Extract from an interview with Christopher Black, described by Finian Cunnigham, on the Information Clearing House site, as:
a renowned international defense lawyer based in Canada, specializing in war crimes. He served as a legal advisor to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic before his death in 2006 in a prison cell in The Hague while on trial. Black also served as the lead defense counsel in a Rwanda war crimes trial where he succeeded in winning acquittal by exposing the prosecution case as a frame-up. He has been a trenchant critic of the criminalization of justice by NATO powers who use indictments of foreign leaders as a political weapon. Christopher Black has written extensively on international affairs, including on relations between the U.S., Russia and China.
Question: What are your expectations from a new U.S. administration under President Biden with regard to international relations?
Black: I expect the Biden administration … to continue the same aggressive policies the US has engaged in for generations wherever it sees its interests, its access to markets and resources, challenged by competition with other nations, in particular Russia, China and their allies. The US is ever-ready to use force and cares nothing for international law or morality. It was the Democrats who prosecuted the war against Vietnam, against Cuba, and they who, under Clinton, destroyed Yugoslavia to advance the war against socialism and encircle Russia, which, while no longer socialist, refuses to give up its independence or sell its people into servitude under US hegemony. It was Obama who began the “pivot to the Pacific”, euphemism for aggression against China, whose rise they cannot tolerate; Obama who began war on Syria and destroyed Libya. The US says it is for competition but we know that is only when it gives it a superior position. To maintain that position it is willing to threaten and attack the world if necessary. There are a myriad domestic problems in the USA which they have no way out of, since the two ruling parties have no solutions to offer, except war.
Question: Under Trump, U.S. relations with China nosedived. Do you think the downward trend will continue under Biden?
Black: The Biden administration will be bent on war. If Biden was at all concerned about peace he’d be denouncing Trump’s new minister of defense, Colonel Christoper Miller, and Trump’s aggressive policies towards Russia and China. Biden would be elaborating a global peace initiative by the new administration. Instead he is seeding his administration with the most reactionary leftovers from the Obama years.1 All war criminals. Biden’s rhetoric against China is even more hostile than Trump’s. But it does not matter who is in power in the USA since both parties are controlled by factions of the corporate-military complex that seeks to continue and expand American hegemony. So we can expect US provocations against China to accelerate and, as the Chinese have warned several times during the past few months, war is a very real possibility, even a probability, and Taiwan will be the flashpoint.
US wars are always preceded by a propaganda campaign of fear and hate which it expects its allies to take up and provide corroboration for. We see this campaign being carried out in all the NATO and Five Eyes countries (US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand) and it is to a large extent successful in manipulating the citizens of those countries into supporting war against China, against Russia, against the enemy du jour.
Full interview transcript here.
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- On Biden “seeding his administration with the most reactionary leftovers from the Obama years”, see my post, The king is dead – long live the king!