While Trump tweeted and sniffled, grown-up leaders planned major global projects By The Wayne Madsen Report
While Donald Trump displayed his immaturity by tweeting threats and sniffling during televised interviews, the world's grown-up leaders were meeting in Beijing to plan major and ambitious global projects foreseen by China's "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) recreation of the ancient Silk Road. Chinese President Xi Jinping told assembled world leaders, who included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, that China's vision of a new Silk Road would expand beyond its ancient predecessor to include global highways, railways, and maritime routes.
Xi spoke of the ancient road that linked the "Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers" via trade routes that extended through "Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Tulufan, Kashi, Samarkand, Baghdad and Constantinople, as well as ancient ports of Ningbo, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Beihai, Colombo, Jeddah, and Alexandria." The discussions in Beijing were a far cry from the "he said, she said" antics occurring in Washington, DC, the capital of what has truly become, in Mao Zedong's famed words, a "paper tiger."
The one clear message the Beijing meeting sent out to the world is that America’s “unipolar” vision of the world lies dead and buried. Even among Washington’s longtime friends and allies, one will not hear Donald Trump referred to as the “leader of the Free World.” That phrase has been discarded into the waste bin of history, along with America’s insistence that it is the world’s only “superpower.” The United States is a power, a second-rate one that happens to possess a first-rate nuclear arsenal.
The United States almost ignored the Beijing meeting completely. Its pathetic representation was carried out by Matt Pottinger, a little-known special assistant to Trump and the senior director for East Asia for the National Security Council. The only reason Trump sent anyone to represent the United States in Beijing was because President Xi made a special request for American representation during his recent meeting with Trump at the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Perhaps Trump was disinterested in OBOR because there were no projects for which his Trump Organization could profit. The gathered leaders were not discussing hotels and golf courses but trans-Eurasian transportation systems, South American regional infrastructure, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Western Balkans extension of Eurasian transport networks, and the very important environmental issues of "conserving and sustainably using oceans and seas, freshwater resources, as well as forests, mountains and drylands, protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife, combating desertification and land degradation." China announced two major environmental initiatives in Beijing: the Big Data Service Platform on Ecological and Environmental Protection and the Joint Initiative to Establish the International Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road with the United Nations Environment Program.
Why would Trump want to participate in a conference in which 1) he saw no profit motivation and 2) the assembled leaders were discussing issues that stand diametrically opposite from policies being enacted by Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?
It is reassuring that other world leaders are taking the environment into consideration when planning major projects like the Eurasian Land Bridge and the East-West Middle Corridor, the latter running from Xian in China to Rotterdam in Europe. Land bridges, comprising highway and rail routes, are planned throughout Eurasia, including China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central and West Asia, China-Indochina Peninsula, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Burma.
Xi announced that a China-Russia Regional Cooperation Development Investment Fund would have a initialization capital of $14 billion in capital to begin funding One Belt, One Road projects. Meanwhile, Trump's Congressional allies were talking of economic sanctions on China over North Korea and increased sanctions on Russia over everything from Syria to Ukraine. It is noteworthy that among the governments represented by influential political players in Beijing were both North and South Korea, as well as Syria -- the government, not the "regime," as it is referred to by Trump's chest-thumpers in the White House.
Further plans were enacted in Beijing to expand the Interbank Association of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an alternative to the SWIFT interbank financial transfer network that is subject not only to surveillance by the Five Eyes (FVEY) signals intelligence allies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also Western-imposed sanctions. The chiefs of the Washington, DC-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund listened to Chinese officials explain how the new Silk Road would bypass the Western and European Union political strings attached to both their institutions. China has initiated a Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme and Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development that will allow participant nations to kiss the World Bank and IMF, with all of their "austerity" measures, goodbye. There is little wonder why the prime ministers of Greece, Spain, and Italy were in Beijing to find out more about loosening the financial shackles placed on them by the IMF, World Bank, and their European Union surrogates.
It also rankled the feathers of Trump's key Zionists in his administration -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn -- to see the China Development Bank sign Silk Road memorandums of understanding with two banks that have been subjected to sanctions by the West: Tejarat Bank of Iran and Raiffeisen Bank International of Austria. The Chinese are beginning to supplant the Zionists in their own playground of international banking and finance, something that irritates the Goldman Sachs players who surround Trump in his White House and Cabinet.
Serving to further irritate the interests of the Zionists of Trump World, China signed an agreement with Palestine on establishing a Think Tank Cooperation Program on Enhancing People-to-People Connectivity. The initiative is part of the Silk Road Think Tank Network (SiLKS). And in a show of force to George Soros and his friends at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), China announced that the China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 150 civil organizations are jointly establishing the Silk Road NGO Cooperation Network. China has a long memory and will not forget Soros and USAID/NED meddling in Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Western corporate media tried to spin the One Belt, One Road summit as a disappointment because Britain, France, and Germany were not represented. It was a specious argument from the likes of The Washington Post and Associated Press. British Prime Minister Theresa May would have been in Beijing except for the tiny little issue of her waging a general election campaign. In her place was Chancellor of the Exchequer Phil Hammond. At least May did not copy Trump and send some middle-grade civil service flunkie. Speaking of elections, France had just seen a presidential election and President Francois Hollande had an excuse not to be in Beijing as he was preparing to hand over the presidency to his successor. France was represented by former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Politics kept the prime minister of Japan and Chancellor of Germany away from Beijing, but both nations were represented by important personal representatives of Shinzo Abe and Angela Merkel, respectively.
Only Donald Trump saw fit to send a virtual nobody to Beijing. Perhaps it is fitting because on the world stage, Trump, in every way, increasingly shows that he, too, is a nobody in charge of a bloviating, meandering, and listless former "superpower." Trump vowed to "Make America Great Again." America's "greatness" died decades ago and Trump neither has the power nor the inclination to change that sobering fact of life regardless of all the red ball cap and t-shirt slogans to the contrary.
While Donald Trump displayed his immaturity by tweeting threats and sniffling during televised interviews, the world's grown-up leaders were meeting in Beijing to plan major and ambitious global projects foreseen by China's "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) recreation of the ancient Silk Road. Chinese President Xi Jinping told assembled world leaders, who included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, that China's vision of a new Silk Road would expand beyond its ancient predecessor to include global highways, railways, and maritime routes.
Xi spoke of the ancient road that linked the "Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers" via trade routes that extended through "Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Tulufan, Kashi, Samarkand, Baghdad and Constantinople, as well as ancient ports of Ningbo, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Beihai, Colombo, Jeddah, and Alexandria." The discussions in Beijing were a far cry from the "he said, she said" antics occurring in Washington, DC, the capital of what has truly become, in Mao Zedong's famed words, a "paper tiger."
The one clear message the Beijing meeting sent out to the world is that America’s “unipolar” vision of the world lies dead and buried. Even among Washington’s longtime friends and allies, one will not hear Donald Trump referred to as the “leader of the Free World.” That phrase has been discarded into the waste bin of history, along with America’s insistence that it is the world’s only “superpower.” The United States is a power, a second-rate one that happens to possess a first-rate nuclear arsenal.
The United States almost ignored the Beijing meeting completely. Its pathetic representation was carried out by Matt Pottinger, a little-known special assistant to Trump and the senior director for East Asia for the National Security Council. The only reason Trump sent anyone to represent the United States in Beijing was because President Xi made a special request for American representation during his recent meeting with Trump at the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Perhaps Trump was disinterested in OBOR because there were no projects for which his Trump Organization could profit. The gathered leaders were not discussing hotels and golf courses but trans-Eurasian transportation systems, South American regional infrastructure, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Western Balkans extension of Eurasian transport networks, and the very important environmental issues of "conserving and sustainably using oceans and seas, freshwater resources, as well as forests, mountains and drylands, protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife, combating desertification and land degradation." China announced two major environmental initiatives in Beijing: the Big Data Service Platform on Ecological and Environmental Protection and the Joint Initiative to Establish the International Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road with the United Nations Environment Program.
Why would Trump want to participate in a conference in which 1) he saw no profit motivation and 2) the assembled leaders were discussing issues that stand diametrically opposite from policies being enacted by Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?
It is reassuring that other world leaders are taking the environment into consideration when planning major projects like the Eurasian Land Bridge and the East-West Middle Corridor, the latter running from Xian in China to Rotterdam in Europe. Land bridges, comprising highway and rail routes, are planned throughout Eurasia, including China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central and West Asia, China-Indochina Peninsula, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Burma.
Xi announced that a China-Russia Regional Cooperation Development Investment Fund would have a initialization capital of $14 billion in capital to begin funding One Belt, One Road projects. Meanwhile, Trump's Congressional allies were talking of economic sanctions on China over North Korea and increased sanctions on Russia over everything from Syria to Ukraine. It is noteworthy that among the governments represented by influential political players in Beijing were both North and South Korea, as well as Syria -- the government, not the "regime," as it is referred to by Trump's chest-thumpers in the White House.
Further plans were enacted in Beijing to expand the Interbank Association of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an alternative to the SWIFT interbank financial transfer network that is subject not only to surveillance by the Five Eyes (FVEY) signals intelligence allies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also Western-imposed sanctions. The chiefs of the Washington, DC-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund listened to Chinese officials explain how the new Silk Road would bypass the Western and European Union political strings attached to both their institutions. China has initiated a Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme and Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development that will allow participant nations to kiss the World Bank and IMF, with all of their "austerity" measures, goodbye. There is little wonder why the prime ministers of Greece, Spain, and Italy were in Beijing to find out more about loosening the financial shackles placed on them by the IMF, World Bank, and their European Union surrogates.
It also rankled the feathers of Trump's key Zionists in his administration -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn -- to see the China Development Bank sign Silk Road memorandums of understanding with two banks that have been subjected to sanctions by the West: Tejarat Bank of Iran and Raiffeisen Bank International of Austria. The Chinese are beginning to supplant the Zionists in their own playground of international banking and finance, something that irritates the Goldman Sachs players who surround Trump in his White House and Cabinet.
Serving to further irritate the interests of the Zionists of Trump World, China signed an agreement with Palestine on establishing a Think Tank Cooperation Program on Enhancing People-to-People Connectivity. The initiative is part of the Silk Road Think Tank Network (SiLKS). And in a show of force to George Soros and his friends at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), China announced that the China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 150 civil organizations are jointly establishing the Silk Road NGO Cooperation Network. China has a long memory and will not forget Soros and USAID/NED meddling in Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Western corporate media tried to spin the One Belt, One Road summit as a disappointment because Britain, France, and Germany were not represented. It was a specious argument from the likes of The Washington Post and Associated Press. British Prime Minister Theresa May would have been in Beijing except for the tiny little issue of her waging a general election campaign. In her place was Chancellor of the Exchequer Phil Hammond. At least May did not copy Trump and send some middle-grade civil service flunkie. Speaking of elections, France had just seen a presidential election and President Francois Hollande had an excuse not to be in Beijing as he was preparing to hand over the presidency to his successor. France was represented by former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Politics kept the prime minister of Japan and Chancellor of Germany away from Beijing, but both nations were represented by important personal representatives of Shinzo Abe and Angela Merkel, respectively.
Only Donald Trump saw fit to send a virtual nobody to Beijing. Perhaps it is fitting because on the world stage, Trump, in every way, increasingly shows that he, too, is a nobody in charge of a bloviating, meandering, and listless former "superpower." Trump vowed to "Make America Great Again." America's "greatness" died decades ago and Trump neither has the power nor the inclination to change that sobering fact of life regardless of all the red ball cap and t-shirt slogans to the contrary.
