The Shifting Alliances And Militarisation Of The Western Balkans

• by: Biljana Vankovska

03-25-2025 ~ In September 2024, a well-known media outlet from Albania reached out to me for my perspective on a recent €2.7 billion deal between France and Serbia, signed by Presidents Macron and Vučić, to provide the Serbian army with 12 Rafale fighter jets. Over the prior years, Serbia had received military supplies from Russia, China, Iran, and other countries, making it the most militarised power in the Western Balkans. My response did not satisfy the editor, and it was never published. This is what I stated at the time:

‘Unfortunately, it’s not just former President Trump; the French president also often acts as an arms dealer. This means that, alongside the global and regional arms race, we are witnessing top state leaders prioritising the profits of the military-industrial complex over peaceful coexistence among nations.

In Macedonia, we vividly recall when an over-indebted Greece unnecessarily purchased French submarines to gain [favour] with Paris in the name dispute with Skopje. Likewise, during the pandemic, President [Emmanuel] Macron rushed to Zagreb to sign a major arms deal with the Croatian government. The Croatian public – including President [Zoran] Milanović, who was bypassed on this occasion – was outraged by the enormous expense of what was seen as a non-urgent purchase of Rafale fighter jets. Experts argued that the deal was more about securing political support for Croatia’s Schengen accession and bolstering Prime Minister [Andrej] Plenković’s ambitions in Brussels.

Similarly, in 2021, Serbia reacted strongly when its western neighbour, Croatia, disturbed the regional military balance. Now, Serbia’s latest arms acquisition has triggered concern in Kosovo and Albania, fueling fears of military superiority. This is precisely what arms deals do: they create insecurity, provoke counter-reactions, and escalate demands for further militarisation.

I also tend to believe that [Serbian President Aleksandar] Vučić follows Plenković’s footsteps. He is effectively purchasing political support from France, an historic ally, in an attempt to downplay Serbia’s ties with non-Western partners. The ultimate outcome remains the same: excessive military spending, political manoeuvring disguised as diplomacy, and a redirection of resources away from the fundamental needs of citizens. Meanwhile, these deals only deepen instability, fear, and regional insecurity’. Read more

Trump’s Bid To Transform International Relations May Succeed

• by: John P. Ruehl

John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute

03-24-2025 ~ Eliminating bureaucracy and abandoning the world order that the U.S. helped build may allow Trump to recalibrate foreign policy, at the cost of global stability.

Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued a radical reshaping of U.S. foreign policy. In early March, the State Department terminated foreign assistance programs supporting political opposition and regime change in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, deeming them no longer in the U.S. “national interest.” Trump also reversed the Biden administration’s agreement with Cuba, after it released 553 prisoners, to ease sanctions on the country.

In February, the government issued an executive order dissolving the Inter-American Foundation, which had long promoted economic and community-led development in Latin America.

The African Development Foundation is also slated to be eliminated under the executive order, while AFRICOM, the U.S. military command for Africa, could be next. Trump’s sweeping cuts extend to global initiatives like the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and U.S. support for political prisoners worldwide.

Facing a divided opposition, a largely compliant GOP, and key loyalists in power, Trump’s teardown of the foreign policy establishment is well underway. In place of the U.S.-led multilateral order, he is embracing a blunt, America First, transactional approach to international affairs centered on military threats, economic coercion through tariffs and sanctions, and stricter immigration policies—stripped of the usual lip service to human rights.

One of Trump’s first priorities has been a more aggressive crackdown on unauthorized migration. Weeks into his term, his administration began transferring undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, and while migrant and advocacy groups challenged this action, in March a federal judge “expressed doubts toward those challenging the federal policy,” according to a New York Times article. Now, alleged Venezuelan gang members are being sent to El Salvador under a detention agreement with Trump ally El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, while Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras have also agreed to accept third-party nationals, under the pressure of tariffs being imposed and other economic measures.

Trump is also seeking greater control over strategic infrastructure abroad. In March, a consortium led by U.S. firm Blackrock acquired both Panama Canal ports in a $19 billion deal, underscoring the role of the private sector in realizing his goals. Chinese state-run media criticized the Hong Kong-based seller, and labeled the move as “economic coercion.” With Chinese entities removed from the canal, Trump has increasingly hinted at possible military action to secure even broader control over the Panama Canal. In his first term, Trump floated the idea of sending private military companies to Venezuela to topple President Nicolás Maduro, a tactic that could resurface. Read more

Trump 2.0: US Revivalism Driven By Tech Oligarchy

• by: Bappa Sinha

24-03-2025 ~ Trump 2.0 has had a tumultuous start. While Trump has always been erratic and almost deliberately unpredictable, the scope and magnitude of changes being ushered in this Trump 2.0 administration is qualitatively different. An ambitious attempt is being made to restructure the US state, military, and their relations with the rest of the world. New tariffs are announced daily – including against the United States’ closest partners, Canada and Mexico – and then are subsequently withdrawn, controversial foreign policy decisions are made, and the US government is radically restructured.

While Trump’s erratic decision-making is often attributed to his personality, a broader strategy appears to underpin these moves: a section of the US bourgeoisie has concluded that American total dominance with control over global institutions, international trade, and endless wars is no longer viable. Instead, they are pushing for reviving America’s declining economic, technological, and military strength while settling for a cold war with China.

The Tech Oligarchy – the big tech monopolies and their billionaire owners – are at the front and centre of this ambitious effort. Tech monopolies have come to play an increasingly important role in the American economy, and are now starting to flex their political muscle. The Who’s Who of tech, including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk, had front-row seats in Trump’s inauguration, showcasing their importance. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Marc Andreessen are central characters in the Trump administration, taking on key roles and advisory positions.

Under both Trump and Biden, Washington sought to curb China’s technological rise through stringent sanctions, particularly in semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden administration passed the CHIPS and Science Act, allocating $52 billion in incentives to bring semiconductor production back to the US. However, China has made significant strides in chip design and manufacturing, undermining the intended impact of these policies. China’s breakthroughs in producing Huawei’s mobile phones with advanced 7nm chips and Deepseek, an AI model competitive with the leading US models, have come as shocks. They are ‘Sputnik moments’ to the US tech industry. Meanwhile, efforts to relocate chip production domestically have faced setbacks. Read more

Germany And The EU Embrace Military Keynesianism

• by: Matthew Read

03-24-2025 ~ Just days before its dissolution, Germany’s outgoing parliament rushed through a revision of the constitution and a massive spending package to facilitate unlimited borrowing for militarisation. Half a trillion euros have been earmarked for the vague category of ‘infrastructure and climate neutrality’, while increased military spending is now exempt from the Schuldenbremse, Germany’s stringent anti-debt law that was introduced in 2009. The vote inaugurated the largest armaments programme in Germany since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – which are set to form a coalition government when the new Bundestag convenes on 25 March – clinched support from the Greens to secure the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to revise Germany’s ‘Basic Law’. The three centrist parties raced to pass these amendments in the last week of the outgoing parliament because they would otherwise have to rely on support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which gained an additional 69 seats in the new parliament. While the AfD is not opposed to increased military spending, collaborating with the far-right party remains taboo for many Germans and would have risked both prolonging negotiations around militarisation and provoking greater backlash in the population. Driven by the CDU-SPD-Green trio, the amendments have generated little popular resistance and enjoy support from business leaders, the climate lobby, and trade union leadership.

After imposing broad sanctions on Russia in 2022 and falling behind China’s productivity in key sectors such as electric cars, the German economy has been stuck in a two-year recession. With the arrival of US tariffs, the forecasted 0.2% growth for 2025 now seems illusionary. Under the shadow of a third consecutive year of recession, businessmen, media commentators, and even trade union leaders are now advocating a debt-driven ‘growth through armaments’ strategy to kickstart the economy. It is in this vein that the new amendments to Germany’s ‘Basic Law’ must be understood. Read more

How News Reporters Are Being Deceived By Fake Groups Of ‘Moms’ And ‘Parents’ Attacking Public Schools

• by: Maurice Cunningham

03-21-2025 ~ These groups are the creation of deep-pocketed conservative networks, not “grassroots” advocates.

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out” is a bromide drilled into every journalist. So it is baffling why, if an interest group includes the words “moms” or “parents,” it is just taken at its word, especially when a little digging can reveal that many of these groups are the creations of billionaires out to destroy public education.

As the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, I have been following billionaire-backed education interest groups for more than a decade. Since big money lacks public credibility, it often masquerades as organizations claiming to represent the interests of “parents,” “moms,” “educators,” and “families.” The concocted stories about how these groups were created are often repeated by an incurious press, which misses the opportunity to tell its readers a more interesting story: how billionaires and right-wing activists pour money into upbeat-sounding organizations to further their aim of privateering our public school system.

These astroturf operations have been proliferating resulting in serious negative impacts. Consider the havoc wreaked on some school boards by Moms for Liberty (M4L). M4L even got into presidential politics in 2024, boosting Donald Trump, at the behest of the donors, who co-founder Tina Descovich termed as M4L’s “investors.”

Consider a November 2024 Washington Post story on Linda McMahon’s nomination to be secretary of education. The article contrasted remarks from National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle with an alternative view from Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union (NPU), which the reporter Laura Meckler called “a grassroots group,” thus giving the impression that NEA and NPU are similar organizations.

They are not. NEA is a well-established teachers’ union that credibly claims 3 million members and is governed by a democratic structure. NPU appeared on the scene in 2020, surfing in on millions of dollars from the foundations of American oligarchs, including the Walton family, Mark Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch.

In 2024, Rodrigues, a fixture at education privateering groups, told the Boston Globe that NPU could get its message to “250,000 families to vote against” a ballot question sponsored by the teachers’ union and would “put that network to work.”

There is zero evidence that this extensive network exists or that it did anything on the ballot question. There is also no proof to validate Rodrigues’s claim that the organization has 1.7 million members nationally.

A 2021 Washington Post article introducing Moms for Liberty chronicled its claimed rapid rise without raising questions about how it grew so fast. The story simply provided the M4L narrative of its creation story, centered around former Florida school board members Descovich and Tiffany Justice. It omitted M4L’s third co-founder Bridget Ziegler, though it did quote her husband, Christian Ziegler, about the group’s political potency. Read more

Macedonia’s Foreign Policy Between Two Suns

• by: Biljana Vankovska

North Macedonia – en.wikipedia.org

03-15-2025 ~ At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski was the only European to applaud the speech by US Vice President JD Vance. From Munich, Mickoski went to Washington, DC, for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). At CPAC, he said that Macedonia could be used by the United States to manoeuvre against Russia and China. A small country, in other words, offered itself as the battlefield for the great powers.

Upon his return to Skopje, journalists asked whether this marked a shift in Macedonia’s foreign policy, which had so far been dictated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU). His response was: ‘We are among the first to take to the pitch. That is my style; there is no second chance to make a first impression. We are on the pitch, and others can come behind us. We must find a place for ourselves in the new normal.’

But what exactly is the ‘new normal’ for a country on the periphery of Europe? Until recently, Macedonia had no major foreign policy dilemmas simply because it had no foreign policy! Elites followed Brussels’s directives. NATO and EU membership became substitutes for the former socialist ideology – more than that, they became a secular religion, a dogma that no one dared to question. Just before joining NATO, following an unconstitutional and imposed change of the country’s constitution and name, a representative of the ruling coalition (later a deputy prime minister) stated: ‘For us, the sun rises in the West!’ But now, it seems there are two suns – both rising in the West – leaving small and dependent states facing an impossible choice.

Trump’s ‘second coming’ has shattered the illusion of Western unity, exposing deep fractures within what was once considered a monolithic Atlantic bloc. His (still hypothetical and undeveloped) peace plan for Ukraine has thrown NATO into disarray—if not outright paralysis. Some analysts already speak of a post-NATO world. Others describe the alliance as a ‘zombie’ structure, a relic of the first Cold War, while still others predict its partial or complete transformation. NATO’s fate, like so much else, now hinges entirely on the will of the United States. Read more