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America is in the choosing sides phase of the coming civil war. To use a college recruiting phrase, it is accurate to state that the letters of intent to join one side or another have mostly been signed and the commitments offered. However, there is one big uncommitted piece, but very soon the sides will be drawn.

It is becoming clear that US influence – despite its “pivot toward Asia” – is waning across the Asia Pacific region. Washington has suffered geopolitical setbacks in virtually every nation in Asia Pacific, including those now led by regimes it has meticulously organized, funded, and backed for decades. It is also waning, however, among those nations considered long-time and crucial US allies. This includes Southeast Asia’s Thailand, whom the US repeatedly reminds the world has been Washington’s ally since the Cold War and America’s war in Vietnam, and allegedly, even before that. Washington’s Waning Influence is Based on Floundering Fundamentals   However, in reality, Thailand has incrementally dismantled American influence over it, and has diversified its trade and cooperation with a large variety of nations – including China – as a means of depending on ties with no single nation in particular. Thailand’s economic trade is focused primarily within Asia, with the majority of its imports and exports divided equally between China, Japan, and ASEAN, with the West collectively representing a smaller – though not insignificant – market. It is no coincidence that Thailand’s geopolitical ties thus reflect its economic ties around the world – revealing that economic and sociopolitical realities are driving intentional relations regardless of the vast array of “soft power” means at Washington’s disposal. A look at Thailand’s military inventories reveals a similar strategy of diversifying weapon acquisitions and partnerships as well as developing systems through indigenous industry. What used to be a military dominated by American hardware and military exercises, is transforming with the acquisition of Chinese tanks, European warplanes, Middle Eastern assault rifles, Russian helicopters, and Thai-made armored vehicles – as well as joint drills held with a variety of nations, including for the first time, China. A similar shift is occurring throughout the rest of Asia, with China naturally assuming a large share of regional cooperation due to its geographic, economic, and demographic size. http://journal-neo.org/2016/10/24/us-attempts-to-shame-asia-for-caving-to-china/

The US marine who was killed in a rocket attack on Saturday died at the first exclusively American base established in Iraq since the Pentagon returned forces to the country in 2014, a spokesman said on Monday. The base, whose existence had not previously been public, has come under fire from ever closer range over recent days, an indication that Isis knew about the outpost before the Pentagon announced its creation.

While the US military described the base as at least 15 kilometers away from the frontline, Fire Base Bell came under small-arms fire again on Monday morning, indicating an advancing enemy which was targeting the newest symbol of the US military’s return to Iraq. The creation of the outpost is the latest incremental escalation of a war whose developments do not always correspond to the White House’s depiction of a conflict in which the US is in a merely advisory capacity on the ground.

Iran accused the five nuclear powers Wednesday of failing to take concrete action to eliminate their stockpiles and called for negotiations on a convention to achieve nuclear disarmament by a target date. Iran’s deputy U.N. ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehghani told the U.N. Disarmament Commission that “a comprehensive, binding, irreversible, verifiable” treaty is the most effective and practical way to eliminate nuclear weapons. He accused the nuclear powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France — of promising nuclear disarmament but making no significant progress. Dehghani’s speech came days after the announcement of a framework agreement between Iran and the five nuclear powers and Germany aimed at keeping Tehran from being able to develop a nuclear weapon. It has to be finalized by June 30.

The commission, which includes all 193 member states, is supposed to make recommendations in the field of disarmament but has failed to make substantive proposals in the past decade. Its three-week meeting is taking place ahead of the five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the world’s single most important pact on nuclear arms, which begins on April 27. The NPT is credited with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to dozens of nations since entering into force in 1970. It has done that via a grand global bargain: Nations without nuclear weapons committed not to acquire them; those with them committed to move toward their elimination; and all endorsed everyone’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy.

Dehghani said that as a non-nuclear weapon state and NPT member, Iran believes it’s time to end the incremental approach toward disarmament and to start negotiations with all nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states on a convention that would set a deadline for ridding the world of nuclear weapons. He noted that a proposal in 2013 by the Nonaligned Movement, which represents over 100 developing countries, to start negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention in the Conference on Disarmament gained wide support. Russia said President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that Moscow is ready for a serious and substantive dialogue on nuclear disarmament. But Olga Kuznetsova, a counselor in Russia’s Foreign Ministry, warned in a speech Tuesday that the U.S. deployment of a global missile defense system could lead to the resumption of a nuclear arms race.

Back in November, before most grasped just how serious the collapse in crude was (and would become, as well as its massive implications), we wrote "How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed", because for the first time in almost two decades, energy-exporting countries would pull their "petrodollars" out of world markets in 2015.  This empirical death of Petrodollar followed years of windfalls for oil exporters such as Russia, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. Much of that money found its way into financial markets, helping to boost asset prices and keep the cost of borrowing down, through so-called petrodollar recycling. We added that in 2014 "the oil producers will effectively import capital amounting to $7.6 billion. By comparison, they exported $60 billion in 2013 and $248 billion in 2012, according to the following graphic based on BNP Paribas calculations."

The problem was compounded by its own positive feedback loop: as the last few weeks vividly demonstrated, plunging oil would lead to a further liquidation in foreign  reserves for the oil exporters who rushed to preserve their currencies, leading to even greater drops in oil as the viable producers rushed to pump out as much crude out of the ground as possible in a scramble to put the weakest producers out of business, and to crush marginal production. Call it Game Theory gone mad and on steroids. Ironically, when the price of crude started its self-reinforcing plunge, such a death would happen whether the petrodollar participants wanted it, or, as the case may be, were dragged into the abattoir kicking and screaming. It is the latter that seems to have taken place with the one country that many though initially would do everything in its power to have an amicable departure from the Petrodollar and yet whose divorce from the USD has quickly become a very messy affair, with lots of screaming and the occasional artillery shell. As Bloomberg reports Russia "may unseal its $88 billion Reserve Fund and convert some of its foreign-currency holdings into rubles, the latest government effort to prop up an economy veering into its worst slump since 2009." These are dollars which Russia would have otherwise recycled into US denominated assets. Instead, Russia will purchase even more Rubles and use the proceeds for FX and economic stabilization purposes. 

"Together with the central bank, we are selling a part of our foreign-currency reserves,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in Moscow today. “We’ll get rubles and place them in deposits for banks, giving liquidity to the economy." Call it less than amicable divorce, call it what you will: what it is, is Russia violently leaving the ranks of countries that exchange crude for US paper.

n response to criticism of the hefty fees that could be charged to public requesters in its new Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) rule, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has agreed to modify the rule. The revised rule will adopt the more flexible and forgiving approach used in ODNI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program. “We will pull back the MDR rule and swap out the fee structure there for the fee structure in the FOIA policy,” said Jennifer Hudson, director of the ODNI Information Management Division. This represents a substantial change. In comments on the rule submitted yesterday by the Federation of American Scientists, we recommended such a change. We noted that the MDR fee schedule was inconsistent in several respects with existing law and policy and, in particular, that it differed from the cost recovery procedures in ODNI’s FOIA program: *     The MDR rule would charge 50 cents per page for photocopying, but ODNI charges only 10 cents per page for responses to FOIA requests. *     The MDR rule would have made requesters responsible “for paying all fees,” but ODNI always waives costs of $10 or lower under FOIA. *     The MDR rule did not provide for discretionary fee waivers for public interest or other reasons, but the FOIA policy does.

Now all of these discrepancies will be eliminated. Perhaps most significantly, “We will also make sure that there is room [in the MDR process] for discretion in charging fees,” Ms. Hudson said in an email message. “I’m sure you know from looking at our FOIA reports that we have exercised our discretion to not charge fees quite a bit in the past.” She noted, however, that “The search/review charges are identical” under the proposed MDR rule and under FOIA. “FOIA just breaks [the charges] down into 15 minute increments where the MDR rule is by the hour. The end result is the same.” “At the end of the day, I don’t think it will make as much of a difference as people think,” she said.

Translated from Arabic language Alrai Media (thanks to the reliable Fort Russ Russian news site), the senior Syrian officer at the operations room is quoted as saying: “Soon Syria will announce that any country using the airspace without coordinating with Damascus will be viewed as hostile and [we] will shoot the jet down without warning. Those willing to fight terrorism and coordinate with the military leadership will be granted safe corridors.” This may seem like a dangerous escalation. American fighter jets have been bombing Syrian territory since September 2014, having carried out thousands of air strikes allegedly against the Islamic State (IS) terror group (also known by its Arabic name Daesh). Since the Paris terror attacks last month, France has stepped up its air strikes in Syria too. In the past week, Britain and Germany parliaments have voted for their air forces to join the other NATO members in aerial operations. The US-led bombing coalition in Syria also includes Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Russia is the only country whose military aircraft are legally deployed in Syria because Moscow has the full consent of the Syrian government. All the others do not have consent from Damascus. So we have at least seven foreign powers deploying their warplanes to bomb Syrian territory – all in violation of international law.

It is irrelevant whether the US-led alliance claims to be fighting terrorists, or whether they claim it is in “self-defence” as France, Britain and Germany are. The Germany justice minister Heiko Maas, speaking after the Bundestag voted for military action this week, claimed that the United Nations Security Council resolution passed last month in the wake of the Paris attacks makes the German intervention legal. That UNSC resolution does not specifically sanction military action. In any case, the ultimate legal criterion is the position of the Syrian state authorities. Western governments and their media have done everything to discredit, demonise and delegitimise the Syrian government. That’s part of the US-led criminal enterprise for regime change in Syria. But the fact remains, Syria is a sovereign state fully entitled the legal rights of all other UN members. If the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad – which is the internationally recognised governing authority of Syria and retains its seat at the UN – does not consent to foreign military intervention, then that intervention is illegal, as Moscow and Damascus have repeatedly pointed out. Syria, with the S-300 missile system supplied by its Russian ally, now has the technical means to defend its borders and airspace from all intruders. It also has the legal right to defend the inviolability of its territory. After all, US President Barack Obama invoked this right with regard to Turkey after the shoot-down of the Russian Su-24. Obama said Turkey had “every right to protect its skies” (even though the evidence shows that the Russian fighter jet did not breach Turkish territory). In other words: what’s good for Turkey is good for Syria, as for any other nation.

Now, some might say it is a reckless move for Syria to train its skies with the powerful S-300. If a US, French, British or German warplane is shot down then that may ignite a full-on war with the American NATO military alliance. Russia would inevitably be dragged into the fight, which could slide into a world war between nuclear powers. But hold on a minute. That logic amounts to the US and its allies using such fear as a weapon to disarm others and to prevent sovereign states from exercising their rights. Such a dynamic is a blank cheque for powers to bully and oppress others. As Russian President Vladimir Putin has said time and again, the issue is one abiding by international law. Without respect for international law then the world resorts to the law of the jungle and barbarism, as Putin said in his recent state of the nation speech. What we have seen in recent years since the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-2003 is the wholesale erosion of sovereignty. This has involved the overt deployment of military force and the covert use of “asymmetric war”, says American political analyst Randy Martin (who writes at crookedbough.com).