Before we begin, it’s worth remembering exactly what the prize is intended to represent. According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded to people or organizations who “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee have come under fierce criticism many times for snubs or shameful recognitions – Antonio Egas Moniz won the Nobel in physiology or medicine in 1949 for inventing the frontal lobotomy as a way to treat mental disorders, for example.

Here’s a breakdown of the most incongruous Peace Prize awards of all time:

The new guy

Many considered President Barack Obama’s award as an example of the committee’s penchant for giving out the prize for expectations, rather than actual results. Obama was given the lucrative prize after just 12 weeks in office – and even he seemed baffled by the accolade.

“I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Side note: Obama became the first two-term president in history to have US military forces at war for all eight years of his presidency.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/440484-noble-peace-prize-winners/

Relatives of notorious Nazi leader Adolf Hitler have been quietly living in the US under false identities since World War II, it has been revealed.

And now, the German dictator’s oldest living male descendant has given a rare media interview — branding US President Donald Trump a “liar” in the process.

Alexander Stuart-Houston, 68, is the great-nephew of Adolf Hitler. He was born in Long Island in New York State.

He and his two surviving brothers, Brian and Louis Stuart-Houston, have refused to speak to the media for decades.

However, that changed this month when German tabloid Bild tracked the eldest brother down and convinced him to speak out.

During the interview, Mr Stuart-Houston — whose middle name is Adolf — revealed he was a Republican voter, but that he was not a fan of the current President.

“The last person I would say I admire is Donald Trump. He is definitely not one of my favourites,” he told Bild.

“Some things that Trump says are all right … It’s his manner that annoys me. And I just don’t like liars.”

“I always vote for the person who does the best job.”

He also revealed his support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“I like her. She’s good. She seems to be an intelligent and smart person,” he said, noting she “does what she has to do” regarding Europe’s refugee crisis.

During the interview, Mr Stuart-Houston also revealed one of his brothers had once planned to marry his Jewish girlfriend, who ended up leaving him after discovering the family secret.

And he also rubbished rumours the brothers had once made a pact to never marry or have children to kill off the Hitler bloodline as “bullshit”.

Read more:

https://www.whimn.com.au/talk/people/hitlers-grandnephew-slams-trump-in-rare-interview/news-story

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...

"Do you really think I'd call Russia to help me with an election? Give me a break. They wouldn't able to help me at all. Call Russia. It's so ridiculous," Trump told CBS.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton said during a radio interview aired on Friday that the major issue of the 21st century for the United States is China due to its ability to build economic and military power while violating international norms.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said on Wednesday that China has launched an unprecedented campaign to influence the opinions of Americans,however, Beijing has not yet attacked US election systems.

READ MORE: China is Creating New Powerful Tool to Counter Trump's Trade Offensive

Trump's accusations of election meddling come as the United States and China have become increasingly embroiled in a trade dispute that has seen the two sides impose tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of goods.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201810151068887483-usa-china-election-meddlin...

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Yep "China is violating international norms"... Whatever these "norms" are, the same ones the USA has been violating one hundred thousand times over... Yep, the Chinese are roaming the edges of the US Empire pimping turf... and it's not illegal, especially with a more cooperative approach than bombs and boots — and the threat of economic sanctions... 

Meanwhile at Blame Russia inc...:

President Trump said he believes that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin “probably” has been involved in assassinations and poisonings, but he appeared to dismiss the gravity of those actions, noting that they have not taken place in the United States.

“Probably he is, yeah. Probably,” Trump told CBS’s Lesley Stahl when asked during an interview on “60 Minutes” whether he thinks Putin is involved “in assassinations, in poisonings.”

“But I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” Trump added.

A long line of Russian dissidents, journalists and others critical of Putin have been poisoned or died under mysterious circumstances; in one of the most recent cases, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter were poisoned in Britain, allegedly by Russian operatives. Russia denies any involvement in the attack.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/putin-is-probably-involved-in-assassinations-and-poisonings-but-its-not-in-our-country-trump-says/2018/10/14/

OK … here’s a question for you.

Let’s assume, strictly for the purposes of argument, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, or at least a proto-Hitlerian fascist, like the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media have been saying he is. And let’s go ahead and also assume that he’s a treasonous Russian intelligence asset working in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy the very fabric of Western democracy, and that he isn’t even legitimately President, because he stole the election from Hillary Clinton with all those Russian bots and Facebook posts, and all that other stuff they’ve been accusing him of, which would make him the most monstrously evil villain in the history of monstrously evil villains, not to mention an existential threat to the nation, and Americans, and … well, the rest of humanity. And so, basically, what I want to know is, why don’t they just kill this guy?

Seriously, if Trump is really Hitler, and a traitor, working for a foreign enemy, like The New York Times and more or less every other organ of the corporate media has been telling us he is for the last two years, well, how about getting SEAL Team 6 to storm the White House in the dead of night and shoot him in the face or something? That seems to go over pretty well with people. Or what about a simple heart attack? Don’t our spooks have some kind of heart attack juice that they could slip into his Diet Coke, or smear onto the doorknob of the Oval Office?

Not that there’s really any need for subtlety. After all, if he’s actually a Russian operative, and a proto-Hitlerian genocidal dictator, there’s no reason to run a covert op or attempt to cover anything up. On the contrary, you would want do it openly, proudly, where all Americans could see it. Which is why I’d go with the DEVGRU option. They could waste him live on CNN. The bloodier the better. Just imagine the ratings! They could march into the Oval Office in that cool-looking kill squad body armor and beat him to death with a gold-plated golf club. It’s not like he’d put up much of a fight. What is he, like seventy years old or something?

All right, I know you’re probably thinking that beating a sitting president to death with a gold-plated gap wedge is nothing to joke about, and that doing so (i.e., joking about it, not actually beating the President to death) is possibly a federal crime or whatever, but we’re talking Adolf Hitler here, folks. Do I have to link to every one of the literally thousands of impassioned editorials, articles, and TV and radio segments in which respected journalists at serious news outlets have warned us, over and over, and over, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, or virtually Hitler, and probably also a Russian agent?

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/10/23/the-assassination-of-donald-trump/

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When “America First” Becomes Negotiable

The most remarkable thing about Trump's foreign policy is how much it's like his predecessors'.

By GIL BARNDOLLAR • November 12, 2018

As we near the halfway point of President Donald Trump’s first term, U.S. foreign policy is being widely portrayed as off the rails. Yet when one looks past the Trumpian bluster, the predetermined media narrative, and the serial incompetence of an understaffed and often inexperienced administration, one finds a foreign policy agenda that differs far more in style than in substance from its predecessors’.

Donald Trump ran for president as a foreign policy Buchananite in all but name. Thoughhe made pro forma genuflections before the altars of primacy and American military supremacy, Trump repeatedly bemoaned America’s disastrous interventions in the Greater Middle East. The South Carolina Republican presidential debate in February 2016 seemed like a watershed moment: Trump attacked George W. Bush’s war leadership and proclaimed the Iraq war a disaster, a bold stance in a Republican Party that still refused to acknowledge reality more than a decade after the invasion. Despite being booed by some in the audience, Trump won the state easily and drove “Low Energy” Jeb Bush out of the race. 

Candidate Trump offered a radical break with the U.S. foreign policy establishment. He said was NATO obsolete and warned of the danger of a third world war with Russia. He rightly declared the Libyan intervention to be another fiasco, and an illegal one at that. Hillary Clinton, by comparison, bragged about Muammar Gaddafi’s death and compared Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Foreign policy realists and restrainers were understandably receptive to a Trump presidency, warts and all.

Much of Trump’s rhetoric revolved around the undeniable fact that our allies are prospering under an American security umbrella they do not pay enough to support. He famously said that the United States should “take Iraq’s oil” as payback for the American blood and treasure invested there. Trump seemed to sum up his view of America in the world when he told The Washington Post in March 2016: “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore.”

Two years later, it is clear that “America First” was negotiable. U.S. troops aren’t coming home, entangling alliances are expanding not contracting, and American client states are even more likely to drag us into war in the Middle East. When one pushes the media and the president’s personality out of view, the most remarkable thing about Trump’s foreign policy is how unremarkable it is. Beneath the rhetoric, American foreign policy these past two years has remained shackled to the traditional pillars of primacy, interventionism, and hubris.

Afghanistan: The war in Afghanistan offers the clearest evidence of business as usual in American foreign policy. The administration’s brief attempt at unconventional thinking on Afghanistan was the risible Prince plan, whereby the U.S. would continue to prosecute the war but outsource it to a “modern East India Company.” Erik Prince, formerly head of the Blackwater security firm and more recently a logistics provider in Africa and trainer of Chinese security services, proposed to turn Afghanistan over to a brigade of contractors and a “viceroy” with total command of the U.S. war effort. Though many of Prince’s critiques of the current strategy are sound, mercenaries cannot fix a country with massive culture and governance problems. This idea was thankfully rejected. More creative thinking, like a real effort to work with Russia, China, and Pakistan to stabilize Afghanistan, or a withdrawal and a pledge to return in force if necessary, appears to have been unwelcome.

Instead, a vaunted new strategy offered little substantive change. U.S. forces in Afghanistan were increased by 4,000 troops, and the number of airstrikes shot up. But the situation there has only gotten worse. Casualties for both civilians and Afghan security forces have risen dramatically in the past year while Pakistan still shelters and abets the Taliban. The Afghan military is still not able to hold territory without U.S. assistance. In fact, independent assessors like the Long War Journal believe that nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s districts are either under Taliban control or contested. The Department of Defense even briefly trotted out enemy body counts as a metric for progress before The New York Times rightly invoked the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, 17 years after 9/11, the Pentagon claims there are now upwards of 20 terror groups operating in Afghanistan, including what’s left of ISIS, the heir to al Qaeda. For that reason, Americans are told we cannot leave.

Europe: Early in his presidency Trump briefly declined to endorse NATO’s Article 5, provoking predictable hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic. A year later, he gave America’s European allies a tongue-lashing in Brussels, calling them delinquent in their contributions to collective defense. Germany received special attention, with the president labeling Europe’s largest economy a “captive of Russia.” In Helsinki a few days later, Trump appeared to dismiss charges of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, igniting yet another firestorm of criticism. Back stateside, he concurred during an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that starting a war over Montenegro, NATO’s newest member, would be folly.

Yet when the dust finally settled, little had changed. The United States continues to support Ukraine in its war against Russian-backed separatists, even selling Kiev Javelin anti-tank missiles and other “lethal aid” that the more cautious President Barack Obama had refused to provide. Sanctions against Russia pile up, dampening that country’s long-term economic development. European armies remain largely impotent while mindless NATO expansion continues apace. Despite what he said on Fox News, Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate had already signed off on the addition of Montenegro (and its tiny army of fewer than 2,000 soldiers) to NATO in 2017. Macedonia, another mouse that roared, is next. Poland has recently entertained the idea of a “Fort Trump” to permanently house U.S. troops on its soil—yet another American tripwire force.

The Middle East: Iran remains the Trump administration’s abiding foreign policy obsession. Here, at least, one cannot blame false advertising. The president was explicit about his plans to tear up Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and make a better deal.

Once in office, the president’s instincts on the regime were further fortified by the Saudis and Israelis, to whom he has clung more tightly than any previous administration. He surrounded himself with paid advocates of the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), a cult that is hated in Iran. Trump’s lawyer and national security advisor, Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton respectively, have spoken on MEK’s behalf, despite it being a U.S.-designated terrorist organization until 2012. Bolton now officially abjures regime change, but in July 2017 he promised an MEK gathering in Paris that they would celebrate together in Tehran in 2019. 

[Don’t miss Barndollar discussing the forever war, the military industrial complex, and military reform at our fifth annual foreign policy conference on November 15 in Washington, D.C. Full schedule and free registration here]

In May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented Iran with a list of 12 demands that bring to mind Austria-Hungary and Serbia on the eve of World War I. Pompeo’s conditions were not a starting point for negotiations or normalization; they were a call for surrender. The administration now believes it can crush Iran through economic sanctions and force it to the negotiating table. 

Trump’s Iran obsession has had baleful effects beyond the Persian Gulf. U.S. sanctions on Iran are damaging relations with a host of other nations by restricting their trade, even as the president extolled the primacy of sovereignty at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Tethered to the increasingly reckless Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the U.S. has continued to fuel, arm, and otherwise aid the Saudi-led coalition’s brutal, stalemated war in Yemen—a policy begun by Barack Obama. 

In Syria and Iraq, the U.S. can take credit for a successful campaign against the Islamic State. Yet in the wake of this victory, U.S. troops seem to be staying put in Syria, despite a promise by Trump to pull them out earlier this year. Top officials announced in September that American forces will not be leaving Syria until the Iranians do. The risk of our presence in Syria dragging us into a war with either Iran or Russia is more real than ever.

In Israel, Trump has doubled down on support of Benjamin Netanyahu and the hardline Likud party. The U.S. finally moved its embassy to Jerusalem, as promised to pro-Israel donors during the campaign, and cut off all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. These moves only cemented a growing impression that Trump never planned to be an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Many now believe that the peace process is dead.

North Korea: North Korea dominated headlines and fears of during 2017 and early 2018. While the president tweeted about “fire and fury” and “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un, ultra-hawks in Washington pushed for a “bloody nose” preventive attack or even full-on regime change in North Korea. Thankfully, this was one case where Trump’s status quo foreign policy prevented conflict. Both sides climbed down, conducted a historic summit in Singapore, and made over-hyped and easily reversible concessions. The president’s personalization of diplomacy resulted in a victory, albeit in a verbal conflict that he had done much to create. Substantively, little has changed. North Korea will keep its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, American troops will remain in South Korea, and further negotiations are promised.  

This is a good thing: a preventive war with North Korea would be the ultimate expression of Bismarck’s line about “committing suicide out of fear of death.” It appears that North Korea wants to slowly open itself to the world, a prospect that has South Korean businessmen quietly ecstatic and China relieved. Nonetheless, this is basically business as usual: North Korea threatens, is granted concessions, and the status quo is preserved. We have seen this before. We may be on the cusp of a permanent change in relations with North Korea, but the jury is still out. 

China: There is one shining exception to the Trump administration’s conventional foreign policy: China. Trump, unencumbered by free trade ideology, is challenging China’s economic ascent. Gone is the mindless determinism of Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the evidence-free belief that free trade would somehow gradually end Chinese totalitarianism and mercantilism. The Chinese have never competed on a level playing field and as a result we have spent 20 years ceding American industry and supply chains to China. The hour is late, but there is still time for the United States to fundamentally reorient its relationship with China.

Despite the chimera of a 355-ship navy, America will not win or lose this fight in a Gotterdammerung in the South China Sea. The contest with China may be existential, but it is primarily an economic, technological, and political battle. For all of the deep structural problems in the U.S. economy, China has more to lose from a trade war right now than America does.

It is not clear, though, if we are in the midst of a trade war or a trade bluff. If it is the latter, we are likely to get a slightly better arrangement for U.S. businesses and then proceed towards the same endpoint. If we are fighting a real trade war, however, there is an opportunity to unwind “Chimerica” and bring manufacturing, if not necessarily jobs, home. It is an open question whether the president has the stomach for the economic and political pain that this will entail, as his oft-invoked roaring stock market tanks and Americans feel the bite of tariffs in their wallets.

As with most things this administration does, competence is also an enormous question mark. A trade war with China may be necessary and prudent. Simultaneously battling the Europeans and our NAFTA partners while conducting a trade war with China is neither. If we want to fundamentally reorder our economic relationship with China, for reasons of both national security and long-term prosperity, we need to do it in concert with the other liberal democracies, especially our North American neighbors. They could benefit greatly from a reorientation of American trade. A strategy is needed, not an impulse and a series of tactical tariffs.

How did America First so quickly become business as usual, China excepted? Diehard Trumpists are inclined to defend the president’s foreign policy U-turns by painting him as a prisoner of his own administration, surrounded by conventional Republicans who subvert his non-interventionist instincts. The writing was on the wall immediately, they claim, as a trio of generals—John Kelly, James Mattis, and H. R. McMaster—were chosen to drive national security policy. As veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, all three were unlikely to support any radical reexamination of America’s place in the world. Steve Bannon, who would and did support such a change, was forced out of the White House within a year.

Personnel is policy, as the cliché goes, and the administration’s foreign policy team is dominated by men who are conventional internationalists at best, unrepentant neoconservatives at worst. Rex Tillerson presided over a State Department in unprecedented disarray and often found himself focused on limiting the damage of the president’s bombast. His successor has been a reliable agent of foreign policy orthodoxy, dutifully dealing with North Korea on the one hand and threatening Iran on the other.

There is undoubtedly something to the narrative of internal betrayal, as Bob Woodward’s Fear and the recent anonymous New York Times editorial attest. America may not have a true Deep State, but Trump’s personality and some of his policies have provoked unprecedented resistance from within government bureaucracies and even from his own political appointees. Realigning American foreign policy in the face of an obdurate establishment was always going to be a significant challenge. Succeeding in this task without a united team is likely impossible.

But this is not an entirely tenable defense. These are men the president chose, and they are doing his bidding, inasmuch as he knows and communicates what that is. The bench of realists and non-interventionists may be small, but the president has put some of the worst warmongers in Washington into positions of real power and influence. 

So those who believe in foreign policy realism and restraint are left with the worst of both worlds: a presidency that espouses an America First agenda but then proceeds to sabotage support for these policies through reckless rhetoric, incompetent implementation, and a refusal to carry out anything approaching a thoughtful, non-interventionist strategy.

Perhaps the next two years will see a drastic change in American foreign policy. Hope springs eternal—but there is scant reason for anything more than hope.  

Gil Barndollar served as a Marine infantry officer from 2009 to 2016. His writing has appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette, the Journal of Military Operations, and the Michigan War Studies Review.

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by CJ Hopkins

Maybe Donald Trump isn’t as stupid as I thought. I’d hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn’t help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and “the brink of fascism” that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election.

I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn’t find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the US Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer. Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz, or any other Nazi stuff … which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has been a standard feature of the official narrative we’ve been subjected to for the last two years.

So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a “normal” president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire … the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under.

I’m referring, of course, to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries that are not playing ball with global capitalism and which haven’t been “regime changed” yet. Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the Venezuelan “opposition,” but which is obviously a US operation, or, rather, a global capitalist operation. As soon as he did, the corporate media immediately suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and so on, and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country.

Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying their economies, stealing their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold of the global capitalist “international community” is not exactly what most folks thought Trump meant by “Make America Great Again.” Many Americans have never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the Cold War. They have not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan democracy, or Syrian democracy, or Ukrainian democracy.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/12/making-globalism-great-again/

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