Saturday
From the Taipei Times HERE
- BY Jeffrey D. Sachs
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.
The world’s biggest economic loser last year was Ukraine, whose economy collapsed by 35 percent, the IMF reported.
The war in Ukraine might end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.
The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding NATO and weakening Russia. The US’ proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries such as Ukraine in rubble.
Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Libya, Syria and Vietnam.
In 1979, the US armed the mujahidin — Islamist fighters — to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. The US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained.
That Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.
Reat it all HERE