HOW THE WORLD CONTINUES TO BE FRAMED: SPOKESPERSONS FROM THE HEGEMONIC POWER AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Harry Targ

The Council on Foreign Relations, formed in the 1920s, represents the pinnacle of finance and manufacturing capital. Its members often include Secretaries of State and Defense and others who serve in government foreign policy areas. Many leading politicians publish their views in “Foreign Affairs,” the leading establishment journal in the field.

For these reasons I subscribe to the CFR electronic newsletter to get a clue about what much of the ruling class is thinking about US foreign policy. I found the essay below particularly enlightening, about Russia and China, the Ukraine War, Israel, Iran and NATO. One cannot find a better document illustrating the view of the world believed and/or articulated by the foreign policy elite. This is what we must challenge.

For instance, the newsletter illustrates that the CFR is fearful that a Trump prsidency would not give as much support to NATO, Ukraine, Israel, military/technological research and development that this sector of the ruling class desires. It seems like the CFR is wedded to escalating the wars on the “authoritarians,” and advocates killing and unlimited wasteful spending for such escalation. No wonder the world is rising up angry.

On the CFR see:

https://monthlyreview.org/author/laurencehshoup/

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By Michael Froman President, Council on Foreign Relations The World This Week   January 10, 2025

 

The world President-elect Donald Trump will inherit in ten days is far less placid in many ways than the one he inherited eight years ago.  Across the world, a coalition of aggressors led by China and Russia is determined to undermine the leadership of the United States and the international system it built. Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine will soon mark its third anniversary. An unprecedented competition with China is playing out across the political, military, economic, and technological domains. Conflict is raging between Israel and Iran’s proxies, and Iran is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon. A humanitarian crisis in Sudan has displaced more people than the wars in Ukraine and Gaza combined. And here at home, we face serious weaknesses in our defense industrial base and our capacity to incorporate cutting-edge innovation into our warfighting capabilities. But in other ways, the world Trump will inherit is better off than it was during his last inauguration. It is a world where the level of operational cooperation in the Middle East among the United States, Israel, Europe, and Arab partners is closer than ever. It is a world where the security architecture of the Indo-Pacific is more impressive than ever, with the building out of the Quad, the launch of AUKUS, the strengthening of trilateral cooperation between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and the tightening of the alliance between the United States and the Philippines. And it is a world where NATO is larger, more unified, and better-resourced than ever before. Notwithstanding the challenges here at home, it is also a world in which the U.S. economy is the strongest and most dynamic in the world, the envy of other industrialized countries. America’s unique innovation ecosystem remains a magnet for entrepreneurs from across the world who want to start something new. Trump campaigned on a policy of “peace through strength.” How he builds on these strengths to deal with the challenges we face remains to be seen. What should his priorities be? This week, CFR’s Center for Preventive Action released its annual Preventive Priorities Survey, in which hundreds of foreign policy experts make predictions about which new conflicts might break out and which existing ones might escalate. The survey makes for a sobering read, especially since never in the seventeen years since the survey began have respondents rated so many contingencies as both high-impact and high-likelihood. (Interestingly, neither Greenland nor Panama nor Canada made the list.) What worried respondents most this year was the possibility that the conflicts Israel is now engaged in—in Gaza, in the West Bank, and with Iran—could escalate. All were rated as having a high likelihood and high impact. Beyond the Middle East, the experts were concerned about Russian military gains in Ukraine, potential conflict on our southern border over migration and other issues, and Chinese aggression over Taiwan and in the South China Sea. What’s striking about the Middle East risks at the top of the Preventive Priorities Survey is that so far, they have mainly remained just that—risks. At several points over the course of 2024, there was deep concern about one or more of the specific conflicts escalating into a regional conflagration. But now, with Israel having destroyed Hamas and significantly degraded Hezbollah as military threats, the Assad regime in Syria having disintegrated faster than virtually anyone expected, and Iran’s capacity to strike Israel significantly limited, conventional escalation scenarios seem unlikely. But that is no reason for complacency. Every day, U.S. forces in the region are shooting down multiple anti-ship ballistic missiles fired at them and at other countries’ ships by the Houthis. The attacks have become almost normalized as unnewsworthy, in part because the U.S. military has been so successful at intercepting them, but we should remind ourselves that for the first time since World War II, the U.S. Navy is experiencing daily incoming fire. Then there is the nuclear question. Iran has lost its second-strike capability against Israel through the degradation of Hezbollah, its missiles have proved relatively powerless in the face of Israel’s air defenses (supported by the United States and others), and most of its own air defenses have been destroyed by Israeli strikes. As a result, factions in Iran might well feel that their country has no choice but to cross the nuclear threshold. Israel and the United States have declared that this would be unacceptable. The question is what the two are willing to do about it. Trump has pledged to restore his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking forward to working with a U.S. president he expects to support Israel’s plans unconditionally. On Wednesday at CFR, I had the privilege of interviewing General H. R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for thirteen months. He predicted that Trump will further constrain the cash flow to the Iranian regime and more aggressively interdict its material support for its network of proxies across the region, especially advanced components for anti-ship missiles used by the Houthis. McMaster also thought it was nearly certain that Israel would carry out a strike on Iran’s nuclear program in the coming years. That would raise a crucial question for Trump: join the attack or sit it out? And if he chose to join the attack, that would pose the risk of an all-out war between the United States and Iran. The last three administrations tried to pivot away from the Middle East. Those around Trump are considering whether to do so once again, either to focus on China or as part of a broader strategy of retrenchment. President Barack Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq and pursued a “rebalance” to Asia, Trump ordered a partial withdrawal of troops from Syria and negotiated an agreement with the Taliban for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and President Joe Biden carried out that withdrawal. But to paraphrase Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the Middle East has a way of pulling the United States back in, just when it thought it was out. Trump will re-enter office in ten days with significant assets at his disposal, at home and abroad. He has majorities in both houses of Congress, and he is appointing a team committed to implementing his vision faithfully. Leaders across the world are all asking the same question: What do I need to do to cut a deal with him? The agenda is now his to manage. How he uses the assets America has to deal with the risks it faces will leave a lasting impact on the country’s position in the world—and on his own legacy.

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Insights from Social Science

(This essay was written in 2022 just after President Gustavo Petro spoke at the United Nations. In 2023 he spoke again. He later was interviewed by Amy Goodman and elaborated on the perspective of the Global South about peace, justice, and the threat to human survival. https://youtu.be/6-6Ni7jbi3U?si=CdPsWUWWOTFFUsDw)

 

                                 

A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

How the Washington Post Sees the World

Charles Lane, “Migration’s ‘Root Cause” is Latin American Socialist Dictatorship, Washington Post, September 21, 2022 wrote  about the migration this year of 200,000 Cubans from the island. He also pointed out that such migrations over the years have involved thousands of fleeing Venezuelans: “The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should appreciate it.”

For Lane, the “root cause” of such migrations, of course, is communist dictatorship, a pattern of people fleeing their home countries because of dictatorship and failed economies.  Lane may have been aware of the declassified State Department document, The Decline and Fall of Castro,” quoted in a speech by Senator Patrick Leahy, February 7, 2022 that US policy’s “purpose was “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”  Cuba became the model for applying economic sanctions against governments who the US tried to bring down.

Today US sanctions have been levied against 39 countries. And in most cases, while citizens of these countries suffer, most remained committed to their governments and/or reject United States intervention. And Cuba, despite Lane’s dismissal of Cuba as a dictatorship, has remained a beacon of hope, a model of economic and political development for the global south. Health care is free, Education is free. Cubans in their communities discuss and debate issues and vote on key constitutional changes. Most recently this is illustrated by the national vote on a proposed new Family Code to give legitimacy and rights to all kinds of families and children. And paradoxically virtually every country in the world (except for the US and Israel) condemns the US economic blockade.

And in another editorial statement on the Chinese “challenge” to the United States the author writes: “In just over 40 years, the People’s Republic of China has arisen from the political chaos and poverty of the Mao Zedong era to become a powerhouse on the world stage. Its unmistakable clout is intensifying its rivalry with the United States over which country will dominate the global order and, crucially, which system will stand as the world’s political and economic model: the authoritarianism and state capitalism of China, or the liberal democracy and market-oriented economy of the United States.”  Thus, the media frame is global competition between authoritarianism and “state capitalism” versus markets and democracy (Dexter Roberts, “At Stake in the U.S.-China rivalry: The Shape of the Global Political Order,” Washington Post, September, 22, 2022).

And the Washington Post and other corporate media usually reflect a common agenda. For example, from a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:

“HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving…”

But How Others See the United States: The Powerful Voice of the New President of Colombia Gustavo Petro

 

Recently elected president of Colombia Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States.  Petro’s major points concluded the following:

THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND PEOPLE

“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.”

BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE

“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.”

AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL NORTH

“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”

AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE

“Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”

AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

“These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries.”

THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION

“The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.

THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS EXPENDABLE

“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”

LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER

“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.”

“Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.”

What Does All This Mean for Peace and Justice Activists

There are lessons to be learned by analyzing significant narratives of the contemporary world order. First, narratives are inextricably connected to the position from which the narrative comes. Is the narrative one disseminated by spokespersons of the wealthiest country in the world or from a spokesperson from a poor and marginalized country, for example? Second, narratives often reflect the interests of the powerful, economically, politically, and militarily or the interests of most nations and peoples. Third, these narratives have consequences. They justify policies that may or may not be in the interests of humanity. They may justify violence, plunder of resources, the exploitation of workers or they may envision a future of greater equality and the satisfaction of human needs. Finally, as Edelman, Gitlin, Chomsky and Herman, and others suggest our understanding of the world is often controlled and manipulated by those in power. Today the dominant symbols, myths, and media frames from the Global North must be challenged. And President Gustavo Petro has contributed eloquently to this task.