so considered i'm peter lavelle historically speaking the cold war was a great ideological confrontation western liberalism versus soviet communism according to joe biden the great geopolitical struggle of our time is democracy versus a caucus each for we are in another great ideological struggle but there is a difference the west particularly the united states is the only ideological actor . cross talking geopolitics i'm joined by my guest rick ross off in chicago he is an anti nato analyst and a contributor to antiwar dot com in bath we have bruce gagne he is the coordinator of the global network against weapons and nuclear power in space and in charlottesville we cross to david swanson he is the executive director of the world beyond war all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want i always appreciate david let me go to you 1st in charlottesville

. going after my introduction right here listening to the president the united states we're in a great ideological struggle against autocracy here very much in tune with what we experienced during the cold war which i remember very well and it was an ideological struggle but is are we living in in 2021 in the ideological struggle on the on the world stage what's your take go ahead do. i think mostly in the fantasies of us propaganda i think the reality is more a struggle between of plutocracy and oligarchies there's no democracy to be seen there's no nobody in the us public has had a right to vote on whether to have a great battle against the autocracies you know we've got. you know it's just not credible that there's a military threat out there so something is needed and here you know it's just yesterday you see a drone whistleblower pleading and facing 10 years in prison for telling the u.s.

public what its government is doing in its with its military all over the world just yesterday also i see these reports huge numbers of people in california in prison for over 3 years without yet being you know charged turkey even a trial it notion that some force is going to come to the united states and take away what's left of our freedoms it is just not credible and so you need this this vague justification of we're up against the autocracies and sadly there are people falling for it yeah well david we have to be worried about the elites not the be the so-called talk received in the world rick let me go to you this ain't the same question here because this is how we're being sold it and and you know obviously people in biden in his orbit they're all neo-cons they and they want another crack at this thing the interesting thing is that it's not a whole lot different than under trump so it you know there are differences in

washington but not when it comes the empire it's purely bipartisan go ahead rick. political differences and of the shoreline is the outrage as it earlier this week you know george samwell like another guest discussing the distinction i would argue the opposition between on the one hand international laws and trying to the united nations are there for example and what the united states and nato have been pushing recently under the curious name of rules based international order that term as you know that expression is used several times a day by nato secretary general stoltenberg blank and most notoriously at the nato foreign ministers meeting a few days ago and it's clearly they're targeting russia and china that's indisputable throwing them incidentally if you read or listen to blink and address on march 24th of nato headquarters where he throws russia and china into the same category as north korea and iran and some new axis of evil if you will is that

ideological no except in the sense that by rules based their values based international order the united states and its vassals and tributaries to quote the . you know the developed a sort of the social cultural norm that almost serves as the equivalent of a political ideology and it's one that they want to enforce on the rest of the world of the rest of the world doesn't go along with it they're isolated and they're produced and they're you know they're all timidly confronted confronted sanctioned economic warfare and ultimately they're threatening of the kind i think version there of actual warfare brucey we seem to be living in an era of 0 sum i mean either you submit or you will be you'll be threatened with annihilation i mean i thought you know i heard there's not that i ever believe that you know the return of diplomacy well it's 0 sum game has nothing to do with diplomacy and i don't know what rules they're talking about i don't know what norms i mean there are rules and they are norms because as was mentioned earlier rick talked about international law

that is the that is the level playing field here not your norms not your rules because you're the one making the rules making everyone else obey it under the threat of force go ahead bruce like a magician you with us is creating. we don't have much real democracy more here oligarchies and so have the us is becoming more author carrying so he talks about others who are turning but again as in the mirror and see what's really there we're losing our rights increasingly growing surveillance state lawsuits 'd from billet. protest. as openly as we have in the past and growing censorship really dangerous censorship i can't even you know hundreds. more in the local papers for years and even

printing out a memo but in the last couple years and several of the major papers in the state of maine where i live i can't even get her in there anymore because the record worsens that on these media i don't want to allow the public access to any other opinion other than the talking points that come out of washington. you know if it did david i mean one of the interesting things if you look at it repeated election cycles there's a very strong anti-war anti interventionist. element to our politics but as soon as we the people get into office it all changes here i mean afghanistan this situation there 20 years on is a perfect example it is a very unpopular war particularly among veterans here but they still continue we need 6 more months we need 9 more months i mean it's like talking to a drug addict that's what empire is a drug addict go ahead david. well i of course agree horrible as joe

biden was as a presidential candidate if his promises the better promises to us and some of them were being kept things would be not quite so bad the war on afghanistan would be ended the troops would be out. the wars across the middle east and the troops and the weapons would be out. you know and it's it's incredible that he comes right in and picks up where trump left off changes very little has yet to lift the sanctions against the international criminal court it for his rule based order has yet to lift the the the trade sanctions tariffs on on china and continues with the weapons that the united states take the 50 countries on earth that the u.s. government itself calls the most oppressive $48.00 of them 96 percent are getting

weapons and training and funding of their militaries from the united states military and so it's incredible that you can do that while at the same time preaching democracy and peace and rule of law it makes absolutely no sense to me and it requires incredible contortions and while i see that there's added wind because i don't buy they call scootin a bad name and putin says i wish you good health the new yorker magazine tells me putin just threatened by and by wishing him good health if this is what's required at this point rick what you know we're told over and over again i'm like you know you mentioned you know 8 that you know new axis of evil is coming to into play here but what is is there any credible threat that russia and china present to the united states if there is a threat how would you define it go ahead britain of course there is not in this for example to speak arithmetic the russian annual defense budget last time i

checked with 69000000000 dollars u.s. spends 10 dynes of that and if you can if you combine us with other nato nations military spending is over a trillion dollars a year so you know russia with a population of $140000000.00 some odd people and spending only $69000000.00 on defense while the u.s. is spending you know i think up to 720000730. 1000000000 rather last year so this is not a credible threat nor is it with china though i should mention that at the recently concluded nato foreign ministers meeting in brussels that the 6 key threats that nato believes faces in the world russians right at the top china's number 5 incidentally of the 6 and in between. you know vegas cyber security and so forth by the way and to david's comment about joe biden one should not have been under any illusions about that since he entered the u.s. senate 973 he was not only supported he was very unlikely agitated for every american war every american proxy or every regime change every color revolution all

the way down the line i don't believe we should have expected anything other than. you know the sort of almost manado. of diplomacy the only thing the unusual is this is the 1st time probably since the nixon administration that the u.s. government has threatened china and russia simultaneously in one off against the other. i mean he was going to put i know russia but no way to tell we're going to talk a little bit about that in the 2nd part of the program but you're but you're absolutely right i mean when you look at it you know you can think whatever you want of richard nixon ok but on his foreign policy it was quite brilliant and what we've seen since the end of the cold war is particularly in this century here policy after policy and then of course ukraine came in 2014 and that's when a lot of people at the foreign policy blob won't admit it but that's what russia

said enough enough enough of you people foreign minister lavrov said only yesterday he said that he's willing to sit down and talk to nato but if you just want to lecture about ukraine they don't want to sit down and talking about our sensually what they've done is that the u.s. is actually pushed russia away completely let me get 20 seconds to bruce before we go to the break here go ahead bruce. in the u.s. . exceptional. wars . everybody. got to go to a hard break and continue our discussion. the

crisis and so the crisis began if that's the way used to be now there is just one crisis on top of another you don't know where one starts and one stops and it's just a multiple crises stacked up you know right there from me and you're thinking to yourself my goodness gracious what happened.

the day. thinks. we are here to ask.

welcome back to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing geopolitics. please go back to david in charlottesville one of the things i've been looking at over the years here is that we do live in

a multilateral world that is the reality here but the foreign policy blog in washington and the think tanks and all of their donors don't believe that and they will and this is one of the reasons why we see such an erratic foreign policy because washington believes in me and you know polar world but it's not that's no longer the case and that's why we're seeing so many tensions said differently countries can say no and this is what we expect we we saw in ankara go ahead david . i agree and i think rick maybe it was right to point out that the united states is going after a couple of big countries at once but people in the united states not so much disproportionately people who identify as the democratic party blame russia for everything where those who think they're republicans blame china for everything works out well for the government cause they can blame both them for everything but people sort of you pick who your identity determines which foreign nation you hate

but with with respect to rick one of the ways the military is this magician that bruce speaks of is with its budget and the pentagon budget that we all denounces speech enzymes russia's military budget is only a chunk of u.s. military spending the nukes are in a different departments the homeland security is in a different department it adds up to one and a quarter trillion dollars a year in u.s. military spending of which russia's to the incredible credit and praise of russia is you know far less than 10 percent of that and it is it is enormously to the credit of the russian government that it puts more money into things other then militarism it should put more into put everything into things other than militarism but it doesn't even china it's a tiny fraction its terms of its g.d.p. or its population it's a tiny fraction going into militarism and the threat is just not credible and see a need all this vague talk about ideology to make it credible you know rick that's

why we don't have health care ok i guess i'll go to the military ok they have health care ok that are $15.00 an hour you know we can't afford it ok we got to we're spending too much money on things that we are wasting money on rick here and we're an expert you well you wrote a very interesting article recently about nato expansion and nato is to leave all its grinning from ear to ear now we got china and china ok i mean what's it going to be is going to be an asian nato or is nato want to take over the pacific go ahead rick. thanks for raising that issue a document was published last november by nato it's called. nato 2030 modeled after the u.n. 2030 i suspect a nato 2030 united for a new era it's a 67 page the documents online i invite people look at it and it'll be used of course for the upcoming summit nato summit later this year and that in turn the summit will be used for crafting the 1st strategic concept as nato deems that since

2010 in that document they talked about expanding their partnerships and i don't think one person in a 1000000 in the world right now realizes that the military bloc nato which at the time of the fragmentation of the soviet union 1901 had 16 members and no partners now has 30 members and 40 partners that is 70 countries all together on every inhabited continent colombia is now a member of what nato aptly to a long way is really the colombian military program. so that's correct right as of 3 years ago i believe and that's a book look this is by no means the end of it in this document nato 2030 they openly talk about recruiting india into a nato partnership most likely partners across the globe india has a population warred here then the 1000000000 people who inhabit nato countries in one fell swoop but in the article you're alluding to peter i mentioned that in addition to having and i'm defining asia including west asia the middle east that

nato only has one member in asia which is turkey that has 19 military partners in the asia pacific region and what clearly came out of the nato foreign ministers meeting a few days ago was to expand that even more dramatically and you're correct it's not an asian aid nato this is a different proposition right an asian nato would be the equivalent of nato in the asia pacific region this is actually expanding nato into the asia pacific and in addition to the 19 partners it already has their envisioning no less a country than india you know being poor pulled into the nato orbit that. a pretty clear signal to china but it's also an attempt to dislodge russians being india's major military ally an arms supplier ok you know bruce i mean so that nato is solved it's really great dilemma because it never it doesn't really have a reason to exist ok russia is not a threat to nato even though we hear analysts propaganda now they want to take on russia and china they found the reason to exist here and way i look at it bruce is

this is replacing the united nations' ok that this is going to be this is going to be a military alliance that will replace or they can ignore the united nations and there is no security council there's only one head honcho and we know who that is that's the u.s. go ahead bruce. ingo you hit the nail on the. u.s. so i know you know. religion and mongolia as partners in this and exactly what the plan is to get rid of the united nations and have a global alliance united states claim look we have the support of the entire world as they then go for regime change her relations countries around the world so this news indeed was. an undemocratic effort to create their own military

alliance to get rid of the united nations which as you say because of the security council who don't control i want to mention one other thing when we were talking about the military budget it's my understanding the last couple of years russia has actually cut their military gets a house yes they have to deal with poverty more i wish the province. yeah well i wish it were christmas every day to david you know i know you have a good good historical knowledge if you think about this it's ever growing military alliance around the world i think you remember what happened in august $1014.00 so the entire world is going to be put at the mercy of a border dispute and then we have world war 3 i mean this is pure insanity and what it is is it is ignoring diplomacy how to resolve problems because the problem is these miele constitute not recognized peers and there can be no country we can be

a peer because once you admit that then the exceptionalism dice and that's what's about what's in play right now go ahead david. absolutely right i mean the reasons that the united states kept out of the league of nations after world war one other then it wasn't giving the u.s. special privileges like the u.n. later what it was because people were smart enough not to want to be committed to any wars that somebody else got into which is exactly what nato does to all of its members that commits them all to wars that somebody else gets into which is just a disaster waiting to happen meanwhile you have people across the united states convinced that soma how bizarrely trunk was anti nato and therefore nato is good at nato is in fact not a gaggle of criminals but a judicial body of some sorts along the lines of issues so that if there's a nato war it's a good and legal one which is of course not the exact opposite of what it is when

you get more people involved in a crime it's just a bigger crime you know rick a few weeks ago twitter announced that anyone and i'm paraphrasing here so i don't want to be fact checked here but if you criticize if you challenge the faith and that's the word faith in nato i only have faith in god i've never heard anyone having faith in a military alliance i mean this is look i mean i'm serious what i had to read it over again i mean what is this again is this the onion is the babylon be you know challenging our faith in a military alliance this is got this is going to be extreme go ahead rick. yeah thanks for pointing that out i mean it has nato has virtually been a shrine is a deity is a religion i should just follow pearl quickly on what bruce said which is a key point some 12 years ago. who had been assistant secretary general of general

secretary of nato and humanitarian coordinator for iraq. had a major article in a journal in switzerland warning just what bruce was talking about that nato affectively is moving to supplant the united nations as an arbiter of international relations particularly of international conflicts and this was particularly clear during the general secretary ships of kofi annan and ban ki moon who seemed to bend over backwards to accommodate nato when you start talking by the way the united nations and 194 members last i heard. 70 of those are nato members and growing then they're all but supplanting nato simply by recruiting its members on mosques but overall on this question of you cannot call a question nato this is you know i would i put it the transcendent euro land they could land assist you know whatever term has been used over the last few you know it's basically a supra national. you know political trend that subordinates all 30

members of nato and putting the united states in some instances you know the atlantis is project that wants to remake the world and i would just argue by the way when you look at who these powers are founding members of nato and so forth you're looking at all the great colonial powers of the last 500 years i mean you look at britain france spain portugal germany italy and so forth and i think you know metaphysically if you will there is a part of the west that does not want to give up that 500 year dominance of the globe and nato is the military mechanism by which they can maintain and even extend you know that sort of global dominance you were talking earlier about do you know. let me jump in here has urged. i mean look we've got we're almost out of time i want to go to bruce here is that i'm really glad that rick brought up this new colonia agenda here because bruce they the west cannot conceive of how being china is a peer because for 500 years it has been european countries have controlled the global

system they cannot consonant the fact that china is the equal to the west 40 seconds go ahead bruce well isn't that a reasons. concept well from here i'm a liberal so yeah from liberals yeah. well one last word about nato they've created these wars. to ramstein air force germany and so nato now understands that. yeah there is. this burgeoning. weapons in space program to use the old. russian i'm so glad you brought that up because that's an expert that you're. an expert in and i really appreciate it that's all the time we have gentlemen many thanks to my guests in chicago about and in charlottesville and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at the see you next time to remember.

a new gold rush is underway in ghana thousands of ill equipped workers are flocking to the gold fields hoping to strike it rich here's the good. as they are by those that work children are torn between gold and education from me was very poor i thought i was doing my best to get back to school which side will have the strongest appeal. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

is your media a reflection of reality. in a world transformed. what will make you feel safe. isolation or community. are you going the right way or are you being led somewhere. direct. what is true what is faith. in a world corrupted you need to descend. to join us in the depths. or in maine in the shallows.

new york is really what america is about. when our mayor took office she was elected because of his campaign on our city being a tale of 2 cities that have not and those who have not are usually the ones who were into being very hard at the city has always wanted to forget about iowa city has wanted to forget about the people who are buried there wanted to forget about the fact that there is a potter's field but there is a place where difficult stories are hidden the fact they were using inmates to maintain this act is very a site where 1000000 souls are buried where so much of new york city history is buried is to commence of the inequality that existed in this city for centuries.

children of course in the crossfire as the deadliest part of violence between israel and palestinian militants enters a 2nd week with no end in sight. they are children real true 34 years old what did they do that made the necessary to kill them they were torn to pieces israel meanwhile launches its worst onslaught so far while rejecting international calls for a ceasefire while the israelis say their. responsibility for the tragic escalation . i want to say is a former commander in the i.d.f. to the citizens of gaza we love you we want you to leave a normal life you need to know.