In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.

The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, "No Place to Hide."

The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.

Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.

It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of their "persons, houses, papers and effects."

Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden documents.

It is also well to remember that defense of the fundamental right to privacy helped to spark the American Revolution. In the 18th century, the tyrant was the British government, which claimed the right to intrude freely into the homes and personal lives of American colonists. Today it is American citizens' own government that arrogates to itself this authority.

Britain retains the stance that drove the colonists to rebellion, though on a more restricted scale, as power has shifted in world affairs. The British government has called on the NSA "to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, swept up by its dragnet," The Guardian reports, working from documents provided by Snowden.

British citizens (like other international customers) will also doubtless be pleased to learn that the NSA routinely receives or intercepts routers, servers and other computer network devices exported from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools, as Greenwald reports in his book.

As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might be sent to President Obama's huge and expanding databases in Utah.

In other ways too, the constitutional lawyer in the White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties. The principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.

Recently The New York Times reported the "anguish" of a federal judge who had to decide whether to allow the force-feeding of a Syrian prisoner who is on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.

No "anguish" was expressed over the fact that he has been held without trial for 12 years in Guantanamo, one of many victims of the leader of the Free World, who claims the right to hold prisoners without charges and to subject them to torture.

These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.

The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.

Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.

It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, Obama has a series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.

To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two entities must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.

The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."

Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

Huntington's insight into state power and policy was both accurate and prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration was launching its war on terror - which quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, primarily in Central America, but extending well beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

From that day forward, in order to carry out violence and subversion abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is terrorists that we are fighting, though there are other options: drug lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be seeking to attack and destroy us.

Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.

In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.
(c) 2014 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co- author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.

DURING HIS short visit to Israel, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl.

That was not a usual gesture. Foreign heads of state are obliged to visit Yad Vashem, as did the pope, but not the grave of Herzl. It is not like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.

So why Herzl's grave? Obviously, this gesture was intended to emphasize the Zionist character of the state.

Herzl was the founder of modern political Zionism. He is officially called "the Visionary of the State." His is the only picture decorating the Knesset plenum hall. If we had saints, he would be St. Theodor.

PROBABLY, FRANCIS did not give another thought to this gesture. If so, it's a pity. The Argentine Pope could have found a lot of interest in this colorful Viennese journalist and playwright.

Because if Herzl had had his way, Francis would have been greeted by President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu in Spanish. He would have honored Herzl's grave in the Jewish State somewhere south of Buenos Aires.

If Francis had never heard of this episode, he is not the only one. The vast mass of Israelis has not either. It is not taught in Israeli schools. It is hidden rather shamefully.

Israelis know about "Uganda". Shortly before his early death, Herzl was invited by the British government to implement his ideas in part of British East Africa (actually, it was the Kenyan highlands, a plateau with a mild climate, which later became a part of Kenya.)

By that time, Herzl had despaired of getting Palestine from the Turkish Sultan. The Kenyan project, which could be implemented at once, attracted him and his main supporter, Max Nordau, who advised him to take it at least temporarily, as a "night asylum."

But the Russian Zionists, the bulwark of the movement, rebelled. Palestine or nothing. Herzl was overruled by his admirers and died soon after of a broken heart, it was said.

THIS EPISODE is well known. Much has been written about it. Some would say that if during the 1930s a Jewish Commonwealth had existed in Africa, many European Jews could have been saved from the Nazis.

But the Argentine chapter has been erased. It did not fit the image of the Visionary of the State on the walls.

HERZL'S LONG trek to Zionism started when, as a Hungarian-born Jewish student in Vienna, he encountered anti-Semitism. His logical mind found the answer. Being a playwright, he described the scene: all Austrian Jews, except himself, would march in an orderly fashion to the Cathedral and convert en masse to Catholicism. The pope would have been enthusiastic.

However, Herzl soon learned that neither would the Jews accept baptism ("the Jews are afraid of water," Heinrich Heine once joked), but the nationalist Goyim did not dream of accepting them into their ranks. How could they? Jews were everywhere, in many different countries, so how could they sincerely join any national movement?

That's when Herzl had his historic insight: if the Jews could not join any of the national movements that were mushrooming in Europe, why shouldn't they constitute themselves as a separate, new-old nation?

For Herzl, that was a sober, rational idea. No God involved, no Holy Scriptures, no romantic nonsense. Palestine did not enter his mind. Nor had he any interest in the religious fantasies of Christian Zionists in Britain and the US, like Alfred Balfour.

Herzl's project was fully completed, up to the smallest detail, and written down in the brochure that became the Zionist Bible "Der Judenstaat", before he even started to think seriously about the place where it should be realized.

THE PAMPHLET started as a speech he made to the "family council" of the Rothschilds, the richest Jews on earth. He expected them to finance the project.

The text is immortalized in his Diaries, a very well-written document covering several books. On page 149 of the first book of the original German print, after explaining his plans, he remarks that "I can tell you everything about the 'promised Land' except its location." This will be left to a conference of outstanding Jewish geographers, who will decide where to set up the Jewish state, after examining all the geological, climatic, "in short, the natural circumstances, taking into account the most modern investigations." It is a "purely scientific" decision to make.

In the end, when the pamphlet came out under the title "Der Judenstaat", the location was almost ignored. Less than a page was devoted to it, under the expressive title: "Palestine or Argentina?"

HERZL CLEARLY preferred Argentina. The reason for this has also been forgotten.

A generation before Herzl, Argentina consisted mainly of the north of the country, around Buenos Aires. The vast south, called Patagonia, was almost empty.

At the time, Argentina started a campaign of conquest, that many today consider genocidal. The indigenous pre-Columbian population, including a tribe of "giants" (two meters tall) was annihilated or pushed out. That was called, almost in Zionist fashion, "the desert campaign".

Such genocidal campaigns were at the time quite usual. The US ran one against the "red Indians". The Germans committed genocide in today's Namibia, and the mass-murderer was feted in the Kaiser's Germany as a national hero. The King of the Belgians did something similar in the Congo.

What Herzl saw with his mind's eye was a huge new country more or less empty, just waiting to be turned into a Jewish state. He thought that the Argentine government would give it up for money. The remaining local population could be pushed out or enticed to move somewhere else, but "only after they had exterminated all wild animals."

(Anti-Israeli propagandists use this sentence as if it was aimed at the Palestinians. That is quite untrue. Herzl could not possible have written such a thing about Palestine as long as the Muslim Caliph was the sovereign of the country.)

PATAGONIA IS a very picturesque country, with many different landscapes, from the seashores of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the incredibly beautiful ice-covered mountains of the Andes. The climate is generally cool, even cold. The most southerly town in the world is located on its southern tip.

The rational approach of Herzl was soon swamped by the irrational character of his movement - a mixture of religious fantasies and East European romanticism. The plan to resettle the Jews in a safe environment turned into a Messianic movement. This has happened to the Jews before, and always ended in disaster.

HERZL DETESTED Palestine. Most of all he detested Jerusalem.

Curiously enough for the prophet of Zionism, he long refused to visit Palestine. He crisscrossed Europe from London to St Petersburg, from Istanbul to Rome, in order to meet the Great of the World, but did not set foot in Jaffa until he was practically compelled by the German Kaiser.

Wilhelm II, a romantic and rather unstable type, insisted on meeting the Leader of the Jews in a tent near the gates of Jerusalem. It was in November, the mildest month in this country, but Herzl suffered terribly from the heat, especially as he would not take off his heavy European suit.

The Kaiser, a born anti-Semite, listened politely, and later remarked: "A good idea, but impossible to do with Jews."

Herzl fled the town and the country as quickly as he could. The Holy City, for which his successors are today ready to shed much blood, looked to him ugly and dirty. He escaped to Jaffa, and there climbed in the middle of the night onto the first available ship going to Alexandria. He claimed to have heard rumors about a plot to kill him.

ALL THIS could have been food for the pope's reflections, if he had been focused on the past. But Francis lives in the present and held out his arms to the living, especially the Palestinians.

Instead of entering the land through Israel, like everybody else, he loaned a helicopter from King Abdallah II and flew directly from Amman to Bethlehem. This was a kind of recognition of Palestinian statehood. On his way back from Bethlehem to the helicopter, he suddenly asked to stop, went up to the occupation Wall and laid his hands on its ugly concrete, as his predecessors had done at the Western Wall. His prayer there could only be heard by God.

From there the pope flew to Ben-Gurion airport, as if he had just arrived from Rome. He marched on the red carpet between Peres and Netanyahu (since neither of the two would cede the honor to the other).

We were the subject of a rambling screed posted late last month on the Facebook page of Dr. Molefi Asante, the liar, charlatan, hustler, and current agent of white corporate power at Temple University, in Philadelphia. At more than 4,300 words, it was an incoherent mess, beginning with the insane assertion that the "Black Radical Tradition...at least the public head of it, was the Black Agenda Report headed by Glen Ford." Without a hint of sarcasm, Asante, chairman of what he calls the Department of Africology at Temple, then proceeded to dismiss "the so-called Black Radical Tradition" as "nothing more than a weak ideological propaganda gallery of Africans trying to imitate white Marxists."

Only a loon would describe Black Agenda Report, a seven-year-old publication that barely keeps its head above water, as the repository of anything so grand in scope as the Black Radical Tradition, which encompasses much of the political legacy of an entire people. Make no mistake, Asante is a loon. But he is a madman on a mission: to delegitimize, de-Black, and de-African the Black Left in the Diaspora and on the Continent. Thus, in his first sentence, he describes the Black Radical Tradition as a "thin strip of intellectual curiosity" - as if hardly worth confronting. The Black Left is further diminished by positing BAR, a small weekly magazine of news, commentary and analysis, as the Black Radical Tradition's leading manifestation. Asante attempts to make Lilliputians of everyone, past and present, that does not subscribe to "Systematic Nationalism," which is not a tradition or movement, but the title of one of his books. In furtherance of his commercial and political enterprises, Dr. Asante consistently makes common cause with white corporate power, which shares his hatred of the Left. (This article will not touch on Asante's mentor Ron Karenga's role in the deaths of Black Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, in Los Angeles, in 1969 - although these crimes should never be forgotten.) Asante's eager complicity with Temple administrators in terminating Dr. Anthony Monteiro's contract with the Department of African American Studies is yet another episode in his jihad against the Black Left.

It is a wildly asymmetric alliance. Like its corporate educational siblings in major cities around the country, Temple is both a local real estate developer and a player in global capitalism. Its relationship to Black and brown Philadelphia, and to the emerging peoples of the planet, is inherently predatory. Asante is a small peddler of cultural products who sells his Black persona to predators, to advance their common goal of weakening the influence and cohesion of the Black resistance. Although Asante and his ilk drape themselves in African garb and mouth super-nationalist rhetoric, in practice their role is to buttress white corporate power and privilege. Thus, in his diatribe against the Black Radical Tradition, Asante said: "Universities reserve the right to choose their faculties; Temple never gave up that right to the community and was not expected to do so by anyone except those who did not understand the rules." Kashara White, a student of African American Studies, native North Philadelphian and a leader of the campus/community coalition, understands "the rules" perfectly well. The problem, she told Black Agenda Report, "is not that the school isn't following its policies, but that their policies are unjust." Ms. White and her comrades are "fighting for students and community people to have a real voice at the university" concerning curriculum and faculty - for which Temple students pay tens of thousands of dollars a year - and issues like gentrification of surrounding Black neighborhoods. It turns out that Super-Black Asante's credo is actually "All Power to the Administration!"

Asante's books and lectures are filled with talk about Africans wielding agency, making their own history. But he pretends that Kashara White, fellow Black student leader Paul Conge and the many other Black and brown campus activists who have denounced his behavior don't exist. Instead, Asante gives whites all the credit. "The white students used their propaganda talents to attach Monteiro's fight to numerous other grievances, gentrification, police brutality, Mumia, poor housing, and corporate power. Few black students joined this movement."

What a slur against the Black people of Temple University and North Philadelphia, who, according to Asante, don't have the sense or "talents" to mobilize against racial oppression and corporate dictatorship on their own. And, What a damnable and deliberate lie! The vibrant movement that resulted in Asante becoming department chairman, last spring, was comprised of the same community/labor/student coalition - and the very same organizers - that are now denouncing him. The demands then were much the same as the demands now: an end to gentrification and police brutality; real student and community influence over university policy; and a fair deal for campus workers. The difference is, the Department of African Studies (Africology?) is now run by the Black turncoat who fired a principal organizer of the first protest: Dr. Monteiro.

Since all the facts indict Dr. Asante, he is left only with lies. His narrative is as fraudulent as his politics.

Dr. Monteiro enjoys broad Black support; whites are a helpful minority. A February rally and press conference at a union meeting hall drew preachers, politicians, and labor officials. On March 10, no less a union notable than the president of Local 1199C of the Hospital Workers Union, the legendary Henry Nicholas, urged the crowd to move inside Sullivan Hall, where Temple's board of trustees was meeting, to stage a direct action.

Asante, who is second to none in belittling Black people's mental capacities, writes that Dr. Monteiro "asked a few community people who did not understand university rules to come to a rally. When they understood that they were being manipulated many of them backed away from the last protest." Asante invents scenarios out of whole cloth. But Sacaree Rhodes, the anti-hunger and homelessness activist, has the prevaricator's number. "People like Asante sit around and plot on Black people. And then use the word African-centricity. What the fuck is that? You've got to stop romanticizing about treachery," she told the March 10 rally.

Treachery, as in "betrayal" and "backstabing." The facts are not in dispute. Dr. Monteiro urged skeptical coalition members to back Dr. Asante for African American Studies chairman at the conclusion of the 2013 protests. Dr. Monteiro was terminated in December. At first, Asante claimed the firing was Liberal Arts dean Teresa Soufas' decision. "Did she consult with me to tell me what she was going to do? Yes, she did. I didn't provide any guidance at all," he told the Philadelphia Tribune. But he had already been contradicted by Soufas, who said Asante got rid of Monteiro because he was "making some exciting curriculum changes in the department and wanted different fields of study to be covered by instructors." The university provost confirmed that firing Monteiro was Asante's initiative. Cornered by the facts, in March Asante told his Facebook followers: "In Monteiro's case the African American Studies department had changed its academic direction to seek a more cultural orientation based on an Africological interpretation of African American, African Caribbean, and African experiences in Africa and in South America." Then the shameless liar defamed his former colleague: "There is almost nothing noteworthy or notable in Monteiro's career at Temple University and the faux demonstrations are examples of defrauding the public." The protest "headlined by Cornel West and Marc Lamont Hill" a few days before "was a spectacle of misguided and misinformed people eager to be a part of a public event." West and Hill were "dupes" and Pam Afrika had been "trapped in [Monteiro's] web," said Asante. The Temple students and 250 educators who denounced Asante were under the sway of white communists in their midst. Marxists were promoting "anti-African ideas."

That's when BAR called Asante a "dashiki-wearing J. Edgar Hoover" in an article titled "Molefi Asante: Portrait of a Redbaiting Bootlicking Rat" (May 14), followed by "Molefi Asante Must Go, Say Students and Educators" on May 21.

The man was frothing. In his muddle-headed wrath, he had provided Monteiro with all the ammunition necessary to make the legal case that his firing was a political dismissal, actionable in court.

Asante's latest, 4,300-word assault on the Black Radical Tradition should be read by every Black activist and academic throughout the Diaspora, so that there can be no doubt about the absurdity - and menace - of his politics.

Asante has conjured up a vast, chocolate-cherry conspiracy (brown on the outside, red on the inside) to undermine his cultural product-peddling business. The Black Radical Tradition is the means of subversion (under the direction of Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report). So, spread the word, as revealed by Molefi Asante:

"For its propaganda success, the so-called Black Radical Tradition needed a trained cadre of black imitators of white theorists, who, with a little reading of Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, could be prepared, after mastering the European critical tradition, to attempt to stamp out Systematic, that is, Black Nationalist Thought"...which is "the only real and historical radical tradition in the African American community."

"The only black radical tradition has always been Systematic Nationalism in the vein of Prosser, Turner, Vesey, Sengbe, Delany, Garnet, Tubman, Crummel, Garvey, Booker T. Washington some of the time, and the later Du Bois, Muhammad, Robeson, Hare, Harding, Malcolm and Karenga."

"The unipolar model of the world order has failed." ~ Vladimir Putin, St Petersburg, May 22

In more ways than one, last week heralded the birth of a Eurasian century. Of course, the US $400 billion Russia-China gas deal was clinched only at the last minute in Shanghai, on Wednesday (a complement to the June 2013, 25-year, $270 billion oil deal between Rosneft and China's CNPC.)

Then, on Thursday, most of the main players were at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum - the Russian answer to Davos. And on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his Shanghai triumph, addressed the participants and brought the house down.

It will take time to appraise last week's whirlwind in all its complex implications. Here are some of the St Petersburg highlights, in some detail. Were there fewer Western CEOs in town because the Obama administration pressured them - as part of the "isolate Russia" policy? Not many less; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley may have snubbed it, but Europeans who matter came, saw, talked and pledged to keep doing business.

And most of all, Asians were ubiquitous. Consider this as yet another chapter of China's counterpunch to US President Barack Obama's Asian tour in April, which was widely described as the "China containment tour."

On the first day at the St Petersburg forum I attended this crucial session on Russia-China strategic economic partnership. Pay close attention: the roadmap is all there. As Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao describes it: "We plan to combine the program for the development of Russia's Far East and the strategy for the development of Northeast China into an integrated concept."

That was just one instance of the fast-emerging Eurasia coalition bound to challenge the "indispensable" exceptionalists to the core. Comparisons to the Sino-Soviet pact are infantile. The putsch in Ukraine - part of Washington's pivot to "contain" Russia - just served to accelerate Russia's pivot to Asia, which sooner or late would become inevitable.

It all starts in Sichuan

In St Petersburg, from session to session and in selected conversations, what I saw were some crucial building blocks of the Chinese New Silk Road(s), whose ultimate aim is to unite, via trade and commerce, no less than China, Russia and Germany.

For Washington, this is beyond anathema. The response has been to peddle a couple of deals which, in thesis, would guarantee American monopoly of two-thirds of global commerce; the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - which was essentially rebuked by key Asians such as Japan and Malaysia during Obama's trip - and the even more problematic Trans-Atlantic Partnership with the EU, which average Europeans absolutely abhor (see Breaking bad in southern NATOstan, Asia Times Online, April 15, 2014). Both deals are being negotiated in secret and are profitable essentially for US multinational corporations.

For Asia, China instead proposes a Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific; after all, it is already the largest trading partner of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

And for Europe, Beijing proposes an extension of the railway that in only 12 days links Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to Lodz in Poland, crossing Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus. The total deal is the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe network, with a final stop in Duisburg, Germany. No wonder this is bound to become the most important commercial route in the world.

There's more. One day before the clinching of the Russia-China gas deal, President Xi Jinping called for no less than a new Asian security cooperation architecture, including of course Russia and Iran and excluding the US. Somehow echoing Putin, Xi described NATO as a Cold War relic.

And guess who was at the announcement in Shanghai, apart from the Central Asian "stans": Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and crucially, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

The facts on the ground speak for themselves. China is buying at least half of Iraq's oil production - and is investing heavily in its energy infrastructure. China has invested heavily in Afghanistan's mining industry - especially lithium and cobalt. And obviously both China and Russia keep doing business in Iran.

So this is what Washington gets for over a decade of wars, incessant bullying, nasty sanctions and trillions of misspent dollars.

No wonder the most fascinating session I attended in St Petersburg was on the commercial and economic possibilities around the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose guest of honor was none other than Li Yuanchao. I was arguably the only Westerner in the room, surrounded by a sea of Chinese and Central Asians.

The SCO is gearing up to become something way beyond a sort of counterpart to NATO, focusing mostly on terrorism and fighting drug trafficking. It wants to do major business. Iran, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia are observers, and sooner rather than later will be accepted as full members.

Once again that's Eurasian integration in action. The branching out of the New Silk Road(s) is inevitable; and that spells out, in practice, closer integration with Afghanistan (minerals) and Iran (energy).

The new Crimea boom

St Petersburg also made it clear how China wants to finance an array of projects in Crimea, whose waters, by the way, boasting untold, still unexplored, energy wealth, are now Russian property. Projects include a crucial bridge across the Kerch Strait to connect Crimea to mainland Russia; expansion of Crimean ports; solar power plants; and even manufacturing special economic zones (SEZs). Moscow could not but interpret it as Beijing's endorsement of the annexation of Crimea.

As for Ukraine, it might as well, as Putin remarked in St Petersburg, pay its bills. And as for the European Union, at least outgoing president of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso understood the obvious: antagonizing Russia is not exactly a winning strategy.

Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, has been one of those informed few advising the West about it, to no avail: "Russia and China are likely to cooperate even more closely ... Such an outcome would certainly benefit China, but it will give Russia a chance to withstand US geopolitical pressure, compensate for the EU's coming energy re-orientation, develop Siberia and the Far East, and link itself to the Asia-Pacific region."

On the (silk) road again

The now symbiotic China-Russia strategic alliance - with the possibility of extending towards Iran - is the fundamental fact on the ground in the young 21st century. It will extrapolate across the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Of course the usual shills will keep peddling that the only possible future is one led by a "benign" empire. As if billions of people across the real world - even informed Atlanticists - would be gullible enough to buy it. Still, unipolarity may be dead, but the world, sadly, is encumbered with its corpse. The corpse, according to the new Obama doctrine, is now "empowering partners."