug approvals by Chinese pharmaceutical companies should be a source of awe to any global innovation investor. There are multiple reasons that have led to the current point. However, one key contributor is China’s drug approval policy transformation, which is one of the most under-discussed and massively impactful policy narratives of our era.

The history of the global pharmaceutical industry has largely been a monologue, spoken by the West and listened to by the East. For the better part of the post-war era, the United States, through the engines of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), served as the world’s laboratory.

In this established orthodoxy, which also included a handful of companies from Japan and Europe, China entered decades later, becoming the world’s factory. In the first phase, it became a massive but fundamentally replicative engine designed to produce volume rather than value.

This dynamic was underpinned by a regulatory lag so severe that it functioned as a non-tariff trade barrier; drugs invented in Cambridge or Basel would typically arrive in Beijing or Shanghai five to seven years after their Western debut.

This delay, known colloquially as the “drug lag,” effectively imposed a “China-last” penalty on the world’s largest aging demographic, rendering the Chinese patient population a secondary consideration in the global R&D calculus.

That era is demonstrably over. It did not end with a whimper, nor was it the result of a slow, organic drift of market forces. It ended with a calculated, statutory, and industrial restructuring of the Chinese state’s relationship with biology.

We are currently witnessing the results of a decade-long project of Acceleration by Design, a deliberate strategy to transform the regulatory review process from a discretionary gatekeeping function into a mandatory conveyance system for innovation. 

The data emerging from 2024 and early 2025 confirms a tectonic inversion in the global biopharmaceutical hierarchy. For the first time in history, the sheer velocity and volume of China’s regulatory apparatus have not merely caught up to Western standards but, in specific metrics of efficiency and output, have bypassed them.

In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs (excluding TCM), a 12% year-on-year increase—significantly outpacing the FDA’s 50 novel medicines. Of these, 46 were Class 1/1.1 innovative drugs (the regulatory classification for drugs not previously marketed anywhere), while 48 qualified as first-in-class by mechanism of action, covering high-complexity modalities including bispecific antibodies, ADCs, and novel small molecules.

Average review times collapsed from 663 days in 2017 to approximately 105 days in 2024, an 84% reduction. 

This report serves as a deep-dive forensic audit of this transformation. By verifying internal regulatory documents and synthesizing external market data, we dissect the seven structural pillars of the “Accelerationist State” and project the consequences of a world where the East no longer waits for the West’s medicine.

The Cradle for more

by JOHN HELMER

President Vladimir Putin has given instructions to accept the Trump Administration’s demand that in exchange for lifting sanctions against Russia, U.S. capital must return to Russia on preferential terms as soon as possible.

For the new round of negotiations in Geneva later this week, Putin has replaced Admiral Igor Kostyukov, the military intelligence chief, as head of the Russian negotiating team with Vladimir Medinsky, a lower ranking Kremlin official. Medinsky’s instructions are that the military terms of settlement on the Ukraine battlefield, insisted on by Kostyukov at the Abu Dhabi talks, be subordinated to the terms negotiated by Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s principal negotiator with the White House.

The change in the Kremlin line is reported in the Russian media as the “Anchorage formula” and the “Dmitriev plan”.

This has been publicly criticized by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in coded attacks in media interviews and a speech last week to the State Duma, declaring “the reality is quite the opposite.” Lavrov—Moscow sources say—was reflecting the consensus of the General Staff, the Foreign and Defense Ministries.

Putin reacted through spokesman Dmitry Peskov in defence of the Anchorage formula. “The spirit of Anchorage”—Peskov told Tass—“reflects a set of mutual understandings between Russia and the United States that are capable of bringing about a breakthrough, including in the settlement between Moscow and Kiev…[and] are fundamental.”

Faction-fighting around the Kremlin over what this means has triggered dismay among those Russian businessmen who have acquired their new economic power with takeovers of foreign assets released by the exit of U.S. and European corporations since 2022. These Russian sources report resentment at the backing which Putin has given to Russian Central Bank (CBR) Governor Elvira Nabiullina’s continuing high-interest rate policy for Russian borrowers in parallel with Dmitriev’s plan for low-interest rate U.S. investors to re-enter Russia, recover their former market share, and generate the appearance of an investment stimulus in the run-up to the the State Duma elections on September 20.

Nabiullina and Dmitriev have combined to persuade Putin to allow them to make these Anchorage formula concessions to U.S. negotiators Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Joshua Gruenbaum. Their last session in Miami on January 31 also included U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

What makes these concessions a “fundamental breakthrough”, as Peskov calls them, has been revealed in a memorandum of conversation published on February 12 by Bloomberg. This reports a “high-level memo which was drafted this year…which was circulated among senior Russian officials”. No author, date, subject line, distribution list, or any other detail of the document has been reported by Bloomberg to authenticate it, or to indicate whether it was leaked by the Witkoff side or the Dmitriev side after the Miami talks.

The published summary has seven points, listed without quote marks. They indicate “U.S. participation in Russian manufacturing” in the Russian aviation sector; “allow American firms to recover past losses” in the Russian oil and gas sector, “including offshore and hard-to-recover reserves”; “preferential conditions for U.S. companies to return to the Russian consumer market”; “cooperation on nuclear energy, including for AI ventures”; “Russia’s return to the dollar settlement system, including possibly for Russian energy transactions”; “cooperation on raw materials such as lithium, copper, nickel and platinum”; and “working together to push fossil fuels as an alternative to climate-friendly ideology and low-emission solutions that favour China and Europe”.

There was no mention of Dmitriev in the Bloomberg report.

Monthly Review Online for more

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

15 June, 2010
Counterpunch.org
Paris, June 12, 2010.

Dear Noam,

It was a long-awaited pleasure for your many friends and admirers to see you in Paris. I know it was tiring, but you mustn’t think you wore out your voice for nothing. I’m afraid you might get such a negative impression from certain media which seemed to have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. However, I think that the rude treatment you received from Le Monde in particular merely highlights the importance of your visit and the deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has in France.

Excuse me for neglecting your primary field, linguistics, in my analysis. I am not qualified to speak about that. But I tend to believe that the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy. Yes, we know there are many more, but Chomsky is by far the best-known the world over. My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism.

I need to put this argument in context.

The end of the Second World War split Europe between two groups of satellites of the two major victorious powers. The political methods of the Soviet Union made the satellite status of Eastern Europe obvious to everybody, and notably to the citizens of those countries, who were aware of the coercion keeping them in the Communist bloc.

In the West, American wealth, the ready complicity of native ruling classes and the far more sophisticated methods of political persuasion, dramatizing a largely imaginary “Soviet threat”, succeeded in convincing the satellite countries that they were voluntary allies of the United States.

This worked most of the time. There were a very few temporary exceptions. Sweden, never having been conquered or liberated, had moments of fairly genuine independence, notably under Olof Palme (whose timely assassination has brought Sweden gradually into the arms of NATO). In the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle took major steps to regain political independence for France, notably by criticizing the US war in Indochina and seeking to strengthen relations with Third World countries. This drive was shattered by the events of May 1968, and after the fall of de Gaulle, a normalization process got underway to secure US hegemony in France once and for all.

Now, it is precisely because France was the scene of the strongest impulses for independence that the normalization process had to be the most vigorous.

Counter Currents for more