War

As Bloomberg reports, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute is out with their latest military spending report, and it looks as though many countries around the globe are preparing for more conflict in the coming years, if only based on the recent jump in military-related spending.    In aggregate, world military expenditures rose to $1.7 trillion in 2015, an increase of about 1% from last year. According to SIPRI, this was the first increase in global military spending since 2011.

US military bases that are stationed in Japan will not be relocated “within the foreseeable future” since the island country still needs security backing from the United States,  the Japanese Prime Minister Shizo Abe has claimed In an interview with the WSJ, published on Tuesday, Abe said: “I cannot conceive of any situation within the foreseeable future when the US presence wouldn’t be necessary” RT reports: The statement came in response to a question on the possibility of the withdrawal of American troops from Japan – a move recently proposed by Republican presidential front-runner Donal

Submitted by Pepe Escobar via SputnikNews.com,

So now Iran is back to being demonized by the West as “provocative” and “destabilizing”. How come? Wasn’t the nuclear deal supposed to have brought Iran back to the Western-concocted “concert of nations”?

Iran will once again be discussed at the UN Security Council. The reason: recent ballistic missile tests, which according to the West, are “capable of delivering nuclear weapons” – an alleged violation of the 2015 UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

Shadi Hamid writes another defense of the Libyan war:

Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn’t intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.