Things are moving fast.

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1- https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20220224-israeli-air-strikes-kill-three-syrian-soldiers-near-damascus-syrian-media-says

2- https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-969210303435

3- https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/10/biden-administration-should-prevent-atrocity-famine-yemen-conflict/

4- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/11/theft-afghan-americans-decry-decision-to

5 

So why has no progress still not been made in this direction? For one simple reason: Western wealthy people fear that such transparency will ultimately harm them. This is one of the main contradictions of our time. The confrontation between « democracies » and « autocracies » is overplayed, forgetting that Western countries share with Russia and China an unbridled hyper-capitalist ideology and a legal, fiscal and political system that is increasingly favourable to large fortunes. In Europe and the United States, everything is done to distinguish useful and deserving Western « entrepreneurs » from harmful and parasitic Russian, Chinese, Indian or African « oligarchs ». But the truth is that they have much in common. In particular, the immense prosperity of multi-millionaires on all continents since 1980-1990 can be explained to a large extent by the same factors, and in particular by the favours and privileges granted to them. The free movement of capital without fiscal and collective compensation is an unsustainable system in the long term. It is by questioning this common doxa that we will be able to effectively sanction autocracies and promote another development model.

https://prospect.org/world/worse-than-a-crime-its-a-blunder-russia-ukraine-lieven-interview/

Recommended by Anton Jäger, Tariq Ali, and others. And it includes Cooper, in his new home. Again: the unromantic left meets up with the unromantic observers/partisans of capitalism.  I've been following Lieven on this for a couple of weeks, through somebody. This has made a few people laugh. 

I’m not sure if John Mearsheimer has ever completely forgiven me for this, but I reviewed his book that came out in the ’90s, and he wrote that Germany was inevitably going to come back as a great military power dominating Europe, and I wrote in my review that the man who wrote this has never been in a German disco. That he really doesn’t understand contemporary German youth, and I think that still applies.

I linked to Lieven once, years ago, to ridicule Henry Farrell, but I should have read him more. 

I had a polite email exchange with Milanovic. It confirmed all my assumptions, but he's right of course about capitalism.