<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Tomorrow is the first Saturday of August, so please join AWARE for
our anti-war demonstration,<br>
<br>
2-4 PM<br>
Saturday, Aug. 1st<br>
corner of Main and Neil, downtown Champaign<br>
<br>
Our flyer this month, thanks to Carl, looks at the long consistency
in United States foreign policy:<br>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Obama
(and Hillary) - despite constant protestations of ‘hope and
change’
- are completely in line with US foreign policy for decades.
U.S.
foreign military bases (which expanded to more than a thousand
after
the fall of the Soviet Union; no other country has more than
30) make
it clear that US foreign policy has been directed to
preventing an
economic rival arising in Eurasia, especially in Russia and
China.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2"><i>US
foreign policy for a century has seen Africa, Asia, and
Europe not as
three separate continents, but as a unitary land mass, a
world
island. Its heartland - 4,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to
the
Siberian Sea - could only be controlled from its rimlands in
Eastern
Europe or the margins in the surrounding seas. “Who rules
the
Heartland commands the World-Island,” went the U.S. motto.
“Who
rules the World-Island commands the world.” </i></font>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY">(If you think that the
US makes war because we have to - in order to put down this or
that bad guy on the far side of the world, as we are told daily in
the media - think again.)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY">Background reading
might be this, on an article by Alfred McCoy that traces the
origin of "geopolitics" - proposed in the context of the British
Empire in a visionary speech by Halford Mackinder more than a
century ago. Our leaders today are reading from the same
playbook.<br>
<a
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176007/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_washington%27s_great_game_and_why_it%27s_failing_/">http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176007/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_washington%27s_great_game_and_why_it%27s_failing_/</a><br>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</p>
<p> "The Geopolitics of American Global Decline / <span
style="font-size: x-large;"></span>Washington Versus China in
the Twenty-First Century<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy">"<br>
</a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<title></title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice 4.1.0 (Unix)">
<style type="text/css">
<!--
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
-->
</style></blockquote>
<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title></title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice 4.1.0 (Unix)">
<style type="text/css">
<!--
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
-->
</style>
</body>
</html>