National strike shakes Colombia’s right-wing government

Evan Blake

With the launching of a national strike Thursday, hundreds of thousands of Colombian workers joined the eruption of class struggle that has shaken Latin America over the past several months. Following the mass demonstrations and strikes in Chile, the eruption of social protest in Ecuador and the resistance of Bolivian workers and peasants to the US-backed right-wing military coup, Colombian workers have shut down the fourth largest economy in Latin America.

While exact crowd sizes are hard to determine, estimates have ranged from 200,000 to over 1,000,000 people participating nationwide. Over 100,000 marched in the rain through the capital of Bogotá, filling the streets and closing 130 Transmilenio bus stations. At least 20,000 marched in Cali, and tens of thousands more participated in over 100 cities and towns across Colombia. Solidarity protests were held in numerous cities internationally, including Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Munich, New York, Sydney, Madrid, Miami and San Francisco.

Thousands protest in Bogotá (credit: Dylan Baddour via Twitter)

Dozens of organizations took part in the strike, primarily the various trade unions, indigenous rights groups and student organizations. In every major city, protesters blocked public transportation to varying degrees, shutting down large sections of transportation throughout the country.

Thousands of protesters filled Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, the main square of the capital. Referencing the state violence unleashed against protesters in Chile, where hundreds have lost their eyes after being shot by rubber bullets, a large banner draped across a side of the square read, “How many eyes will it cost us to open theirs?”

Underscoring the significance of the strike, Oren Barack of Alliance Global Partners in New York, which holds Colombian sovereign and corporate debt, told Bloomberg, “I’m following it pretty closely. The government has something to be nervous about.”

While the protests remained overwhelmingly peaceful, minor clashes between protesters and units of the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron (ESMAD) took place in some major cities during the day, leading to the arrest of ten protesters by mid-day. Altercations in Bogotá and the western city of Cali injured seven protesters and 28 policemen, prompting the imposition of a 7pm curfew in Cali. As of this writing, some clashes have broken out between police and protesters defying the curfew.

Despite efforts by demonstrators to keep the protest peaceful, a confrontation took place in the afternoon between protesters and the ESMAD on Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, prompting the militarized riot police to fire tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Clashes in Bogotá at night (credit: Dylan Baddour via Twitter)

In the evening, thousands of people took to the streets in cacerolazos —banging pots and pans—in Medellín and Bogotá, protesting the police violence.

In the days leading up to the strike, the Colombian state mobilized its vast police and military apparatus, the second largest in the region after Brazil. The commander of the Colombian armed forces, General Luis Fernando Navarro, ordered the quartering of all of the country’s 293,200 soldiers beginning Monday and lasting through the national strike, commanding them to be on “maximum alert status.” 8,000 soldiers were deployed to Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Bucaramanga, Pereira and Pasto.

In addition, 10,000 local police were deployed in Bogotá and 7,000 in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, with thousands more in other cities. President Iván Duque issued a decree enabling local authorities to impose curfews and ban the carrying of arms and consumption of alcohol.

In an effort to whip up xenophobia, the government deported 24 Venezuelan nationals, as well as Spanish and Chilean nationals, whom they accused of “affecting public order and national security.” In addition, Duque ordered the closing of Colombia’s borders from midnight Wednesday until 5:00am Friday.

Twenty-seven raids were conducted by the National Police in Bogotá on Tuesday morning, searching the offices and homes of leaders of organizations involved with the strike. In a nationally televised public address on Wednesday, Duque warned that his government “will guarantee order and defend you with all the tools the constitution grants us.”

"We need a government that fights poverty, not the poor" (credit: Dylan Baddour via Twitter)

The underlying objective impulse for the national strike is the deep economic inequality that pervades Colombian society. With three billionaires owning more wealth than the bottom ten percent of the population, Colombia ranks among the most unequal countries in Latin America, the most unequal region in the world. Unemployment has risen under the Duque administration, as more than 600,000 people lost their jobs last year alone.

The right-wing policies of the Duque administration, which has been a dutiful servant to the Colombian bourgeoisie and foreign capital since coming to power in August 2018, have exacerbated this situation and created immense hostility to the existing political setup. The most recent opinion polls before the strike showed Duque’s approval ratings at a dismal 26 percent.

Duque has violated nearly every statute of the fraudulent 2016 peace accords negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla movement and has branded anyone who supports the peace accords as a guerrilla sympathizer. Duque has waged this campaign in alliance with his mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe, who during his reign from 2002-2010 vastly expanded the military and relied upon paramilitary death squads to wage war against FARC.

Under Duque, hundreds of innocent civilians, and in particular indigenous people, have been murdered. In October alone, five indigenous leaders were killed in Cauca, while more than 700 indigenous leaders and community organizers have been killed in Colombia since 2016.

The repeated treaty violations led a section of the FARC to resume the bloody, decades-long civil war with the government at the end of August. Since it began in 1964, the Colombian conflict has led to the killing of over 177,000 civilians by both the military and the guerrilla fighters, and is the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.

In late September, student protests erupted in response to revelations of corruption within the District University administration involving the embezzlement of over COP$10,400 million (roughly US$3 million). When the ESMAD violently suppressed the protests, students began organizing weekly protests and marches throughout Colombia, repeatedly clashing with police.

Also in September, the Supreme Court began hearing witnesses in the trial of Uribe, who has been accused of fraud and bribery to cover up his family’s past crimes. With Uribe’s record largely destroyed by this testimony, his far-right Democratic Center (CD) party lost significant ground in local elections held on October 27.

Protester with sign that reads "South America woke up" with Chilean and Ecuadorian flags (credit: Dylan Baddour via Twitter)

First announced by the country’s main trade unions on October 4, the national strike was initially ignored by the corporate media. The protests first centered on opposition to government plans for an austerity package to undermine the state-run pension program Colpensiones, reduce the minimum wage for minors, decrease education spending and cut taxes for the rich.

A tipping point occurred on November 5, when it was revealed that the state had covered up the fact that an August 29 military bombing had killed at least eight children in Caquetá, which it claimed was a FARC stronghold, leading to the resignation of Colombian Defense Minister Guillermo Botero. The revelation that the Colombian military had committed yet another war crime against its own population prompted students and indigenous groups to join the call for a national strike, shifting the central demand to the ouster of Duque. Since then, reports have surfaced that up to 18 children were killed, more than double the government’s count, further fueling social tensions.

The massive participation in the national strike in Colombia has exposed the determination of the Colombia working class to mount a struggle against the government and the capitalist interests it defends. For the trade unions and the “left” bourgeois opponents of Duque, however, the action is a means to let off steam, with the strike limited to a one-day protest.

Moreover, the nationalist policies of these forces inevitably lead the working class into a political blind alley, while paving the way to bloody defeats.

The national bourgeoisie, which Duque and all the existing political parties in Colombia represent, are tied to American and world imperialism by a thousand threads. Capitalism is in a state of crisis globally, and the bourgeois politicians are incapable of offering any reforms whatsoever.

NATO riven by tensions between major powers

Alex Lantier

At their summit Wednesday in Brussels, NATO foreign ministers tried to close ranks, despite growing divisions in the alliance as it escalates plans for war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

The central item on the agenda was the state of the alliance, after French President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview to the Economist earlier this month declaring NATO to be “brain dead.” He also called for closer European relations with Russia and a more independent military policy from America, criticizing US policy on Russia as “governmental, political and historical hysteria.”

This statement threw into question the December 3–4 NATO heads of state summit in London, and the massive Operation Defender 2020 war games planned next year. In addition to naval maneuvers in the South China Sea, it includes NATO’s largest land exercises in Europe in a quarter century, with 37,000 troops—including 20,000 US troops transported across the Atlantic to Europe. It simulates coordinated, all-out mobilization for war with Russia.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo holds a press conference, in Brussels, Belgium on November 20, 2019. [State Department Photo by Ron Przysucha/ Public Domain]

NATO officials repeatedly stressed their unity around an aggressive policy of targeting Russia and China and boosting European military spending to be closer to America’s. “Reports of NATO’s death are greatly exaggerated,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told Reuters as the summit began Wednesday.

“We are going to have an important foreign ministerial meeting,” NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said before the summit, saying it would “address strategic issues like Russia, arms control, but also the implications of the rise of China.”

Arriving in Brussels, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stressed that Berlin still sees NATO as critical, despite growing US-German tensions and trade war tariffs. Warning against “breakaway tendencies in NATO,” he said the alliance with America is Europe’s “life insurance and we want it to remain so.” Maas proposed forming a group of “experts” to oversee changes to NATO, stating: “What is important is that the political arm of NATO is strengthened.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made no public statement, though he had previously floated similar proposals for a “group of wise men” to reform NATO. Stoltenberg passed over Le Drian’s proposal in silence, however, and endorsed Maas: “I think that the German proposal is valuable.”

NATO officials pointed to growing rivalries between Berlin and Paris. A senior diplomat told Reuters: “This is about who the natural leader of Europe should be, Paris or Berlin, or possibly both together, and where NATO is heading.”

The only strategy the NATO powers found to deal with their escalating trade war and diplomatic tensions is military escalation, however. After the summit, NATO announced two new initiatives: spying on China, and forming a NATO space command, shortly after Washington launched its own military space command in August.

Pointing to China’s $175 billion military budget, and the addition over the last five years of 80 ships to its navy—more ships than the entire British navy—NATO announced it would officially begin military surveillance of China. “When there is a military build-up, you have to see what you need to defend against,” declared US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison.

NATO officials also said they were preparing to turn space into an “operational domain,” that is, a battle zone. Stoltenberg said that “this can allow NATO planners to make a request for allies to provide capabilities and services, such as satellite communications and data imagery.” He added, “Space is also essential to the alliance’s deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And around half of them are owned by NATO countries.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also gave a press conference afterwards, thanking Maas for his help. Denouncing Russia, China and Iran for having “very different value systems” from NATO, he demanded all NATO member states “confront” them, stressing in particular the “long-term threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.” He hailed the build-up launched by the European powers, who have pledged to increase military spending by $100 billion by 2020.

This summit confirmed again that there is no escape from the spiral of military escalation driven by the NATO imperialist powers inside the capitalist nation-state system. Macron’s criticisms of NATO reflected alarm in European ruling circles, as they conclude the imperialist wars launched since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 have led to a dead end and a danger of nuclear war. However, they have no alternative policy.

“A pervasive conception developed in the 1990s and 2000s around the idea of the End of History, an endless expansion of democracy, that the Western camp had won,” Macron told the Economist. He added, “Sometimes we committed mistakes by trying to impose our values and change regimes without getting popular support. It is what we saw in Iraq and Libya… and maybe what was planned for Syria, but that failed. It is an element of the Western approach, I would say in generic terms, that has been an error since the beginning of this century, perhaps a fateful one.”

Macron left unsaid that France, Germany and other European powers participated in wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria that killed or wounded millions and that led to the highly dangerous military standoff that exists between the NATO powers, Russia and China.

While calling in the Economist for better relations with Russia “to prevent the world from going up in a conflagration,” Macron is at the same time waging bloody wars in former French colonies like Mali. Berlin has contributed 1,000 troops to the Mali war, and getting these troops is a key goal of Macron’s call for a separate European military policy.

Despite Europe’s growing trade war and strategic conflicts with America, Macron’s proposals have not won broader support, and for now the European NATO powers are backing a US-led escalation against Russia and China. “Paris is isolated,” the daily Ouest France concluded, citing a diplomat from a “country close to France’s position” who said: “Macron received no support inside NATO for his virulent criticisms.”

The paper also cited Ulrich Speck, an official at the German Marshall Fund think tank, who said: “Macron forced Germany to take a position, and for Berlin NATO is still the future of European defense... Most of the Eastern European states want to keep the United States in the game to keep Russia away, and they have little interest in the war on terror France is waging to the south.”

In particular, there are clearly growing tensions between Paris and both Berlin and Washington in Eastern Europe. Paris plans to host a conference with German, Russian and Ukrainian officials next month, excluding Washington, to try to broker a deal preventing renewed war in Ukraine after the US- and German-backed coup there in 2014 to oust a pro-Russian government. In October, Paris angered Berlin and Washington by vetoing the EU accession of the Balkan state of North Macedonia—a move Merkel publicly criticized yesterday, speaking in Croatia.

The Neue Zurcher Zeitung wrote that Macron’s Economist interview “greatly upset Berlin. The reply came back quickly: NATO is not brain-dead, but the cornerstone of European defense... Something is now in the open that was long known, but seemed to be without consequence: France and Germany have very different ideas of Europe’s strategic future.” Macron, it added, “wants to try to put himself and France in America’s place as the leading power. But the leadership he offers is no more multilateral and inclusive than the leadership the United States offered earlier.”

Amid US-led campaigns targeting Russia and China, the re-emergence of strategic conflict between Germany and France is a dangerous sign. The conflict between the two traditional leading EU powers twice in the 20th century exploded into world war in Europe. The European countries are not moderating policies or slowing the drive to war, but are centrally involved in pushing a war drive that can be stopped only by mobilizing the working class internationally in opposition to imperialism and war.

US, EU gave over $20 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine since 2014

Patrick Martin

Testimony by two high-ranking US national security officials, on the final day of the public hearings on the impeachment of President Trump, has shed new light on the central issue in the impeachment crisis: the enormous and protracted effort by American and European imperialism to use Ukraine as a base of operations against Russia.

David Holmes, the chief political counselor at the US embassy in Kiev, testified alongside former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, who had the main responsibility for US policy towards Russia and Ukraine from March 2017 to July 2019.

David Holmes, a U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, leaves after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The key passage in Holmes’ testimony came in response to a question about the comparative scale of US and European security and economic assistance to Ukraine, and the significance of the $391 million in military aid Trump held back for 55 days. Holmes explained that this was only a fraction of the $1.5 billion in US military aid to Ukraine since 2014. He continued:

The United States has provided combined civilian and military assistance to Ukraine since 2014 of about $3 billion plus … three $1 billion loan guarantees—those get paid back, largely… The Europeans, at the level of the European Union plus the member states combined since 2014, my understanding have provided a combined $12 billion to Ukraine.

This would bring to $18 billion the combined imperialist backing for Ukraine since the ultra-right CIA-backed coup in 2014 (absurdly dubbed the “Revolution of Dignity” in official parlance). Other reports suggest that Holmes somewhat underestimated the EU contribution.

According to Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the EU and its members states and related financial institutions have provided over 15 billion euros, or about $16.4 billion since 2014. An EU spokesperson told the press that this total “covers grants and loans from different sources/instruments within the EU budget and European Financial institutions.”

The $16.4 billion from the EU, combined with the $6 billion in loans and grants from Washington, would bring the combined total to some $22.4 billion over the past five years, for an annual average of nearly $4.5 billion—comparable to the US annual aid to Israel or Afghanistan.

Ukraine shares a 2,000-kilometer border with Russia, which once was an internal border between constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Providing tens of billions to build up Ukraine as a base of operations against Russia is a blatant provocation. How would Washington react if China or Russia poured billions into arming a hostile anti-American government in Canada or Mexico, one installed, moreover, by a political coup backed by Beijing or Moscow?

What are the imperialist powers—the United States, Germany, France, Britain, etc.—getting for their money? Ukraine is being transformed into a front-line state against Russia, the spearhead of plans for an eventual NATO war against that country, for which advance forces have already been stationed in the Baltic states and Poland.

From a comparatively ragtag military force in 2014, the Ukrainian army has become, according to the testimony of Holmes, “arguably the most capable and battle-hardened land force in Europe.” Ukraine numbers 250,000 men and women in its regular armed forces, plus 80,000 in the reserves: larger than Germany or France, second only to Russia on the European continent.

The Ukraine government spends 5.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product on the military—a far higher proportion than the countries of western Europe—and its state-owned arms production company, Ukroboronprom, has made Ukraine the world’s 12th largest arms exporter from 2014 to 2018, more than NATO countries like Canada and Turkey.

Last week, the Ukrainian Navy took possession of two former US Coast Guard cutters, with more ships coming, leading one naval official, Andrii Ryzhenko, to boast that “we may patrol over all the Black Sea.”

Impeachment witnesses from the State Department, National Security Council and Pentagon have made repeated references to the ongoing “hot war” in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian military forces confront Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

This conflict has been carefully studied by US military planners, strategists and tacticians, as an invaluable arena for observing the Russian tactics and learning how to combat them.

An unclassified report by the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group says: “U.S. Forces should now begin contemplating how our formations should best prepare themselves for the threats that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) face and identify gaps within our own doctrine … America has not encountered this type of conflict for nearly a generation and needs to transform to fight and win in complex maneuver warfare.”

In other words, the imperialist-backed military buildup has qualitative as well as quantitative significance.

David Holmes is not a minor figure. His past postings include Moscow; New Delhi, India; Kabul, Afghanistan; Bogotá, Colombia; and Pristina, Kosovo. He served in Washington as the Director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council, suggesting he is a highly influential official. His current position, political counselor at the US embassy in Kiev, is frequently the one used as a cover by the CIA station chief in foreign capitals.

And despite the title of “political counselor,” Holmes has personally reviewed the military operations of Ukraine. He told the House Intelligence Committee, “I have had the honor of visiting the main training facility in Western Ukraine with members of Congress and this very Committee, where we witnessed first-hand U.S. National Guard troops, along with allies, conducting training for Ukrainian soldiers. Since 2014, National Guard units from California, Oklahoma, New York, Tennessee and Wisconsin have trained shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukrainian counterparts.”

It is this massive imperialist military build-up that underlies the political crisis in Washington that has produced the impeachment inquiry. The military-intelligence apparatus and its Democratic Party attorneys have not targeted Trump merely because of his demands on Ukraine to investigate a political rival.

They are responding because Trump’s actions in withholding military aid disrupted one of the most critical ongoing imperialist operations. That is what is meant by the constant Democratic and media refrain that Trump is guilty of endangering US “national security.”

In Washington terminology, “national security” means pursuing the worldwide objectives of American imperialism. It has nothing to with defending the American people from some threat, nor, for that matter, defending the population of Ukraine. Rather, this operation is part of the preparations for future wars that would bring the two largest nuclear powers into direct conflict, with incalculable consequences for humanity.

Every member of the House Intelligence Committee bows down before this political objective. Republican members sought to defend Trump by pointing to his greater willingness to send “lethal aid” to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, although he insisted on selling them to the Ukrainians for a profit.

Similarly, at the Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night, every Democratic candidate endorsed the impeachment narrative, in which Trump is to be removed, not for his real crimes against immigrants and democratic rights, or his efforts to build a racist and fascist movement, but because he has come into conflict with powerful elements of the national-security apparatus.

Russia’s Gazprom offers Ukraine short-term gas deal

Jason Melanovski

Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom has officially offered Ukraine’s Naftogaz a one-year deal to continue the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine on its way to Europe.

The offer signals a potential weakening of the US-backed Ukrainian government’s bargaining position, as President Volodomyr Zelensky readies to enter negotiations with French, German and Russian officials under the so-called “Normandy Format” on December 9 in Paris. The talks are to discuss a possible peace deal to end a five-year long civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the lives of 13,000 Ukrainians, displaced 1.4 million and left 3.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance.

The current agreement between Naftogaz and Gazprom is set to expire at the end of the year, and without a new deal in place both Ukraine and Europe could experience significant disruptions to gas supplies as cold winter temperatures set in.

Gazprom has made the deal conditional on Naftogaz dropping all legal claims against the Russian company, which currently total $22 billion. Last February a Stockholm court awarded Naftogaz $2.56 billion in two cases involving gas transit and supply, which Gazprom subsequently appealed.

Earlier in October, Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk asserted Kiev’s intention to avoid signing any short-term deal, stating: “We aim to obtain a long-term contract, because the continuation of the contract for one year... does not suit us.” Honcharuk also stated that Ukraine planned to store 20 billion cubic meters (Bcm) by the start of heating season in the case of a gas shut-off.

With Russia’s offer on the table, the Ukrainian oligarchy must now choose to either end its legal disputes with Gazprom and move forward with the limited one-year deal, or risk throwing Europe into an energy crisis that could erode Kiev’s support in Paris and Berlin.

In seeking a long-term contract Kiev had hoped to avoid being cut off from Europe as a major gas-transit country while Russia moves towards completing its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is worth some $11 billion, by the spring of 2020. The pipeline will travel 765 miles under the Baltic Sea directly from St. Petersburg to Germany. The European Union as a whole already receives over 50 percent of its gas from Russia. Furthermore, European gas production is expected to fall by 50 percent over the next 20 years, while demand continues at the current pace.

In addition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Russia is also planning to complete a second new gas pipeline, known as Turkstream, through the Black Sea and Turkey and then potentially north via Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Turkstream’s completion and final route is unclear, but both pipelines were constructed to eliminate Ukraine’s status as a major gas transporter to Europe and ensure the status of Russia as Europe’s preeminent energy supplier for decades to come.

According to S+P Global, in the first 10 months of 2019 73.3 Bcm of Russian gas passed through Ukraine to Europe, or around 45 percent of total Russian sales in Europe and Turkey. Ukraine has the potential to transit 140 Bcm/year, but volumes have been lowered since the coup in 2014 that brought a right-wing, nationalist, United States-backed government to power in Kiev.

Any further reduction in gas flowing through the country to Europe would both materially and politically weaken the country. The Ukrainian state relies on gas-transit fees to fund its crippled economy and uses its status as a major transporter to gain political support from Germany and France in its confrontation with Moscow.

Naftogaz earns up to $3 billion per year in transit fees on Russian gas, or roughly 3 percent of the country’s GDP, and is a valuable source of much needed foreign exchange.

While the European Union is divided over the project, Ukraine’s major imperialist backers in Europe are eager to see the pipeline completed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has conspicuously protected the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from EU sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

France has also dramatically increased its gas imports from Russia, with Gazprom gas exports to the country increasing by 58 percent between 2013 and 2018. The Nord Stream 2 project involves two major German energy companies, Wintershall and Uniper, the French company Engie, as well as the Austrian OMV and British-Dutch Shell.

The United States, meanwhile, has backed Ukraine in its rabid opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline against Moscow. United States President Donald Trump claimed in June of 2019 that the completion of Nord Stream 2 would make Germany a “hostage” of Russia, and the United States has threatened sanctions against any companies involved in the project.

Apart from geostrategic military considerations in its confrontation with Moscow, the United States is also a major supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe and hopes to increase exports further as Europe’s gas supplies shrink.

The website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is known for its close ties to the CIA, warned in a recent article that although sanctions against Nord Stream 2 are backed by the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans, internal conflict in Washington over the impeachment of Trump centered on US foreign policy in relation to Ukraine could facilitate the realization of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

In recent months, Ukrainian lawmakers have aggressively lobbied the US Congress to impose sanctions on Nord Stream 2. Now, RFE/RL wrote, “…U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials are worried that Congress, with much of its attention focused on impeachment inquiry, will not come to an agreement on sanctions legislation before the completion of the pipeline project.”

John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine who now heads the Eurasia division of the aggressively anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank, said it would be a “shame” if delays in legislation would enable the pipeline project to go ahead as planned.

The gas issue in Ukraine has also entered into the warfare within the American ruling class on a different level. Trump’s pressure on Zelensky first began over the appointment of Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, to the board of Burisma Holdings. Burisma Holdings is Ukraine’s largest natural gas producer and holds licenses to produce gas in regions of eastern Ukraine.

This week it was reported that federal prosecutors are seeking to question Rudy Giuliani over his contacts with both Naftogaz and Global Energy Producers, which sought to sell liquefied natural gas to Naftogaz in place of Russian gas. It is alleged that Giuliani pressured Naftogaz to replace its chief executive officer (CEO), Andriy Kobolyev, in order to benefit Giuliani’s associates at Global Energy Producers, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Fruman and Parnas have already been arrested on campaign finance charges of funneling foreign money to American political candidates.

While Ukraine is dependent on Russia for gas, it is estimated that the country has the third highest amount of gas shale deposits in Europe, most of which are located either within or close to separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine’s significant coal reserves and mines are likewise situated almost entirely within the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic in the east. Any potential further development of Ukraine’s untapped energy reserves will require some sort of solution to the current stalemate in eastern Ukraine, either through negotiations, as favored by Paris and Berlin, or through war, as favored by Washington.

The Ukrainian government has also moved forward with steps to “unbundle” Naftogaz from the gas transit industry in order to comply with European energy regulations and create a new state-owned entity that would control gas transit within the country. The move, put into law last week by Zelensky, was required by both the IMF and the European Commission for Ukraine to continue receive IMF funds and remain part of the European energy market.

While Ukrainian officials--including Prime Minister Honcharuk--have claimed the resulting offshoot of Naftogaz will remain majority state-owned, CEO Kobolyev revealed in an interview with a Polish radio station in January of last year that both European and United States companies were interested in buying shares in any newly created gas transit company.

Both Kobolyev’s comments and the intervention of corrupt American bourgeois representatives from both major political parties into Ukraine’s gas politics demonstrates that there is a high-stakes competition taking place between the United States and the European imperialist powers over the control of Ukraine’s energy sector.

The impeachment crisis and American imperialism

Patrick Martin

Wednesday’s public hearing on the impeachment of President Trump featured the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who testified that, contrary to the White House narrative, there had been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Trump, Sondland said, offered military aid and an invitation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to visit the White House in return for an announcement by Zelensky of an investigation into the activities of the Democratic National Committee in Ukraine in 2016 and the role of Hunter Biden. Biden was paid $50,000 a month by a large Ukrainian gas company while his father, then the vice president, was point man for Ukrainian policy in the Obama administration.

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, center, finishes a day of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019 (Anna Moneymaker/Pool Photo via AP)

Sondland’s appearance was trumpeted by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee and most of the media as a “smoking gun” against Trump. Sondland was even compared to John Dean, the White House counsel whose testimony against Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal paved the way to Nixon’s resignation to avoid certain impeachment.

The testimony of John Dean, however, was part of the uncovering of a major attack on the democratic rights of the American people. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex, carried out by ex-CIA agents working for Nixon, was the outcome of a protracted campaign of political spying and repression directed against Vietnam War protesters, the former military official Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and other political opponents.

There are no such issues of democratic rights in the conflict between Trump and the Democrats, who are acting as the political front men for the CIA and other sections of the national security apparatus. The significance of Sondland’s testimony lies not in what he revealed about Trump, but in his account of the everyday relationship between American imperialism and Ukraine, a small, dependent nation that has been turned into a vassal state by successive administrations in Washington.

The president of Ukraine is told by American diplomats exactly what words he must use and what promises he must make to appease his overlord in Washington. When President Zelensky offers to have his chief prosecutor make a statement along the lines demanded by Trump, he is told that he himself must make the statement, and it must be televised so that he is on the record. He is told to jump, and exactly how high.

In that respect, there is no difference whatsoever between Trump’s conduct in 2019 and the actions of his Democratic nemesis, Vice President Biden, in 2016. Biden traveled to Ukraine and told its government that Washington was withholding $1 billion in promised aid until certain actions were taken, including the firing of a corrupt national prosecutor. Biden even boasted in a US television interview that within six hours of his delivering that ultimatum the Ukrainian president had sacked the official.

Apologists for the Democrats and Biden will insist that Biden was carrying out official US government policy, in the interests of US “national security,” whereas Trump was looking out for his personal interests, seeking dirt on a potential election rival. This argument is questionable even on its own terms, since the prosecutor whose firing Biden demanded had control over the corruption investigation into the gas company Burisma, which was lavishly paying Biden’s son.

But there is a more fundamental issue: What was the “national security” interest that Biden was upholding? Why is the United States supplying vast quantities of military aid and weaponry to Ukraine? It is part of the effort by American imperialism, carried out over two decades, to turn Ukraine into an American puppet state directed against Russia.

For all the claims by the Democrats that they are shocked by Trump seeking “foreign interference” in the 2020 presidential election, every presidential election in Ukraine since 2004 has been characterized by massive foreign interference, particularly by the United States. One US official boasted in 2013 that Washington had expended more than $5 billion on its operations to install a pliable anti-Russian regime in Kiev.

Detaching Ukraine from Russia has been a key US foreign policy objective since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine and Russia were the two largest components of the USSR. They share a land border of more than 2,000 kilometers and economies that were once closely integrated. Thirty percent of the Ukrainian people speak Russian as their first language, including the vast majority of the population of Crimea and the eastern Ukrainian region now controlled by pro-Russian forces.

In both World War I and World War II, German imperialism made the seizure of Ukraine, with its rich soil and proximity to the oilfields of the Caucasus, a key strategic objective. The largest number of Soviet Jews massacred as part of the Holocaust were killed in Ukraine, in atrocities such as Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where 34,000 Jews were machine-gunned, and Odessa, where 50,000 Jews were slaughtered.

American imperialism is seeking to do what German imperialism failed twice to accomplish: use Ukraine as a launching pad for political subversion and military violence against Russia. Behind the backs of the American people, with little or no public discussion, the US government has been shipping large quantities of arms and other war materiel to Ukraine, in an operation that brings with it the increasing danger of a direct US military collision with Russia, a conflict between the two powers that between them deploy most of the world’s nuclear weapons.

The impeachment hearings have focused on anti-Trump witnesses who are themselves key participants in this reactionary foreign policy, and who speak in the Orwellian language of American imperialism. They define “democracy” in Ukraine in terms of the degree to which Ukraine’s government agrees to serve as an instrument of American foreign policy. They hail the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” in which an elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown because he was viewed as an obstacle to the anti-Russia campaign. They salute fascistic figures like Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, sponsor of the notorious Azov Battalion, which marches under modified swastikas and celebrates the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

Nothing of this political reality is so much as hinted at in the coverage of the impeachment hearings by either the pro-Trump or anti-Trump corporate media. On the contrary, the presumption is that the foreign policy of the United States government is aimed at the promotion of freedom and democracy and opposed to Russia because Russian President Vladimir Putin is a tyrant.

The role of US imperialism in Ukraine, however, is only one example of the depredations of American imperialism throughout the world, in which countless tyrants and fascists—like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro—are aligned with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Nor is the cavalier attitude of the US government to Ukrainian sovereignty an exception. There is no difference between Washington’s role in Ukraine in 2014, its intervention against the Rajapakse government in Sri Lanka in 2015, its backing for the abortive military coup in Turkey in 2016, or its support for the overthrow of Evo Morales in Bolivia today.

Weaker nations whose rulers get in the way of American imperialism will pay the price, and in some cases, as in Iraq, Venezuela, Syria and Libya—all countries where oil wealth is a major consideration—the result can be invasion, occupation, military coup or a combination of all three.

Washington has its hands around the throats of the Ukrainian people. The issue is not whether this stranglehold is being used for improper “personal” ends by Trump, as the Democrats allege, rather than for the purposes laid down by the national security establishment. The issue is the intervention of the American and international working class to free the Ukrainian people, and the population of the world, from the deadly grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Sri Lanka: Beyond the Presidential Elections

Sripathi Narayanan


The result of the 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election was on expected lines because of the nature of the captive vote-bank of the frontrunners, Sajith Premadasa, and the winner and now President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The campaign and the poll, in many ways, were contested on electoral arithmetic similar to that of Sri Lanka’s 2005 presidential election and all subsequent elections, big and small. It is for this very reason that losing candidate, Sajith Premadasa, like the then incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015, conceded defeat even during the early stages of counting of the votes.

For (now) President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, like his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (who is now prime minister), their primary political base was majority Sinhala-Buddhist constituency in the South. Premadasa, like all previous political rivals of the Rajapaksas, was able to consolidate that strata of the Sinhala society which is not conservative, along with religious and linguistic minorities - namely the Tamils of the North and the Muslims. This divide in the electoral map is one that has not only dominated the politics of the country but has also been the determining factor in shaping the nation’s polity.

However, for Sri Lanka, this presidential election is just a precursor to the parliamentary polls, which are a few months away. Given the polarising aspect of the presidential elections, a similar voting pattern can be expected in the parliamentary polls as well. If that takes place, then Sri Lanka’s domestic politics would not only be at loggerheads but would exacerbate prevailing social divisions. The inability of the electorate and the political class to bridge the communal divide has been one factor that has dominated the politics of the country but for Sri Lanka, it is time to go beyond these fissures and to script its politics and political identity beyond the ethnographic lines.

Ghosts of the PastIndia’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was one of the first political leaders of the world to congratulate Gotabaya on his victory and also to invite him to visit India. This was followed Indian External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar’s, visit to Colombo, thereby indicating a reset in the bilateral ties between the two countries. This is of consequence as India-Sri Lanka bilateral ties during the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa dispensation was strained owing to a number of issues, including the ‘China factor’.

Nonetheless for Sri Lanka, its primary concern would be not only balancing its ties with the two Asian giants, India and China, but also its partners in the West. Even prior to the elections, the US had kicked up a storm when it expressed its reservations on the elevation of Lt. Gen Shavendra Silva as the Commander of Sri Lanka’s army. For Washington, Gen Silva, who in his earlier capacity was one of the few field commanders responsible in ending Sri Lanka’s civil war, has been on the radar for alleged war crimes and human rights violations. Coupled with the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, the US position on internal security concerns not only made national security an election issue but also made protecting the honour of the country’s military a campaign plank for the two main candidates.

However, for Sri Lanka, now back under the Rajapaksas, allegations of human rights violations in the closing days of the civil war could return to haunt. This is because the initial post-poll reaction of the US, which was the main sponsor of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution on the war-crimes probe in Sri Lanka, was not a note of congratulation but caution. In a statement to the press, the US called upon the new administration in Sri Lanka to uphold the country’s commitments to security sector reform, accountability, respect for human rights, and non-recurrence of violence.

These were the very issues that had consumed much of the country’s energy on the external front during the previous Rajapaksa dispensation post war (under Mahinda Rajapaksa), and that of then Defence Secretary and now President, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Even at the time of commencement of the polling campaign, Gotabhaya had rejected the UNHRC process, like the Rajapaksas had previously done when in power.

The US, by raking up issues of the past, has not only drawn the battle-lines for the new dispensation in Colombo and but also sketched Sri Lanka’s foreign policy outlook. ‘Accountability issues’ had made the Rajapaksas unpopular not only at home but also overseas. This matter also became a catalyst in consolidating Sri Lanka’s ties with China given how Beijing not only refrains from talking about such sensitive domestic issues but has also stood by Colombo, when needed and wherever needed, including at the UN Security Council and the UNHRC. Gotabhaya’s primary interest thus would not be in befriending more in the comity of nations, but in combating the ghosts that had plagued him and his brother Mahinda during their previous stint in power and later as well.

India, on the other hand, would now not only have to re-establish fraternal ties with the Rajapaksas but would also have to be seen as doing so in ways that the larger section of the Sinhala society, too, would understand, in addition to ethnic Tamils. This would mean that on issues of accountability, India would have to sing a new tune, after voting for UNHRC resolutions in the past, and in ways that is heard loud and clear, despite its interest in the Tamils of the island state.

America’s Arms Sales Addiction

William D. Hartung

The 50-Year History of U.S. Dominance of the Middle Eastern Arms Trade

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity. It started with his much exaggerated “$110 billion arms deal” with Saudi Arabia, announced on his first foreign trip as president. It continued with his White House photo op with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in which he brandished a map with a state-by-state rundown of American jobs supposedly tied to arms sales to the kingdom. And it’s never ended. In these years in office, in fact, the president has been a staunch advocate for his good friends at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — the main corporate beneficiaries of the U.S.-Saudi arms trade (unlike the thousands of American soldiers the president recently sent into that country’s desert landscapes to defend its oil facilities).

All the American arms sales to the Middle East have had a severe and lasting set of consequences in the region in, as a start, the brutal Saudi/United Arab Emirates war in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians via air strikes using U.S. weaponry and pushed millions of Yemenis to the brink of famine. And don’t forget the recent Turkish invasion of Syria in which both the Turkish forces and the Kurdish-led militias they attacked relied heavily on U.S.-supplied weaponry.

Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he cares far more about making deals for that weaponry than who uses any of it against whom. It’s important to note, however, that, historically speaking, he’s been anything but unique in his obsession with promoting such weapons exports (though he is uniquely loud about doing so).

Despite its supposedly strained relationship with the Saudi regime, the Obama administration, for example, still managed to offer the royals of that kingdom a record $136 billion in U.S. weapons between 2009 and 2017. Not all of those offers resulted in final sales, but striking numbers did. Items sold included Boeing F-15 combat aircraft and Apache attack helicopters, General Dynamics M-1 tanks, Raytheon precision-guided bombs, and Lockheed Martin bombs, combat ships, and missile defense systems. Many of those weapons have since been put to use in the war in Yemen.

To its credit, the Obama administration did at least have an internal debate on the wisdom of continuing such a trade. In December 2016, late in his second term, the president finally did suspend the sale of precision-guided bombs to the Royal Saudi Air Force due to a mounting toll of Yemeni civilian deaths in U.S.-supplied Saudi air strikes. This was, however, truly late in the game, given that the Saudi regime first intervened in Yemen in March 2015 and the slaughter of civilians began soon after that.

By then, of course, Washington’s dominance of the Mideast arms trade was taken for granted, despite an occasional large British or French deal like the scandal-plagued Al Yamamah sale of fighter planes and other equipment to the Saudis, the largest arms deal in the history of the United Kingdom. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018 the United States accounted for more than 54% of known arms deliveries to the Middle East. Russia lagged far behind with a 9.5% share of the trade, followed by France (8.6%), England (7.2%), and Germany (4.6%). China, often cited as a possible substitute supplier, should the U.S. ever decide to stop arming repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, came in at less than 1%.

The U.S. government’s stated rationales for pouring arms into that ever-more-embattled region include: building partnerships with countries theoretically willing to fight alongside U.S. forces in a crisis; swapping arms for access to military bases in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf states; creating “stability” by building up allied militaries to be stronger than those of potential adversaries like Iran; and generating revenue for U.S. weapons contractors, as well as jobs for American workers. Of course, such sales have indeed benefited those contractors and secured access to bases in the region, but when it comes to promoting stability and security, historically it’s been another story entirely.

The Nixon Doctrine and the Initial Surge in Mideast Arms Sales

Washington’s role as the Middle East’s top arms supplier has its roots in remarks made by Richard Nixon half a century ago on the island of Guam. It was the Vietnam War era and the president was on his way to South Vietnam. Casualties there were mounting rapidly with no clear end to the conflict in sight. During that stopover in Guam, Nixon assured reporters accompanying him that it was high time to end the practice of sending large numbers of U.S troops to overseas battlefields. To “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world,” he was instead putting a new policy in place, later described by a Pentagon official as “sending arms instead of sending troops.”

The core of what came to be known as the Nixon Doctrine was the arming of regional surrogates, countries with sympathetic rulers or governments that could promote U.S. interests without major contingents of the American military being on hand. Of such potential surrogates at that moment, the most important was the Shah of Iran, with whom a CIA-British intelligence coup replaced a civilian government back in 1953 and who proved to have an insatiable appetite for top-of-the-line U.S. weaponry.

The Shah’s idea of a good time was curling up with the latest copy of Aviation Week and Space Technology and perusing glossy photos of combat planes. Egged on by the Nixon administration, his was the first and only country to buy the costly Grumman F-14 combat aircraft at a time when that company desperately needed foreign sales to bolster the program. And the Shah put his U.S.-supplied weapons to use, too, helping, for instance, to put down an anti-government uprising in nearby Oman (a short skip across the Persian Gulf), while repressing his own population at the same time.

In the Nixon years, Saudi Arabia, too, became a major weapons client of Washington, not so much because it feared its regional neighbors then, but because it had seemingly limitless oil funds to subsidize U.S. weapons makers at a time when the Pentagon budget was beginning to be reduced. In addition, Saudi sales helped recoup some of the revenue streaming out of the U.S. to pay for higher energy prices exacted by the newly formed OPEC oil cartel. It was a process then quaintly known as “recycling petrodollars.”

The Carter Years and the Quest for Restraint

The freewheeling arms trade of the Nixon years eventually prompted a backlash. In 1976, for the first (and last) time, a presidential candidate — Jimmy Carter — made reining in the arms trade a central theme of his 1976 campaign for the White House. He called for imposing greater human-rights scrutiny on arms exports, reducing the total volume of arms transfers, and initiating talks with the Soviet Union on curbing sales to regions of tension like the Middle East.

Meanwhile, members of Congress, led by Democratic Senators Gaylord Nelson and Hubert Humphrey, felt that it was long past time for Capitol Hill to have a role in decision-making when it came to weapons sales. Too often Congressional representatives found out about major deals only by reading news reports in the papers long after such matters had been settled. Among the major concerns driving their actions: the Nixon-era surge of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, then still an avowed adversary of Israel; the use of U.S.-supplied weapons by both sides in the Greek-Turkish conflict over the island of Cyprus; and covert sales to extremist right-wing forces in southern Africa, notably the South African-backed Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The answer was the passage of the Arms Export Control Act of 1978, which required that Congress be notified of any major sales in advance and asserted that it had the power to veto any of them viewed as dangerous or unnecessary.

As it happened, though, neither President Carter’s initiative nor the new legislation put a significant dent in such arms trafficking. In the end, for instance, Carter decided to exempt the Shah’s Iran from serious human-rights strictures and his hardline national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, undercut those talks with the Soviet Union on reducing arms sales.

Carter also wanted to get the new Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) he established — which eventually morphed into the U.S. Central Command — access to military bases in the Persian Gulf region and was willing to use arms deals to do so. The RDF was to be the centerpiece of the Carter Doctrine, a response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah of Iran. As the president made clear in his 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by use of any means necessary, including the use of force.” Selling arms in the region would prove a central pillar of his new doctrine.

Meanwhile, most major sales continued to sail through Congress with barely a discouraging word.

Who Armed Saddam Hussein?

While the volume of those arms sales didn’t spike dramatically under President Ronald Reagan, his determination to weaponize anti-communist “freedom fighters” from Afghanistan to Nicaragua sparked the Iran-Contra scandal. At its heart lay a bizarre and elaborate covert effort led by National Security Council staff member Oliver North and a band of shadowy middlemen to supply U.S. weapons to the hostile regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. The hope was to gain Tehran’s help in freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon. North and company then used the proceeds from those sales to arm anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of an explicit Congressional ban on such aid.

Worse yet, the Reagan administration transferred arms and provided training to extremist mujahedeen factions in Afghanistan, acts which would, in the end, help arm groups and individuals that later formed al-Qaeda (and similar groups). That would, of course, prove a colossal example of the kind of blowback that unrestricted arms trading too often generates.

Even as the exposure of North’s operation highlighted U.S. arms transfers to Iran, the Reagan administration and the following one of President George H.W. Bush would directly and indirectly supply nearly half a billion dollars worth of arms and arms-making technology to Iran’s sworn enemy, Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. Those arms would bolster Saddam’s regime both in its war with Iran in the 1980s and in its 1991 invasion of Kuwait that led to Washington’s first Gulf War. The U.S. was admittedly hardly alone in fueling the buildup of the Iraqi military. All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China) provided weapons or weapons technology to that country in the run-up to its intervention in Kuwait.

The embarrassment and public criticism generated by the revelation that the U.S. and other major suppliers had helped arm the Iraqi military created a new opening for restraint. Leaders in the U.S., Great Britain, and other arms-trading nations pledged to do better in the future by increasing information about and scrutiny of their sales to the region. This resulted in two main initiatives: the United Nations arms trade register, where member states were urged to voluntarily report their arms imports and exports, and talks among those five Security Council members (the largest suppliers of weapons to the Middle East) on limiting arms sales to the region.

However, the P-5 talks, as they were called, quickly fell apart when China decided to sell a medium-range missile system to Saudi Arabia and President Bill Clinton’s administration began making new regional weapons deals at a pace of more than $1 billion per month while negotiations were underway. The other suppliers concluded that the Clinton arms surge violated the spirit of the talks, which soon collapsed, leading in the presidency of George W. Bush to a whole new Iraqi debacle.

The most important series of arms deals during the George W. Bush years involved the training and equipping of the Iraqi military in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But $25 billion in U.S. arms and training was not enough to create a force capable of defeating the modestly armed militants of ISIS, when they swept into northern Iraq in 2014 and captured large swaths of territory and major cities, including Mosul. Iraqi security forces, short on food and equipment due to corruption and incompetence, were also short on morale, and in some cases virtually abandoned their posts (and U.S. weaponry) in the face of those ISIS attacks.

The Addiction Continues

Donald Trump has carried on the practice of offering weaponry in quantity to allies in the Middle East, especially the Saudis, though his major rationale for the deals is to generate domestic jobs and revenues for the major weapons contractors. In fact, investing money and effort in almost anything else, from infrastructure to renewable energy technologies, would produce more jobs in the U.S. No matter though, the beat just goes on.

One notable development of the Trump years has been a revived Congressional interest in curbing weapons sales, with a particular focus on ending support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. (Watching Turkish and Kurdish forces face off, each armed in a major way by the U.S., should certainly add to that desire.) Under the leadership of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA), Congress has voted to block bomb sales and other forms of military support for Saudi Arabia, only to have their efforts vetoed by President Trump, that country’s main protector in Washington. Still, congressional action on Saudi sales has been unprecedented in its persistence and scope. It may yet prevail, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020. After all, every one of the major presidential contenders has pledged to end arms sales that support the Saudi war effort in Yemen.

Such deals with Saudi Arabia and other Mideast states may be hugely popular with the companies that profit from the trade, but the vast majority of Americans oppose runaway arms trading on the sensible grounds that it makes the world less safe. The question now is: Will Congress play a greater role in attempting to block such weapons deals with the Saudis and human-rights abusers or will America’s weapons-sales addiction and its monopoly position in the Middle Eastern arms trade simply continue, setting the stage for future disasters of every sort?