PETER KOENIG—Fortunately, there are other economic interests alive in Africa and especially in Ethiopia. There is, for example, China, for whom Ethiopia is a key partner and a linchpin for President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive China-initiated infrastructure development plan, spanning the globe from east to west, via different routes, one of them via Africa. Although China has become cautious over the past years with direct investments in Ethiopia, mainly due to the lasting unrest, said to be over ‘territorial issues’, Ethiopia remains an important partner, because of its strategic location next to the tiny port of Djibouti, where China has a naval base.
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ROB URIE—As has been commented on quite effectively elsewhere, the irony of the Democratic establishment’s support for largely white, largely male establishment candidates— see Andrew Cuomo above, against their identity-politics dream-team challengers— Ms. Nixon is female and lesbian, exposes the tactic as a fraud. The prevalent explanation— that the political stakes are too high, begs the question of why they are so high? This isn’t to claim they aren’t, but rather to ask why austerity economics is still central to the Democrats’ program given the electoral losses that have followed its implementation?
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VICTOR WALLIS—A less direct but no less vital set of enablers is Trump’s “loyal opposition”: the top Democrats and the corporate media, who in this context act very much as a unit. Basically, they have legitimized Trump by failing to offer policies in the interest of the majority and then by attacking both his election and his administration on false grounds – focusing disproportional attention on alleged Russian influences and not giving the electorate the understanding and the organizational tools that they would need in order to effectively advance an alternative agenda.
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PATRICK MARTIN—This social crisis underlies the political convulsions in Washington. There are, of course, political differences within the two factions fighting it out within the ruling elite. They are deeply divided over foreign policy, particularly over how to deal with the failure of US intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly, and over whether to target Russia or China first in the struggle to maintain the global dominance of American imperialism. The most significant passage in Obama’s speech was his criticism of the Republican Party for having retreated from its Cold War, anti-Communist roots by tolerating Trump’s supposed “softness” toward Putin.
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ALEKSANDR KHALDEY—The first thing that can be made out is the crumbling of NATO. A second Vietnam will crush not only the American president, but also the US itself. That’s why Americans will score a goal of prestige and will leave the lost match. They will strike in Syria where again Russian intelligence will beforehand reveal the supposed targets of the blow, will withdraw the Syrian leaders from there, and will then again collect from the fields of Idlib a heap of unexploded Tomahawks, which will be presented to Russian rocketeers in the form of a gift so that they can improve their missile defense methods further.
