New Appointments to Halifax International Security Forum
New appointments to the Halifax International Security Forum (HISF) include a new vice-chair and three new Board Members. The appointments illustrate how integrated the HISF is with U.S. military power. They illustrate how reactionaries who serve narrow private U.S. imperialist interests are recruited and also the direction of the HISF to exacerbate problems of grave concern facing the peoples, not provide them with solutions.
"HFX is honored to have such distinguished individuals join our Board," said HFX Chair Janice Stein. "Their combined experience will deepen and diversify the Board's knowledge as we carry out our work."
New Vice-Chair
The HISF appointed Mark Lippert, a Board member since November 18, 2020, as vice chair. He had attended the 2018 and 2019 HISF on behalf of Boeing. He was vice president for international affairs at Boeing, a HISF corporate sponsor, from 2017 to May 2020. Boeing is a leading contender for the multi-billion Canadian fighter jets program.
Lippert is head of Government Affairs and Public Policy, YouTube Asia Pacific (May 2020 to present) and Senior Advisor (Non-Resident), Korea Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) (2017-present); and member of the board of trustees, Asia Foundation (2017-present).
The CSIS, founded during the Cold War in 1962, has a large number of former top government officials among its ranks and is largely funded by industry and Pentagon contributions. The Asia Foundation was one of the most prominent CIA fronts for over a decade, with offices and representatives in all the major capitals of Asia. In his book, The CIA and the Cult of lntelligence, Victor Marchetti writes that one of the prime missions of the Asia Foundation was "to disseminate throughout Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam, and North Korea."[1]
Prior assignments: Lippert's background in intelligence and diplomacy with the Obama presidency dealt principally with Asia. He was the United States Ambassador to south Korea from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that he was foreign policy advisory to Senator Barack Obama for two years and Deputy Director of the Obama-Biden Transition Team for Foreign Policy. In 2009 he was Chief of Staff for the National Security Council, under General James L. Jones Jr., former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and later Chairman of the Atlantic Council. As Chairman he merged the staffs of the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council into a single National Security Staff. Lippert then spent two years serving as an intelligence officer with the Navy SEALs.
In 2011 he was named Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in the Department of Defense (DOD). Lippert's most important accomplishments are said to be "building defense relations with friends, partners, and allies in the region." Stars and Stripes reported that Lippert "played a key role in DOD's push to deepen defense ties with Asian nations as the Pentagon implements a new strategy aimed at building U.S. influence in Asia ... and has transformed our relationship in the Pacific."
In 2013 Lippert was named Chief of Staff for then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
New HISF Board Members
Yun Sun, a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center since March 7, 2018 and Director of its China Program which she joined in October 2012. She is a prolific commentator on Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and China's relations with neighbouring countries in Asia. On April 12, 2018, Sun gave testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), outlining what were said to be China's contingency plans on north Korea, its desired endgame, and the role of great power competition in China's Contingency Planning on North Korea.
Sun was previously a visiting fellow at the Center for Northeast Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institute, where she focused on China's national security decision-making system. She was the China Analyst for the International Crisis Group based in Beijing from 2008 to 2011, where she was said to specialize in cutting-edge issues of China's foreign policy, "especially those toward conflict countries."
The International Crisis Group has as its chair Thomas R. Pickering, a former director of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Its executive committee includes former Council director George Soros and member Morton Abramowitz. The chair of its advisory board is CFR member and leading Council donor Rita E. Hauser. Hauser, a Republican, is also chair of the International Peace Institute and was appointed to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Over 50 per cent of its $20 million annual budget comes from governments, mostly NATO members; about 25 percent from big foundations like Ford, Gates, Carnegie, Hewlett, Merck, Mott, and Open Society (which is mainly funded by George Soros); and the rest from corporations, such as Chevron, BHP Billiton, and Royal Bank of Scotland, and notables like Soros.
The Stimson Center is a leading Washington think tank. CFR members Barry Blechman and Michael Krepon founded this organization in 1989. Its board includes Alton Frye, a former senior vice president of CFR, Thomas Pickering, a former CFR director, and Council member Lincoln Bloomfield.[2]
Yun Sun attended HISF 2014, 2017, 2018 and contributed to the 2020 anti-China Handbook
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, former president of the Republic of Croatia (2015-2020). She was educated and trained in the United States, attending Los Alamos High School in New Mexico, graduate studies as a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University in Washington and Boston and then became Croatia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration on February 17, 2005. Her main task was to guide Croatia into the European Union and NATO. She returned to the U.S. as Croatian ambassador (2008 to 2011). She was promoted to NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy (2011-2014) -- the chief propaganda assistant to NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister.
Grabar-Kitarovic was elected president of Croatia on February 19, 2015 with a meagre 50.54 per cent. Her majority was enabled by receiving 21,000 votes from Croatians living abroad. She was a member of Franjo Tudjman's HDZ Party (the Croatian Democratic Union), seen by many as the successors to the Nazi Ustasha fascists. When Croatia seceded from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, Tudjman's government became the first in Europe since World War II to rehabilitate fascism. Tudjman was mainly financed with funds from the U.S. and Canada, which he visited twice during the late 1980s, including the Georgian centre in Norwich, Ontario. He named one of his funders -- a Croatian Canadian and co-owner of a pizza chain in Ottawa -- his Defence Minister.
Tudjman adopted the checker-board flag and currency that had been used by the Ustasha regime during World War II, even as he denied it had carried out genocide. Streets and buildings were renamed for Ustasha official Mile Budak, who signed the regime's anti-Semitic laws, and more than three thousand anti-fascist monuments were demolished during the 1990s. A racist campaign was launched in the Croatian mass media, depicting Serbs as sub-humans. Tudjman repeatedly called for German and U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia to break up that country in the strategic Balkans. On May 29, 1992, CNN Prime News reported that Tudjman, speaking in English, appealed for the U.S. Sixth Fleet to come to the Croatian port of Dubrovnik. The U.S. strove to supplant Germany as the leading external power in Croatia. In 1993, "retired" U.S. military officers began retraining the Croatian army, which also began receiving Pentagon-supplied arms. In return, the U.S. was given bases on Croatian islands in the Adriatic. This relationship developed into a "strategic partnership."
In May 2018 Grabar-Kitarovic paid tribute at a memorial in Bleiburg in Austria and two other locations dedicated to Croatian fascist troops and civilians killed by Yugoslav Partisan forces. She has publicly stated that she "adores" the fascist pop star Marko Perkovic, who goes by the stage name "Thompson" after the American submachine gun he toted for Croatia during the internecine Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. "Thompson" is known for his glorification of the German Nazi- and Vatican-created and racially pure puppet state of Ustasha fascism during World War II and praising the mass murder of Serbs in World War II. In his songs, "Thompson" has verses such as "Oh, Neretva, flow down, drive the Serbs into the blue Adriatic Sea," and "Shining star above Metkovic, send our greetings to Ante Pavelic."[3] During the FIFA World Cup in 2018, members of the Croatian national football team, who had competed in Ukraine, were caught on video singing a song with well-known fascist lyrics -- originally a song from the same "Thompson" whose concerts are banned in The Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.
Croatia's support of the rehabilitation of fascism extends to Canada. After attending the 2016 HISF, Grabar-Kitarovic was said to have gratefully accepted the gift of an old Ustasha checkered Croatian state flag from a University of Toronto professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy during a visit to Ontario. Croatia finances the despicable "Victims of Communism" monument in Ottawa which now includes the fascist Ustasha who ruled a Nazi puppet state as such a "victim."
The Three Seas Initiative
Grabar-Kitarovic's appointment reveals that the U.S-NATO subversion of Central and Eastern Europe in opposition to Russian and German takeover is high on the HISF agenda. She is closely associated with the Three Seas Initiative. This refers to the creation of a "North-South corridor" from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and the Black Sea. It was initiated in November 2014, by the Atlantic Council in Washington, headed by General Jones, together with Central Europe Energy Partners (CEEP), a lobbying organization for Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian energy companies. They published a detailed analysis entitled "Completing Europe" which led to the creation of this "North-South corridor."[4]
On September 29, 2015, at the initiative of Grabar-Kitarovic, the Atlantic Council co-hosted an informal high-level Adriatic-Baltic-Black Sea Leaders' Meeting in New York City which would later grow to be the Three Seas Initiative. The Three Seas Initiative was launched that autumn by Poland's President Andrzej Duda and Grabar-Kitarovic. It met for their first summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia in August 2016.
It is a platform to which twelve predominantly eastern European countries belong -- from the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) via the Visegrad countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) and Austria to Slovenia and Croatia or Romania and Bulgaria. It gets its name from the fact that its members connect three seas: the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. A central motive in founding the Initiative was that a good decade after the EU's eastward expansion, a clear east-west prosperity gap persists. In 2018 the twelve countries -- the data still included Great Britain -- accounted for 28 per cent of EU territory and 22 per cent of the EU population, but only 10 per cent of the EU's gross domestic product.[5] In addition, today -- 30 years after the system change in Eastern Europe -- the traffic routes are still dominated by east-west connections; these have been systematically expanded since 1990 in the interests of German industry, which has relocated a large part of its production to countries with low wages in the east of the continent. North-South connections, which favour the establishment of economic relations between the eastern countries and could offer alternatives to one-sided economic dependence, especially on Germany, are still relatively poorly developed. The Three Seas Initiative is intended to remedy this to the benefit of the U.S., not Germany.
Grabar-Kitarovic is also a member of the private, by invitation-only Trilateral Commission (TC), an elite body of oligopolies from Europe, North America and Japan. It was founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1972. Brzezinski agreed to serve as the director of the new organization, with Rockefeller as the North American chair. David Shoup, author of a major study of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that its role lies in "identifying the central ideological and programmatic problems of the larger U.S. alliance system (roughly corresponding to the U.S. informal empire) and formulating neo-liberal policy proposals to address them. These proposals included a concerted offensive against third world revolution by pursuing the integration of the neocolonies into the international capitalist system and developing a common front against challenges from the left. The TC, like the CFR, privately brings together key capitalist-class leaders, especially those representing transnational finance capital and their professional-class allies to identify and handle developing conflicts and develop consensus on maintaining and expanding the system."
She is an independent member of the International Olympic Committee, and was Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders from 2019 to 2020.
Joshua J. Omojuwa is founder and Chief Strategist at The Alpha Reach, one of Nigeria's foremost Digital Media companies, as well as the convener of The Conversations On Democracy & Development (CODED). He was an HISF participant 2014-2020.
He is founder and chief strategist, Alpha Reach; and founder and volunteer, Omojuwa Foundation, Nigeria.
In 2019, he became a British Council Chevening Scholar and recently bagged a Master's degree from University College London where he studied Behaviour Change at the Faculty of Brain Sciences.
He is the author of the best-selling book, Digital: The New Code of Wealth.
Notes
1. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of lntelligence (New York, 1975), p.178; see pp. 178-9 for a description of the Asia Foundation.)
2. See Four New Faces at the Stimson Center.
3. Ante Pavelic was the Croatian who founded and headed the fascist ultranationalist organization known as the Ustase in 1929 and served as dictator of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, (NDH), a fascist puppet state built out of parts of occupied Yugoslavia by the authorities of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, from 1941 to 1945. Pavelic and the Ustase persecuted many racial minorities and political opponents in the NDH during the war, including Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists, becoming one of the key figures of the genocide of Serbs, the Porajmos and the Holocaust in the NDH.
4. Completing Europe. From the North-South Corridor to Energy, Transportation, and Telecommunications Union, Washington 2014.
5. The Three Seas Initiative Summit: European Commission Investments in Connectivity Projects, European Commission, July 2018.
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 47 - November 18, 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmld2022/Articles/D520475.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca