The Seven Sins of the US Alliance System

From Xinhua News Agency, Aug. 24, 2021. Complete text:

Beijing – “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world,” first US President George Washington said in his farewell presidential address in September 1796. Two centuries later, it seems that the US has already forgotten the exhortation of its founding father.

For a long time, the US alliance system has adhered to the Cold War mentality, and has been obsessed with zero-sum games. It trampled on justice for self-interest, provoked conflicts and wars, imposed unilateral sanctions, and reaped world dividends, posing serious threats to and undermining the international system with the United Nations as the core and the international order based on international law.

Since the new US administration took office, it has re-enhanced its control of the alliance system under the pretext of returning to multilateralism. The fact, however, is that the US government aims to build “small circles” and “group politics” to divide the world by forcing others to choose sides between different ideological camps. It has also attempted to use such small circles to contain and suppress China, and to pursue unilateralism with the camouflage of multilateralism.

The US alliance system goes against the historical trend. It flexes its muscles and claims to have gained wide support, but in fact it is just a paper tiger and has gradually lost its popularity. Its crimes of violence, plunder, infringement, sabotage, lying, concealing, and infighting are becoming increasingly flagrant, and it is falling into the abyss of “a gang” step by step.

The following is a presentation of the “seven sins” of the US alliance system, which demonstrates its hegemonic mindset and power politics.

The first sin: violence.

During the past 240-plus years after it declared independence on July 4th, 1776, there are only less than 20 years during which the US had not involved in any war. According to incomplete statistics, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 2001, among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions of the world, 201 were initiated by the US, accounting for 81% of the total number. Of them, there were 13 overseas wars, in most of which US allies were involved. Under the guns and bayonets of the US and its allies, countless people have been displaced and even lost their lives. The economic and social development of regional countries has suffered drastically. Many countries are still in great misery.

Major aggressive wars waged by the US and its allies after World War II include:

• The Korean War. Since June 1950, the US has gathered more than a dozen countries to form the so-called “United Nations Army” to intervene in a civil war between the North and the South of the Korean Peninsula. The war resulted in the death of more than 3 million civilians and another 3 million refugees. During the war, the US military secretly carried out a germ warfare in the northern region of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and parts of northeastern China, spreading by planes large numbers of insects, mice, rabbits and other vectors with bacteria that could cause plague, cholera and typhoid. The germ warfare has resulted in large casualties among Chinese and Korean soldiers and civilians.
  • The Vietnam War. The Vietnam War that lasted from 1955 to 1975 is one of the longest and most brutal wars since the end of World War II. The war has caused as many as 2 million civilian deaths and rendered over 3 million people displaced. The US forces dropped 20 million gallons (about 75.71 million liters) of defoliants in Vietnam during the war, directly causing over 400,000 Vietnamese deaths. Another approximately 2 million Vietnamese who came into contact with this chemical got cancers and other diseases. Besides, it is estimated that at least 350,000 [metric] tons of unexploded mines and bombs have been left by the US military in Vietnam, and these mines and bombs are still explosive, which will take 300 years to be cleaned out.
  • The Kosovo War. In 1999, NATO troops led by the US blatantly set the UN Security Council aside and carried out a 78-day continuous bombing of Yugoslavia under the guise of “preventing humanitarian disasters,” killing and injuring over 8,000 innocent civilians and uprooting nearly 1 million. More than 2 million people have lost their source of livelihood. NATO troops targeted the infrastructure of Yugoslavia and even bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. Serbian economists estimated that the total economic loss caused by the bombings was as much as $29.6 billion. Lots of bridges, roads, railways, and other buildings were destroyed during the bombings, affecting 25,000 households, 176 cultural sites, 69 schools, 19 hospitals, and 20 health centers. About 1.5 million children could not go to school. Apart from that, during this war, NATO troops led by the US also used cluster bombs and depleted uranium bombs banned by international conventions, leading to a surge in cancer and leukemia cases in Yugoslavia and inflicting disastrous impact on the ecological environment of Yugoslavia and Europe. In March 2000, the UN peacekeeping force in Kosovo confirmed that the US military had launched a total of 31,000 depleted uranium bombs to destroy Yugoslavia’s tanks and fortifications. There were more than 100 drop sites in Kosovo and Metohija. NATO used 2 tons of depleted uranium in southern Serbia, and 13 tons in Kosovo and Metohija, for a total of 15 tons of depleted uranium. In addition, from April 17-18, 1999, NATO aircraft blew up a chemical plant in Pancevo, causing the carcinogen content in the city to reach 10,600 times the normal level. As of May 2019, 366 Italian soldiers who participated in NATO military operations had died of cancer, and 7,500 were suffering badly from illness.
  • The Afghanistan War. In October 2001, the US and NATO invaded Afghanistan in the name of combating al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Over the past 20 years, the US military operations have killed and injured more than 100,000 civilians, and created about 11 million refugees. In 2019, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani said that 45,000 soldiers in Afghan security forces have been killed since 2014. A UN report in 2019 showed that 32,000 Afghan civilians had died in the war, while the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the US stated that the number of deaths among the resistance forces was 42,000. Scholars at Kabul University estimated that since its beginning, the Afghanistan War has caused about 250 casualties and a loss of $60 million per day. In 2020, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court stated that there was evidence that nearly 100 Afghan prisoners had been tortured, abused and even raped during interrogation. US military forces and the US Central Intelligence Agency may have committed war crimes for torturing prisoners in Afghanistan. In November 2020, the Australian military released an investigation report of the country’s troops in Afghanistan, confirming that Australian soldiers were suspected of participating in the killing of prisoners and civilians in Afghanistan. On April 14, 2021, US President Joe Biden announced that the mission of preventing terrorists from obtaining safe shelter in Afghanistan had long been over and that all US troops would withdraw from the country before Sept. 11. The US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan hastily, leaving behind a mess of rampant violence and devastation.
  • The Iraq War. In March 2003, despite broad opposition of the international community, the US, along with Britain and other countries, still invaded Iraq on unfounded charges, which led to around 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, including 16,000 directly killed by US forces. Today in Iraq, there are still 25 million mines and other explosive remnants that need to be removed. According to public statistics, the total number of depleted uranium bombs exploded in Iraq exceeded 3,400 tons, with an average of nearly 8 kilograms of uranium compounds remaining per square kilometer. In 2008, the UN General Assembly voted to ban the use of depleted uranium bombs in civilian areas. 141 countries supported it. The US, Britain, France and Israel voted against it. In addition, the US and British forces have seriously violated international humanitarian principles and abused prisoners of war. A set of photos released by the CBS showed that after the war in Iraq, the US military police brutally tortured Iraqi prisoners of war, such as ordering them to stack their bodies naked, or to stand on boxes with their heads covered and live wires connected to their hands. In November 2019, investigators from the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) and “Operation Northmoor” revealed that the relevant investigations were suspended by the British government in 2017. The British government and the army covered up the credible evidence of war crimes of killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq committed by their soldiers.

The multiple wars of aggression launched by the US and its allies have caused a large number of civilian casualties and property losses in other countries, and brought about a series of social problems. In March 2021, the US anti-war organization CODEPINK issued a report stating that in the past 20 years, the US and its allies have been constantly bombing other countries, dropping more than 40 bombs and missiles per day on average. Since 2001, the US and its allies have dropped 326,000 bombs and missiles in other countries, mainly in the Middle East. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen were the most severely attacked countries.

• The US continues supplying weapons to its allies, leading to regional conflicts.

After 2017, the US increased the sales of advanced weapons to its allies as an important means to control and consolidate alliances. Then President Donald Trump frequently touted US-made weapons during meetings with leaders of other countries. In addition, US defense contractors can directly sell military drones to foreign governments without approval from US Department of Defense. In 2018, the US arms exports amounted to $192.3 billion, an increase of 13% over the previous year. In 2020, the US arms sales accounted for more than 85% of the global total, and nearly half of them went to the Middle East. In March 2021, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden confirmed that the US has always been the world’s largest arms exporter, whose exports in the past five years accounted for more than one-third of the world’s total, with more than half going to the Middle East. The size of arms purchases by Middle Eastern countries accounted for one third of the world’s total, of which nearly 70% came from the US, Britain, and France.

• US allies have long participated in US military operations overseas and conspired to commit violence.

Australia is the only ally that has participated in every major US military operation overseas since World War II, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Kosovo War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the Syria War. In November 2020, the Australian Defence Force released an investigation report, which confirmed that Australian soldiers were suspected of torturing and killing 39 Afghan civilians, including children. The report has shocked the world and triggered widespread criticism in the international community. Recently, Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the department of home affairs of Australia, commented on China-US tensions over Taiwan, saying that “free nations again hear the beating drums (of war),” deliberately inciting confrontation and exaggerating the threat of war.

The US has a number of military bases in the Middle East, with more than 70,000 US troops stationed in the region. The US also deploys advanced military equipment in the region, such as aircraft carrier groups, stealth fighters, and strategic nuclear submarines, flaunting its power from time to time as it tries to maintain strategic deterrence in the region at all times. Under the anti-terrorism banner, the US used force to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, and even violently overthrew the legitimate governments of sovereign countries. The US dispatched drones to remove Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Quds Force in Iran. In recent years, several Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated, behind which there are shadows of US-Israel conspiracy. The US condoned Israel for launching air strikes against Syria, Lebanon and other countries, which seriously infringed on the sovereignty of relevant countries. The US also acquiesced in Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and allowed Turkey to attack Kurdish forces in Syria and invade northern Syria in the name of anti-terrorism. During the Libyan war, the US, Britain, France, Canada and other countries jointly implemented armed intervention on the grounds of implementing the UN Security Council’s no-fly resolution, with the actual purpose of supporting the opposition groups in Libya to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. Since the launch of the so-called “war on terrorism” in 2001, the US and its allies have caused at least 480,000 deaths in the region, most of which are innocent civilians.

• Gun violence is rampant in the US.

On April 3, 2021, The New York Times reported that more than 1.5 million Americans have died from gun-related suicides, murders, and accidents since 1975, more than the total number of deaths caused by all US wars since the Civil War. According to data released by the US Gun Violence Archives, in 2020, more than 40,000 people were killed in shootings in the US, setting a record high, and there were 592 mass shootings in the country, an average of more than 1.6 per day. On June 14, 2021, The Washington Post reported that from January to May 2021 alone, more than 8,100 people died in shootings in the US, about 54 people per day, which is 14 more than the average of the previous six years in the same period. While the country is plagued with gun violence, there is no progress in strengthening gun control. The two major parties in the US have been in a tug of war over gun control, making it difficult for any act to pass Congress. Congress has adopted nearly no gun laws of practical significance since 1994.

• Police violence continues in the US and its allies, and has caused a large number of casualties.

During the “Yellow Vest” movement in France, the police used chemical sprays, tear gas, rubber bullets and other methods excessively to suppress violence. In recent demonstrations in Northern Ireland and other places, police violence also caused many injuries and bloodshed and aroused public outrage.

On Feb. 26, 2021, during the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, a number of UN special rapporteurs and human rights experts issued a joint statement calling on the US government to adopt wide-ranging reforms to put an end to police violence, and to vigorously address systemic racism and racial discrimination. The experts also expressed concern that US legal and policy frameworks allow law enforcement officers to use lethal force whenever it is deemed “reasonable,” and urged the US authorities to address the increased “militarization” of policing. On April 21, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a statement over the George Floyd case that impunity for crimes and human rights violations by law enforcement officers must end, and robust measures must be taken to prevent further arbitrary killings.

The second sin plunder.

The development of Western countries is, to a certain degree, a history of exploitation and plunder. The US alliance relies on its military force, economic status and the “stick” of sanctions to intimidate and entice other countries to give up their legitimate rights and interests, and plunder resources and wealth in a blatant way.

• The US and its allies have plundered oil, food and other resources of Gulf countries through different means including war.

On March 20, 2003, the US and Britain jointly launched military operations against Iraq without the authorization of the UN Security Council. The US made up a series of excuses for launching the war, including the Saddam Hussein administration’s alleged serious violations of human rights and possible possession of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.

In April 2021, US Vice President Kamala Harris, while attending an activity on employment and infrastructure policies, admitted that “for years and generations, wars have been fought over oil.”

On the eve of launching the Iraq War in 2003, then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that one of British strategic priorities was to “bolster the security of British and global energy supplies.” In July 2016, former British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was involved in the decision-making of the Iraq war, published an article saying that since the 1950s, it has always been Britain’s interest to ensure access to petroleum products of the Persian Gulf on preferential terms.

Former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said that the threat against Iraq was for oil, and that the US policy was to exploit the oil from the Gulf countries. According to the BBC, the George W. Bush administration had already orchestrated a plan to control Iraq’s oil before the 911 attacks.

Andrew Simms, former policy director at the New Economics Foundation, a British think-tank, said that over the past century, the US and Britain have left behind conflicts, social unrest and environmental destruction across the world as they have sought to control oil reserves more than their share.

On March 20, 2021, Syrian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Bassam Toumeh said in an interview with Syrian state television that the US and its allies were like pirates coveting Syria’s oil and wealth.

The US currently controls 90% of the crude oil resources in northeastern Syria. The occupation of the region by the US military and its allies has led to a total loss of the country’s oil industry of more than $92 billion.

During a visit to Italy, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the US has been enriching its own oil producers and arms dealers by plundering oil resources belonging to the Syrian people. Russian expert Igor Yushkov said the reason why the US was reluctant to withdraw from northern Syria was to plunder Syria’s oil resources, adding that the US has used armed forces to shield oil smuggling and to retaliate against any actions that prevent the smuggling.

The US-led military coalition also smuggled and burned Syrian wheat for many times. In May 2020, the US military used Apache gunships to drop incendiary bombs at al Shaddadi in southern al-Hasakah governorate, northeastern Syria, which burned local wheat crops into ashes, killing 14 Syrian civilians and causing nearly $50 million worth of damage.

According to a report from the Syrian Arab News Agency on June 9, 2021, 20 trucks of US occupation forces marched towards northern Iraq, carrying wheat crops stolen from Syria. The US occupation forces colluded with Syria’s local militia groups, stealing and plundering Syrian oil and food, and then selling them in exchange for money.

On June 16, the news agency reported that the US occupation forces stole wheat from Syria again, and the US-led coalition kidnapped several civilians in the country’s eastern Deir-ez-Zor governorate.

Syria used to be a food exporter. However, years of wars have led to the country’s food shortages, and it has to import food to meet its domestic demand.

• The US pursues the hegemony of the US dollar and constantly plunders assets of other countries through unconventional monetary policies.

In July 1944, the Bretton Woods system was established, which made the US dollar the international currency. And the US thereby becomes the world currency overlord.

In August 1971, the US dollar was decoupled from gold, whereas the US has maintained the hegemony of the US dollar by tying US dollar to petroleum through the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

For a long period of time, the US, based on its own economic cycle, has been continuously pushing up and setting off financial risks of emerging markets and developing countries to ransack foreign exchange reserves of other countries, plunder high-quality assets, rake in huge profits from the rest of the world in the process of large-scale capital flowing.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, the US Federal Reserve has launched unlimited quantitative easing measures and purchased massive bonds in order to revive the US economy and its stock market.

In just a few months, its balance sheet expanded by 65% to a maximum of $7.22 trillion, and the amount of the base currency rocketed up by $3 trillion.

The large amount of additional US dollars has flowed to the rest of the world, inflicting huge impacts on global economic and financial markets and causing a sharp rise in prices of primary commodities, including food. These outcomes also have frustrated other countries, especially developing countries which have already been weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The euro, since its birth, has been increasing its proportion in world trade settlement. However, it has been suppressed by the US from time to time.

By controlling the global US dollar settlement and clearing system, the US has been using this system to block countries, enterprises and individuals sanctioned by Washington. At present, the US still relies on the US dollar to maintain its hegemonic status in the reserve currency and the international settlement and clearing system.

• Militarized plunder by the US and its allies has led to a surge in the number of African refugees and has encroached on African interests through exploiting mineral resources.

On June 16, 2018, Iranian scholar Nazanin Armanian published an article – “The Aquarius ship and five samples of the militarization of the plunder of Africa” – on Spanish online newspaper Publico. The article pointed out that since 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, several US-led wars forced nearly 56 million people to leave their homes in the Middle East and Africa. The refugee wave in today’s world was directly related to NATO’s new militarized plunder of Africa.

Peter Pham, an Africa expert at US think tank Atlantic Council, said that one of NATO’s goals for the militarization of Africa is to hold Africa’s abundant oil and gas as well as other strategic resources, and ensure that any interested third party, such as China, India, Japan and Russia, is unable to obtain monopoly or preferential treatment of African resources.

In September 2012, Kiangiosekazi Wa Nyoka, a columnist with Tanzanian national newspaper Daily News, penned an article entitled “Who benefits from our minerals.” He mentioned the plunder of African resources by Western imperialist countries in history and said that the phenomenon still exits.

Former Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma said that it is impossible for Africa to erase imperialist factors in the mining sector, as the field has all the time been controlled by Western countries.

• Britain has occupied many overseas territories and maintained illegal colonial governments.

Starting from the 16th century, Britain continuously occupied overseas colonies. Its colonization reached the peak in the 1920s when Britain occupied more than a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. At that time, Britain was described as “the empire on which the sun never sets.”

British scholars pointed out that when the country was at its zenith, its territory increased by 111 times, and its cultural relics collected from the colonies also increased by 100 times. At present, Britain still possesses 14 overseas territories far away from home, with a total area of 1.73 million square kilometers and a total population of 260,000.

Among them, the Chagos Archipelago, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean that Britain has refused to return to Mauritius, is of great controversy. The islands were occupied by Britain in 1810. In 1965, as an additional condition for Mauritius’ independence, the islands were separated from Mauritian territory and became part of the “British Indian Ocean Territory.”

Britain said it would return the islands in due course, but it did not fulfil its promise. Moreover, Britain forced thousands of indigenous people to leave the islands and supported the US in building a military base on the islands.

In February 2019, the International Court of Justice said in an advisory opinion that Britain had illegally split the islands and is obliged to “bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible.”

In May 2019, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution with 116 votes in favor and six against, stating that the continued administration of the islands constitutes “a wrongful act,” and demanding Britain “unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from the area within six months.”

However, Britain has so far failed to implement the resolution and has blatantly trampled on international law. Prime Minister of Mauritius Pravind Kumar Jugnauth said that Britain cannot claim to be a guardian of international law while maintaining an illegal colonial government.

• France has long used its colonial legacies to control the economic lifelines of African countries.

Since the euro was born and the French franc was abolished, the CFA franc has had a fixed exchange rate to the euro. Every time the French economy declines, the countries in the CFA franc zone suffer.

The right to issue the CFA franc is not in the hands of the members of the sub-regional currency area who cannot flexibly control the value of the home currency. Consequently, the export competitiveness of West African and Central African countries has been hampered.

As most foreign exchange is controlled by France, the foreign trade of the countries in the CFA franc zone is restricted by France in various ways. In 2017, people protested against the West African CFA franc in Benin. Mali, Senegal and other countries also held demonstrations against the CFA franc

The third sin: infringement.

The US alliance system bends international rules to its will, remains selective in applying international laws, challenges justice with might, distorts international laws to whitewash its wrongdoings, and seeks only its own interests.

• The US has either refused to join or withdrawn from international conventions and organizations.

Over the years, the US has followed an “America First” approach and withdrawn from a number of international treaties and organizations, dealing a heavy blow to multilateralism and undercutting the UN-centered international system.

Washington, for example, has refused to ratify the 1948 Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention that recognizes workers’ rights to association, refused to sign the Geneva Agreements of 1954 that seek peaceful settlement of the two questions concerning the Korean Peninsula and Indo-China, refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, refused to sign the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is supported by most countries and was once advocated by Washington. In 1984, under the pretext that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was over politicized, the US withdrew from the UN agency for the first time.

The US is also the only country in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989. It has also failed to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and has withdrawn its signature to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In 2001, the US solely opposed negotiations on a verification protocol of the Biological Weapons Convention, and has blocked them to date.

In January 2017, the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the grounds that the trade deal would destroy the US manufacturing sector. In June the same year, though a major greenhouse gas emitter, the US announced its decision to exit the Paris Agreement, and then restarted its fossil fuel mining projects, claiming that the climate accord had put it at a disadvantage. The country withdrew from UNESCO for the second time in October 2017, citing the “need for fundamental reform,” and then announced two months later that it was withdrawing from the Global Compact on Migration because the non-binding UN migration pact was “inconsistent with US immigration policy and the Trump Administration’s immigration principles.”

In May 2018, Washington announced its decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), calling the 2015 nuclear deal “a lie,” “a horrible, one-sided deal” and “disastrous.” In June 2018, the US quit the UN Human Rights Council, claiming that the council was biased against Israel and was “a poor defender of human rights.” In the same year, the US also announced its withdrawal from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes relating to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in response to Palestine’s complaint to the ICJ over the US government’s relocation of its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

In August 2019, the US announced its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to develop ground-launched conventional missiles without restraints. In April 2020, it halted funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) and formally moved to quit the organization in July (though later rejoining the WHO after US President Joe Biden took office in early 2021). In May 2020, the US announced its decision to exit the Open Skies Treaty, and formally backed out in November.

• The US and its allies have committed massive human rights abuses in wars overseas.

On Dec. 30, 2020, the Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries under the UN Human Rights Council said in a statement that the pardons granted by then US President Trump to four convicted Blackwater contractors for war crimes in Iraq violated US obligations under international law, and called on all States parties to the Geneva Conventions to condemn the pardons. On Dec. 23, 2020, the spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed deep concerns over the pardoning in a statement, saying that the step “contributes to impunity and has the effect of emboldening others to commit such crimes in the future.”

On April 12, 2021, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Bachelet expressed concerns in a statement that the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill, then reaching its final stages in the British legislative process, could lead to shielding military personnel operating abroad from due accountability for acts of torture or other serious international crimes, adding that “the Bill would make it substantially less likely that UK service members on overseas operations would be held accountable for serious human rights violations amounting to international crimes.” On Oct. 5, 2020, 10 experts from the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council also voiced concerns that the bill violates the British obligations under international humanitarian law, human rights law and international criminal law, and protects British soldiers serving abroad from charges for serious international crimes, including unlawful killing and torture.

On April 14, 2021, UN human rights experts, including the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, issued a joint statement to criticize the US anti-terrorism program “Rewards for Justice” for violating the human rights of some of the individuals it targets.

“Many of the people targeted by the Rewards for Justice program have had their due process rights denied,” said the statement. “By offering money for information that can lead to the capture of these individuals, the program encourages others to participate in the denial of these rights.”

• The US has imposed long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions on many countries over the years.

Relying on US laws including Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the US has long arbitrarily imposed long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions on other countries and foreign companies. To date, it has reaped huge profits by imposing economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries, affecting nearly half of the global population. From 2009 to 2017, the US gained $190 billion and access to a large amount of corporate data from Europe alone through the long-arm jurisdiction. Companies like Alstom were acquired by US companies after the sanctions.

Washington applied more than 350 unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela between 2015 and 2019. The new set of unilateral sanctions imposed by the US against Venezuela were “extremely broad,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Bachelet in August 2019. “I fear that they will have far-reaching implications on the rights to health and to food in particular, in a country where there are already serious shortages of essential goods,” said Bachelet in a statement, adding that evidence has shown that “wide-ranging unilateral sanctions can end up denying people’s fundamental human rights.”

In 2018, Turkey sentenced a US pastor, who had been arrested on charges of espionage and links to the Gulen movement, to years in jail. The US unilaterally announced additional tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Turkey after communication through diplomatic channels failed. Under the US economic sanctions, the Turkish lira tumbled as much as 18% in August 2018, throwing Turkey’s foreign exchange market into chaos.

In 2019, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security imposed supply restrictions on Huawei and its affiliates. Since June 2019, the US government has added more than 200 Chinese companies to its economic blacklist.

In April 2020, seven UN human rights experts called on the US to lift its economic and financial embargo on Cuba, saying the US embargo was obstructing humanitarian responses to help the country’s health care system fight the COVID-19 pandemic. They said the US embargo on Cuba and sanctions on other countries seriously undermine international cooperation to curb the pandemic, treat patients and save lives.

The US has imposed more than 1,600 unilateral sanctions on Iran, covering various fields of Iran’s national economy, including oil, finance, shipping and automobiles. Despite the repeated US claim that humanitarian supplies are exempt from the sanctions, Iran has been unable to purchase medicines and the like through normal channels for a long time, which has caught the country in a humanitarian dilemma of medicine shortages. The Trump Administration adopted a policy of maximum pressure against Iran, and resorted to long-arm jurisdiction to deter the whole world from conducting legitimate and reasonable economic and trade exchanges with Iran. Many Chinese entities and individuals were thus sanctioned by the US side. Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in December 2019 that renewed US sanctions on Iran had cost the country $200 billion in foreign exchange income and investment.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, the US has prevented the International Monetary Fund from granting a loan to Iran to combat the epidemic and not allowed its allies, including South Korea and Japan, to release Iran’s frozen funds overseas, depriving the country of the access to medical supplies and COVID-19 vaccines. The US has also wielded its sanctions against Syria, Yemen and other war-torn countries, further impacting those countries’ fragile economic and social foundations and creating a humanitarian disaster worse than war.

In March 2021, UN human rights experts said in a statement that “the sanctions authorised by the US on the base of announced states of emergency violate a wide range of human rights in China, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other countries around the world.”

The US has also obstructed the work of international judicial institutions. In March 2020, the International Criminal Court (ICC) authorized an investigation into allegations of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Afghanistan, including any that may have been committed by Americans, which the US alliance system spared no effort in obstructing. In June 2020, former US President Trump issued an executive order that authorized asset freezes and family travel bans against ICC officials as well as other persons that contributed to the investigation. In September 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced sanctions against ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Director of the Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division Phakiso Mochochoko. These measures “constitute serious attacks against the Court, the Rome Statute system of international criminal justice, and the rule of law more generally,” the ICC said in a statement, calling the US steps “another attempt to interfere with the Court’s judicial and prosecutorial independence.”

• The Five Eyes Alliance countries have carried out mass surveillance of other countries and their own people.

The Five Eyes Alliance countries have long been engaged in large-scale cyber theft, surveillance and attacks, and obliged technology companies to insert “backdoors” in encrypted applications. The US has invested a large amount of money and human resources in cyber tapping and surveillance, with its total intelligence expenditure in 2018 reaching as much as $80.5 billion. In October 2013, the German government said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone may have been bugged by US intelligence. WikiLeaks disclosed in 2015 that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on French presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and Francois Hollande. In May 2021, media exposed another scandal of the US monitoring its European allies, reporting that the NSA spied on text messages and phone conversations of leaders from Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, etc. from 2012 to 2014 by tapping into Danish information cables.

The US, meanwhile, has used cyber means to conduct mass surveillance of ordinary people around the world. In June 2013, top-secret documents of the NSA program PRISM leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that the NSA was gathering nearly 5 billion mobile phone records per day. It was also exposed that the NSA had secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, stealing information from hundreds of millions of users and wantonly tracking their personal relationships and social activities. It was also known that the NSA had been monitoring mobile applications and grabbing personal data for years. The exposure of PRISM triggered a strong backlash, with public doubts and resentments about the US surveillance of the global network mounting in many countries.

On top of that, starting from the 1970s and by utilizing its control over Crypto AG, a Swiss company that sold encryption devices, the US Central Intelligence Agency on the one hand reaped millions of dollars through the sale of encoding devices to foreign governments and businesses, while on the other stealing confidential information from more than 120 countries by decrypting messages sent through Crypto AG devices.

• The UN Human Rights Council has expressed concerns in multiple statements over various US violations of human rights.

On Dec. 29, 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights said in a statement that the enforcement of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, also known as the Caesar Act, “may worsen the existing humanitarian crisis, depriving the Syrian people of the chance to rebuild their basic infrastructure.”

“What particularly alarms me is the way the Caesar Act runs roughshod over human rights, including the Syrian people’s rights to housing, health, and an adequate standard of living and development,” the UN human rights expert said. “The US government must not put obstacles in the way of rebuilding of hospitals because lack of medical care threatens the entire population’s very right to life.”

On Feb. 23, 2021, 16 experts of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, including the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, issued a joint statement calling on the US government to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center and address ongoing violations of human rights being committed against the 40 remaining detainees, including torture and other ill-treatment, during its review of how to close the center.

The US government should ensure that those who had been subjected to enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, torture, and denied fundamental rights were given reparation, and ensure independent and impartial investigations and prosecutions of allegations, such as secret detention and unfair trial, the experts said.

On March 2, experts of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, including the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, raised serious concerns about the environmental pollution in the southern US state of Louisiana, saying the development of petrochemical complexes in the area has not only polluted the surrounding water and air, but also subjected its residents to health problems.

This form of environmental racism poses serious and disproportionate threats to the enjoyment of several human rights of its largely African American residents, including the right to life, the right to health, the right to an adequate standard of living and cultural rights, and US federal environmental regulations have failed to protect African Americans’ legal rights, the experts said.

On March 4, experts, including the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights at the Human Rights Council, issued a statement, saying that the emergency declarations by the US government that authorize unilateral sanctions are resulting in severe human rights violations.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows governments to suspend the protection of certain rights during emergencies only when the very existence of states is endangered, but US emergencies often violate these rules, the experts said, urging the US to refrain from imposing unilateral coercive measures on other countries on the grounds of a prolonged state of national emergency.

• The US “family separation” immigration policy forcibly separated children from their parents, seriously endangering immigrants’ rights to life, dignity and freedom, among other human rights.

The infamous “family separation” immigration policy is the “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry into the US announced by the Department of Justice. In April 2018, US border enforcement officials sought to curb illegal border crossings by subjecting anyone who entered the country illegally to “detention, trial, and deportation” and relocation of their minor children, resulting in the separation of nearly 2,000 minors from their parents in less than two months. Media revealed images of immigrant children being held in “large cages” and recordings of them crying for their parents, saying that the children might face violent law enforcement and dilapidated temporary housing sites, making their physical and mental health a concern.

The perverse acts of the US have triggered strong condemnation from the international community. Then Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray called the policy “cruel and inhumane.” The El Salvador government called on the US government to consider the protection of minors first rather than the immigration issue, and not to solve the immigration problem in a crude way that violates human rights. The Guatemalan government issued a statement calling on the US to reconsider its immigration policy and protect the basic human rights of Guatemalan immigrants. The Honduran foreign ministry said that forcibly separating children from their parents would make them face judicial proceedings alone in a foreign country, which is inhumane.

In June 2018, the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement, saying that the US immigration policy violated international human rights standards and might amount to “torture.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that refugees and migrants should always be “treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law.” then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said that the practice of child migrant separation may cause “irreparable harm” with “lifelong consequences,” and “the thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.”

Under pressure, then US President Trump signed an executive order in June 2018 to end the “family separation” policy, but continued to implement the “zero tolerance” policy detaining illegal immigrants and their minor children together. However, according to Manfred Nowak, who led a UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty published in November 2019, more than 100,000 children were held in migration-related detention in the US in 2015, the latest figure his team could find, and in 2019 the US held far more children than any other countries “for which he has reliable figures.”

Till June 2021, the Biden administration had facilitated the reunification of only seven children with their parents, leaving 2,127 still separated from their parents, according to a report released by the US Department of Homeland Security. The US has not stopped its violations against immigrants’ human rights, including the rights to life, dignity and liberty.

• The US coordinated the forced landing of the then Bolivian president’s jet over suspicion of hiding Edward Snowden.

On July 2, 2013, the US, suspecting that then Bolivian President Evo Morales was hiding Edward Snowden, coordinated with Italy, France, Spain and Portugal to ban the then Bolivian president’s jet from their airspace, resulting in its forced landing in the Austrian capital Vienna, and a forced search until it was confirmed that Snowden was not on board.

Then Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra said that the US government was behind the rumors that Morales was hiding Snowden, and that the rumors were “generated by the US government.”

Bolivia’s air travel rights were violated, he said, adding that “it is an outrage. It is an abuse. It is a violation of the conventions and agreements of international air transportation.”

Then Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino considered this “a huge offense,” and said that he would call for a Union of South American Nations special summit with foreign secretaries to discuss this issue. The Cuban foreign ministry released a statement condemning the move, saying that “this unacceptable, unfounded and arbitrary act” offended all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

• The US and its allies have intervened in others’ affairs under the name of humanitarianism, while their own human rights situation has deteriorated.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) issued comments on child labor issue in the US in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2020, repeatedly expressing concern about the large number of severe injuries to children working on farms in the country.

In 2014, the ILO Committee on the Application of Standards (CAS) listed as one of the key country cases that the US violated ILO Convention No. 182, (which requires countries to take immediate, effective and time-bound measures to eliminate the worst forms of child labor as a matter of urgency.)

Forced labor has been ubiquitous in the US. On any given day in 2016, there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the US, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index published by the Walk Free Foundation, which also revealed that in 2016, of 1,067 potential labor trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the majority involved domestic work, agriculture and farm work, travelling sales crews, restaurant or food services, and health and beauty services, among others.

Regarding US compliance with Convention No. 105 (Abolition of Forced Labor Convention), the CEACR noted in 2017 that “the committee strongly encouraged the government to strengthen its efforts to ensure that racial discrimination at the sentencing and other stages of the criminal justice process do not result in the imposition of racially disproportionate prison sentences involving compulsory labor,” and that “the Committee urges the government to pursue its efforts to ensure the adoption of federal legislation to address this issue.”

In Germany, the number of crimes committed by far-right extremists reached 23,064 in 2020, and anti-Semitic crimes increased by 16%, according to official statistics. In the European Union (EU), the gender pay gap stands at 14.1% and one in three women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence.

The EU has shirked its responsibility on refugee resettlement and has no regard for the human rights of refugees, and the fires in refugee camps in Greece are still fear-provoking. The EU border agencies refused to allow refugee boats to disembark, and even pushed refugees back into the sea in an outrageous move.

The fourth sin: destruction.

For a long time, the US and its allies have been keen on subverting other governments, cultivating regional proxies, and deliberately creating confrontation, destructing without constructing, disregarding international law and rules, and wantonly violating the rights and interests of other countries, becoming the biggest spoiler of regional stability.

• The US, together with its allies, has engaged in “color revolutions” and intervened in other countries’ internal affairs.

In the 42 years between 1947 and 1989 alone, the US carried out 64 covert operations of subversion and six overt ones, wrote Lindsey O’Rourke, political scientist at Boston College, in her book “Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War.”

After the end of the Cold War, the US became more unscrupulous in promoting interventionism and frequently exported “color revolutions.” At the end of 2003, the US forced then Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign on the grounds of fraudulent vote counting in the parliamentary elections, and supported one of the leaders of the opposition, Mikheil Saakashvili, to be elected president, which has been known as the “Rose Revolution.”

In October 2004, the US concocted the “fraud” scandal of the Ukrainian elections, incited the youth of Ukraine to take to the streets, and supported Viktor Yushchenko to be elected president in the re-election, which has been called the “Orange Revolution.”

In March 2005, the US incited the opposition in Kyrgyzstan to protest the results of the parliamentary elections, which eventually turned into riots and forced then President Askar Akayev to flee and announce his resignation, which was known as the “Tulip Revolution.”

In the past decade, the US has invaded or instigated regime change in more than 20 countries, and has repeatedly intervened in and manipulated “color revolutions” in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and some countries in West Asia and North Africa.

On Oct. 20, 2020, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin said that the US was plotting a “color revolution” in Moldova.

On Feb. 18, 2021, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the decision of the European Court of Human Rights demanding that Russia immediately release the opposition figure Alexey Navalny was “a very serious attempt to interfere in Russia’s domestic judicial affairs,” which showed haste and obvious bias, and raised a lot of questions. Russian Minister of Justice Konstantin Chuychenko said the decision was impracticable because it had no legal basis.

Britain was involved in plotting the military coup in November 2019 in Bolivia to gain access to its lithium deposits, and supported Bolivia’s new government after then President Evo Morales of the Movement Towards Socialism party was forced to resign, reported British newspaper Morning Star with declassified foreign documents in March 2021. The deadly violence following the coup was condemned by human rights groups.

• The US and its allies have left an unmanageable mess in the Middle East and beyond.

The US and its allies have frequently created chaos in the Middle East, seriously weakening the strength of countries in the region, leading to the expansion of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and plunging the region into an unresolvable security and governance deficit. US, British, Australian and other coalition soldiers in the Middle East have rampantly abused prisoners, raped, pillaged and killed civilians, and their brutality is no less than that of terrorists.

The US has been addicted to drawing a faction to its own side to squash another in the Middle East, deliberately creating regional conflicts and dividing Middle East countries to achieve its offshore balancing strategy. In recent years, the US has played up the “Iranian threat” and sectarian confrontation in the Gulf, and forced countries in the region to choose sides. The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, demanding that Iran’s missile program and regional policies be included in negotiations, while on the other hand, it presumed Iran was guilty, linking all incidents, including attacks on regional oil facilities and tanker explosions, to Iran or its proxies, with an intention to confirm Iran’s regional “misdeeds” and stir up insecurity in the region. In early 2020, the US conducted the targeted killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, and tensions in the region escalated abruptly.

• Britain, France and other countries sowed the seeds of trouble in order to keep their influence when they were forced to end their colonial rule, and still have “colonial obsession.”

“Divide and rule” was an important tool Britain used to administer its colonies, which has left the Indo-Pakistani conflict, triggered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and created the Cyprus problem.

First, Britain has left the Indo-Pakistani conflict. After its occupation of India, Britain used the caste and sectarian contradiction to sow discord among classes and social groups in India to strengthen its role and maintain its colonial rule. In June 1947, then Governor-General of India Louis Mountbatten proposed a plan to divide India into Hindustan, which was predominantly Hindu, and Pakistan, which was predominantly Islamic, and to transfer power to each. After the partition, there have been numerous frictions and conflicts between the two parties, with the conflicts and hatred between them deepening, which triggered wars over Kashmir.

Second, Britain has triggered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestine was originally a part of the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, out of its strategic need, Britain supported the Arab people in Palestine to resist the Ottoman Empire, and on the other hand supported the Zionist movement, in favor of Jews establishing a national homeland in Palestine. Since then, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never stopped.

Third, Britain has created the Cyprus problem. Cyprus is close to Greece and Turkey, and the Greek and Turkish communities on the island regard the two countries as their respective mother countries. In the process of Cyprus, a former British colony, seeking independence, Britain adopted the same tactics to provoke the Greek-Turkish conflict and promote the internationalization of the Cyprus problem. Later, an armed conflict broke out between the Greek and Turkish communities, which led to the division of the island between the north and south, and the conflict has remained unresolved.

Embracing “new interventionism,” European countries have adopted the “obey-or-die” policy against African country leaders, secretly instigating and even sending troops to intervene in the civil wars in Cote d’Ivoire and other countries, undermining the peace and stability of the sub-region. Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands sent warships to the South China Sea to show off their power. The European Parliament and the Czech Republic issued resolutions related to Taiwan and arranged for officials and parliamentarians to visit Taiwan, blatantly arguing for “Taiwan independence” separatists, and seriously undermining the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

The European Parliament, under the banner of “safeguarding human rights,” awarded the “Sakharov Prize” to criminals sentenced by the Chinese judiciary in accordance with the law, grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs and violating China’s judicial sovereignty.

In March 2021, the EU imposed unilateral sanctions on relevant Chinese individuals and entities based on lies and misinformation and under the pretext of the so-called human rights issue in Xinjiang, grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs, blatantly violating international law and basic norms of international relations, and seriously damaging China-EU relations.

The fifth sin: lying.

In order to protect their own interests and marginalize and suppress those countries that disagree with them, the US and its allies have resorted to lying and abusing, making up counterfactual evidence and false statements with no bottom lines, and repeatedly deceiving the world and provoking conflicts and clashes under the pretext of fabrications.

On the grounds of “washing powder,” the US provoked the Iraq War with its allies.

On Feb. 5, 2003, in a UN Security Council meeting on Iraq, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a test tube containing white powder, claiming that it was the evidence that Iraq was developing chemical weapons. On that ground, a combined force of troops from the US and Britain launched the Iraq War on March 20. By the end of 2011 when the US withdrew all its troops from Iraq, it found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

While responding to the accusation by Western countries in 2014 that Russia had been secretly annexing eastern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “Proof? Let’s see it!”

“The entire world remembers the US secretary of state demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council,” he said.

• The US made up the story of war hero Jessica Lynch.

In April 2003, the US military portrayed the heroic story of Jessica Lynch, a female soldier who served in Iraq. Lynch was wounded in an ambush by Iraqis but fought till the end in this outnumbered clash, according to the US military. It later claimed that the 19-year-old was raped and tortured after being captured.

The story infuriated the Americans. US special forces raided the hospital where Lynch was held and rescued her. CNN filmed the entire operation and released the footage of the rescue a few days later.

An all-American heroine, the story of Lynch’s capture and rescue became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict, which gave a huge boost to the morale of the US military, and made up a stunning storyline for Hollywood filmmakers.

As a matter of fact, however, Lynch never fired her weapon during the battle. She was seriously injured as the vehicle she and her fellow soldiers were riding in crashed in the ambush. Iraqi medical staff who rescued Lynch reached out to the US military to free her, but was rejected.

According to Iraqi doctors, the hospital informed them of the rescue operation in advance that the operation was a show performed by the military.

In April 2007, appearing as a witness at the congressional committee investigating military misinformation from the battlefield, Lynch recalled the friendly Iraqi medical staff in the rescue and the fine treatment she had received during the time she was wounded and taken prisoner of war, saying that the tales of great heroism by the Pentagon was a hype based on lies.

• The US-led NATO brazenly launched Kosovo War on the baseless fabrications of genocide.

On March 24, 1999, the 78-day Kosovo War broke out as the US-led NATO launched an airstrike against Yugoslavia. A total of more than 2,000 people were killed, more than 6,000 injured, and nearly 1 million people became refugees in the war which also caused an economic loss of over $200 billion on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

On April 7, 1999, then US Defense Secretary William Cohen said, “the appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo” made it clear that the war “is a fight for justice over genocide.”

Then US President Bill Clinton defended NATO’s air attacks on Yugoslavia, claiming that “Nine of every 10 Kosovar Albanians now has been driven from their home; thousands murdered; at least 100,000 missing” and that NATO works to reverse systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass killing. CNN reported that Clinton criticized the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and compared the actions to those of Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust.

The Washington Times reported in November 1999 that the Clinton administration exaggerated the number of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs.

In addition, according to the United Nations Charter, “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” except in a few circumstances where the UN Security Council shall decide whether to use force. However, the US and NATO launched the operation without the UN authorization.

• The US and its allies launched the Syrian war under the hoax of self-initiated chemical weapon attacks.

In early 2011, anti-government demonstrations spread across Syria, which later escalated into a civil war. With the financial support from the US, the White Helmets, also known as Syria Civil Defense, faked videos of false-flag airstrikes and chemical attacks on civilians, putting a target on the back of the Syrian government.

Taking the videos as evidence, the governments of the US, Britain and France later claimed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack its civilians, and thus launched targeted airstrikes in the country.

According to a UN report released in 2019, “there are reasonable grounds to believe that international coalition forces may not have directed their attacks at a specific military objective, or failed to do so with the necessary precaution.”

“Launching indiscriminate attacks that result in death or injury to civilians amounts to a war crime in cases in which such attacks are conducted recklessly,” said the report by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s permanent representative to the EU, said the White Helmet had repeatedly used the tactic of faked videos to frame the Syrian and Russian governments. According to Chizhov, there are personnel “specifically trained” by the White Helmet, who “were already caught in the act with staged videos.”

Aside from providing the so-called humanitarian aid, the White Helmet had long been producing fake news and spreading misinformation, said Russian and Syrian reports, adding that Western countries including the US, Britain, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium have been its long-time sponsors.

• The US and its allies made up a pack of lies about the COVID-19 pandemic in an attempt to deflect blame for their ineffective response to the epidemic in their own countries.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US administration and other Western governments have shrugged off the WHO guidelines to take effective prevention measures, instead, they have been casting blame and doubts on China.

From gloating to waiting for the so-called herd immunity, they have resorted to a series of fabrications to numb their people, claiming that “the virus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan;” “the virus originated in Wuhan;” and “it was the Chinese government’s procrastinated response that had caused the outbreak to spread around the world.”

Trump and Pompeo keep claiming to have collected new evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment (MACE), a major Department of Defense contractor, released a report saying that the novel coronavirus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was criticized by The Daily Beast, a US news and opinion website, as being “filled with information that’s just plain wrong.”

The 30-page document claimed to rely on social media postings, commercial satellite imagery, and cellphone location data to draw the conclusion that some sort of “hazardous event” occurred at the Wuhan lab in October 2019.

Earlier this year, a WHO expert team that visited Wuhan in central China to carry out the virus source tracing research concluded that a laboratory incident is “extremely unlikely” to be the cause of COVID-19, which, however, was ignored and questioned publicly by the US and other Western countries.

According to the WHO, China has provided the organization with information about a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan as early as Jan. 3, 2020. Two days later, on Jan. 5, the WHO shared detailed information about the cluster of cases through the International Health Regulations (2005) Event Information System, which is accessible to all its members. The event notice provided information on the cases and advised its members to take precautions to reduce the risk of acute respiratory infections. Yet Western countries turned a deaf ear to the advice.

• The US wrongly accused China of militarizing the South China Sea, and strengthened its military deployment with its allies in the region.

In recent years, the US has stepped up its military deployment with its allies such as Japan and the Philippines, citing the so-called “freedom of navigation,” while misleading international public opinion by accusing China of militarizing the South China Sea.

According to incomplete statistics, from 2017 to 2020, the US military conducted “Freedom of Navigation Operations” as many as 15 times in the South China Sea.

What’s more, the US strengthened the deployment of military forces in surrounding areas of the South China Sea, especially that of sophisticated strategic weapons, and continued to seek to strengthen military partnerships with the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and other countries. The US also strived to seek cooperation with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

East Asia Forum, an international policy forum based in Australia, pointed out in an article published on May 2, 2017, that “media distortion flourishes when academic analysts themselves push US-slanted research.”

“The US argument is that freedom of navigation is indivisible and includes both commercial navigation and US IRR probes. The US then argues that China’s interference with its military vessels and aircraft in and over China’s exclusive economic zone violates freedom of navigation,” it said.

• The US fabricated a preposterous lie about a “genocide” in Xinjiang, wooing its allies to impose sanctions on China.

In the past two years, based on so-called Xinjiang-related research reports concocted by pseudo-scholars such as Adrian Zenz, and experiences of some so-called “witnesses,” the US has wooed anti-China forces in the West to make up and disseminate fallacies related to Xinjiang, falsely accuse China of committing genocide against Uygurs in Xinjiang, defame China’s policy on Xinjiang, grossly interfere in China’s internal affairs, and announce sanctions against Chinese entities and individuals, in an attempt to deceive the international community and disrupt Xinjiang’s stability and development.

According to The Grayzone, a US-based independent news website which produces original investigative journalism, Zenz, a German far-right ideologue, has invented statistics and spun tales to justify his false conclusion.

“A careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is contradicted by flagrant data abuse, fraudulent claims, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations,” said the website in its report.

Having visited Xinjiang “from one end to the other” and “seen a lot of things” during his trips, French writer Maxime Vivas recounted what he saw in a book entitled “Uygurs, to put an end to fake news,” which has dismantled the lie of genocide in Xinjiang.

• The US and its allies vilified China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and fabricated lies such as China’s “new colonialism” and “debt trap diplomacy.”

The US and its allies have been vilifying the BRI. Deliberately ignoring the positive role of Chinese investment in promoting regional economic development, some Western media and politicians are fueling hypes of the so-called “new colonialism” and “new imperialism,” and disseminating such fallacies as the countries joining the BRI are falling into China’s “debt trap,” and China is the sole beneficiary of its investment.

The narrative of Chinese “dept-trap diplomacy” is just a powerful, well-told lie, which wrongfully portrays China and the developing countries it deals with, according to an article co-authored by Deborah Brautigam, an international political economy professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Meg Rithmire, an associate professor at Harvard Business School.

The authors indicated in the piece published on the Atlantic that the former US administration was touting the fallacy of “debt-trap diplomacy,” taking the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota as the prime example to warn against China’s strategic use of debts.

However, it was Canadian and Danish firms – not China – that first carried out feasibility studies for the port, putting forward plans to finance, build and operate the project, but failed to move forward, said the article.

In 2007, with China Harbour Engineering Company lobbying hard, the Export-Import Bank of China offered a more than $300 million, 15-year commercial loan for the project, and the group won the contract.

Among the creditors of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, Japan and the World Bank are the biggest owners. The Hambantota Port debt in 2017 accounted for only 5% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, which was not the cause of the country’s financial crisis, said a former central bank governor. Politicians and media from the US and other Western countries have been turning a deaf ear to the will of developing countries to pursue development.

Fueling US oppression and economic decoupling from China, Australia made up preposterous fabrications hyping up the so-called “China threat” theory and “China interference” theory, continued to stipulate such bills as “foreign interference laws” and “Foreign Relations Act,” rejected a number of Chinese companies’ investment in Australia and tore up Victoria State’s BRI agreements with China citing national interest.

• In the name of “human rights” and “democracy,” the US and its allies keep selling the world conspiracy and lies.

Some former suzerain states in European countries promised their African colonies that the Western-style democracy was the “gospel” of development, which, in reality, pushed African countries into the trap of endless political succession crisis and development deficit. Europe claimed to have provided the largest aid to Africa but turned out to be just lip service, which procrastinated the development of Africa.

After the start of the Arab Spring movement, the EU promised to increase aid to Arab countries year by year, but facts have shown a downward trend. In 2014, the EU accomplished only 20% of its goal for the year. The bloc branded itself as the biggest funder of the COVAX mechanism, but the number of vaccines it exported to developing countries is less than 5% of its production capacity.

On April 19, 2021, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent from the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a joint statement, strongly rejecting a British government-backed report on racism and ethnic disparities in the country, saying the report further distorted and falsified historic facts, and could even fuel racism, racial discrimination and negative racial stereotypes.

The statement condemned the report’s assertion that while there might be overt acts of racism in the UK, there was no institutional racism there.

“The report’s conclusion that racism is either a product of the imagination of people of African descent or of discrete, individualized incidents ignores the pervasive role that the social construction of race was designed to play in society, particularly in normalizing atrocity, in which the British state and institutions played a significant role,” the statement said.

According to experts, many previous studies and reports have all shown the damaging impact of institutional racism and deep-rooted inequities in areas such as health, education, employment, housing, stop-and-search practices, and the criminal justice system in the UK.

The statement pointed out that the report’s mythical representation of enslavement is an attempt to sanitize the history of the trade in enslaved Africans.

“This is a reprehensible, although not unfamiliar tactic, employed by many whose wealth came directly from the enslavement of others, ever since slavery was outlawed. Seeking to silence the brutal role of enslavers, the mind-numbing generational wealth they accrued, and the social capital and political influence they gained from exploiting Black bodies is a deliberate attempt at historical misrepresentation,” it said

The sixth sin: covering up misdeeds.

In recent years, the US has been judging right and wrong and treating other countries by whether they are allies or not in ways like covering up, giving unprincipled protection to and conniving at many misconducts of its allies, and even manipulating or taking advantage of their weaknesses to achieve its sinister geopolitical purpose.

• Ignoring the interests of all mankind and the opposition of the international community, the US connived at Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean.

On April 13, 2021, the Japanese government announced its decision to discharge over one million tons of nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear accident into the Pacific Ocean, sparking widespread doubts and grave concerns in Japan and among its neighboring countries. However, American and the Western media have barely voiced criticism, and many Western international organizations and politicians even defended Japan. The US expressed its support for Japan’s decision, saying that Japan “appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked Japan on Twitter for its “transparent efforts” in dealing with the nuclear-contaminated water.

A majority of the international community has questioned the US support for Japan. On April 15, the special rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council on toxics and human rights, on right to food as well as on human rights and the environment issued a joint statement, expressing “deep regret at Japan’s decision to release contaminated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean” and saying the discharge “could impact millions of lives and livelihoods in the pacific region” and “imposes considerable risks to the full enjoyment of human rights of concerned populations in and beyond the borders of Japan.” The experts said that the Japanese government’s decision was highly concerning given the warnings about the effect of such a discharge on so many people and the environment at large. American marine conservation biologist Rick Steiner published a commentary on Anchorage Daily News, urging the US government to immediately stop Japan’s discharge plan, and advocating the international community to set up an investigation committee independent from the International Atomic Energy Agency to review issues related to Fukushima’s treatment of nuclear-contaminated water and provide transparent, independent and scientific suggestions.

The US seemingly supports Japan’s release of nuclear-contaminated water, but it has in fact already put strict regulations on the import of Japanese products. In March 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration updated the list of “Import Alert 99-33,” but still restricted the import of certain agricultural, aquacultural, aquatic products and additional products from Japan out of consideration of nuclear radiation.

• The US provided cover for Japan to loosen control over military and helped Japan to lift the ban on its right of “collective self-defense.”

Due to the crime of aggression it committed during World War II, Japan, according to Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Declaration and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, should completely eradicate militarism and disarm its navy, army and air forces. However, in the early days of the Cold War, in order to contain socialism development, support and rearm Japan, the US was lenient with a large number of Japanese militarists who committed war crimes, and acquiesced in some criminals returning to the Japanese politics. The US self-willingly concluded the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the US and Japan, signed and revised the Guidelines for Japan-US Defense Cooperation, and has continuously expanded the scope of military operations of the US-Japan Alliance. In addition, the US connived at the Japanese government’s move to enact the new legislation for peace and security and push for revising the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.

On July 1, 2014, the interim cabinet meeting of the Japanese government adopted a cabinet decision to reinterpret the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defense. Then US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel issued a statement later, supporting the Japanese government’s decision to lift the ban on the right of “collective self-defense” and welcoming the Japanese new policy. Foreign media analyzed that the US was the most important driving force and the key factor behind Japan’s violation of the pacifist Constitution and its rearmament.

• The US covered up the crimes committed by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.

During the years following World War II, the US successively sent several experts on germ warfare at Fort Detrick to Japan to collect information about bacteria warfare and other biological weapons from the main members of Unit 731, including Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731. In order to attain the Unit 731’s data and material on germ warfare, the US paid 250,000 yen, concealed the heinous crimes of Shiro Ishii and Unit 731 from the world, and even made him a consultant in biological weapons for Fort Detrick.

According to media reports, the US offered Unit 731 immunity from war crimes charges in exchange for their data on experiments of human, bacteria and poison gas, as well as germ warfare, for its own biological weapons research purpose. The archives show that the covers of the reports on the experiments conducted by Unit 731 on Bacillus anthracis, Burkholderia mallei and Yersinia pestis all have written the words of “Biological Warfare Laboratory, Fort Detrick, Maryland” as well as the black ink print of “Technical Library, Dugway Proving Ground.”

• The Truman administration of the US supported the apartheid policy in South Africa to avoid condemnation of its own racial policies from other countries.

After 1948, considering the Cold War, the US interests in South Africa, and the weak anti-apartheid force in the US, the Truman administration adopted a so-called “middle road” policy towards the apartheid policy in South Africa, that is, verbally opposing the apartheid policy in South Africa, while at the same time preventing the international community from intervening in the racial issues in South Africa. On March 21, 1960, South African white police officers opened fire on a crowd of protesters who were surrounding a police station in Sharpeville to protest against the apartheid policy, killing 69 people, including eight women and 10 children. This incident aroused widespread condemnation from the international community, and the United Nations also passed a resolution to criticize it. Against the backdrop that African-American civil rights movement rose in the US, then US government tried its best to favor then authorities of South Africa. The Mississippi State Legislature even passed a bill supporting the South African government’s firmness in defending the apartheid policy and its unwavering determination in the face of protesters.

William Edmondson, former US ambassador to South Africa, pointed out that because the US itself was in a dilemma on civil rights issues, the US government was diplomatically wary of racial issues in South Africa, lest the international community should turn its attention to civil rights issues on the US soil. The research committee on American policy towards South Africa reported that because the US was afraid that other countries might condemn its own racial policy, it supported South Africa and blocked the United Nations intervention in the apartheid policy with the excuse that the racial policy was South Africa’s domestic issue.

• On the Palestinian and Syrian issues, the US has long taken sides with Israel in violation of relevant UN Security Council resolutions and international consensus.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank during the Middle East War in 1967, and built Jewish settlements in the two districts, which has been considered illegal by the United Nations and the international community. The International Court of Justice pointed out that the construction of the separation wall has violated international law. For decades, the US has supported Israel politically, economically and militarily, hence Israel gradually expanded its settlement plan in the occupied Palestinian territories. After Trump took office, he replaced the “two-state solution” with the so-called “Middle East Peace Plan.” In December 2017, Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In May 2018, the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem. In November 2019, Pompeo announced that the US no longer viewed Israel’s settlements in the West Bank as inconsistent with international law. In October 2017, in order to oppose the so-called “anti-Semitism” activities of UNESCO and deny the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people, the US and Israel jointly withdrew from the UNESCO, which came into effect at the end of 2018.

On March 25, 2019, the US recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel through a presidential proclamation signed by Trump and then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which drew global criticism, including from Syria, Russia and the UN. The Resolution 497 adopted by the UN Security Council in 1981 clearly stated that the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect. On Nov. 5, 2020, the UN General Assembly confirmed Syria’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights occupied by Israel since the battle in June 1967. Guterres clearly emphasized that the status of the Golan Heights has not changed. In addition, Syria’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the US decision in 2019 a shameless attack on Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia warned the US that its move seriously violated international law, would hinder the settlement of the Syrian conflict and intensify regional tensions in an all-round way.

• The US and its allies turn a blind eye to each other’s serious social problems.

After the Floyd incident happened in the US in 2020, the Canadian government only made a vague statement. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau tweeted that “in the US today, we saw accountability for the murder of George Floyd. But make no mistake, systemic racism and anti-Black racism still exist. And they exist in Canada, too.” This statement did not condemn the US, which shows the Canadian government’s cowardly mentality of not daring to criticize Washington publicly and appeasement to the country.

Meanwhile, the US also turned a blind eye to racial problems in Canada. On June 3, 2019, at the opening ceremony of Women Deliver Conference as the Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ final report was freshly released, Trudeau acknowledged the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls across Canada in recent decades as “genocide.” However, US politicians have been mute on this. Instead of condemning and criticizing Canada, US public opinion claimed that the Canadian government had made great efforts to solve related problems.

• American allies excessively give “green lights” to the US when it comes to the application of international rules.

Australia claims to defend the “rules-based international order” and has stated that global order should be based on “agreed rules rather than on the exercise of power alone” in its 2017 foreign policy white paper. However, in order to tie in with the US strategy towards the Middle East, Australia refused to recognize the decision of the International Criminal Court to accept Palestine as an observer state, and hindered the ICC from investigating Israel’s alleged war crimes committed in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. After the US announced to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Australia changed its Middle East policy that lasted for decades and echoed that it would consider following the move of the US.

In order to safeguard the military interests of the US and the colonial interests of Britain in Diego Garcia, Australia opposed the ICJ advisory opinion on the decolonization of Chagos Archipelago and relevant resolutions by the UN General Assembly.

The seventh sin: infighting.

For its allies, the US sometimes covers up their wrongdoings, sometimes resorts to punishment or threat, playing with “a trick of control.” By taking a carrot-and-stick approach, the US makes the allies to follow its steps. In fact, there is little mutual trust within the alliance system, and bedfellows have different dreams.

• The US suppressed Japan through trade means and forced it to sign the Plaza Accord.

In the 1980s, the US economy was mired in stagnation while Japan experienced an economic boom, prompting an increasing trade surplus with the US. Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the US government initiated 20 times of “Section 301 investigations” into Japanese products from 1976 to 1989, most of which ended with Japan’s voluntary export restrictions.

In September 1985, the US, Britain, France, the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan signed the accord at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, which mainly included curbing inflation, expanding domestic demand, opening trade market and capital liberalization. After the signing of the agreement, the Japanese yen appreciated significantly, its exports were hit, and a large overcapacity emerged in the country.

The US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement was signed in 1986 and renewed in 1991. After the expiration of the five-year deal, the market shares of the US-made semiconductors in both the world and Japan have expanded to around 30%. In addition, the US successively launched seven trade and financial wars against Japan, involving such industries as textile, steel, color TV, automobile, exchange rate and semiconductor, as well as Japan’s systematic reform forced by the US.

In order to reduce the damage of yen’s excessive appreciation to economic competitiveness, the Japanese government chose to maintain the momentum of economic expansion by relaxing credit, leading to bigger bubbles in the stock market and the housing market. Later, the Japanese government quickly raised the central bank’s benchmark interest rate in a radical step to prevent an overheating economy. As a consequence, the economic bubbles burst.

The Plaza Hotel deal is regarded as the turning point of the “Lost 20 Years” of Japan.

• The US used trade deficit as an excuse to force its allies to revise bilateral free trade agreements.

In 2012, the US and South Korea signed the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Years later, Trump claimed that the agreement has caused a trade deficit with South Korea. In September 2018, South Korean President Moon Jae-in had to sign an amended agreement with Trump.

In August 1992, the US, Canada and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and established a free trade zone in North America, the world’s largest regional economic integration organization at that time. When Trump took office in January 2017, he required renegotiations of the deal, arguing that it had increased the US trade deficit and moved tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage Mexico. After more than a year of negotiations, the three countries signed the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which opened Canada’s $16 billion agricultural market to the US.

• Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the US and its allies have been blaming each other and setting up barriers for each other. The US even intercepted allies’ medical supplies, and hoarded vaccines and other urgently-needed protective equipment.

Since the onset of COVID-19, the anti-pandemic supplies ordered and purchased by US allies such as Germany, France and Canada have been snapped up at higher prices or intercepted by the US. In April 2020, the Federal Emergency Management Agency suddenly ordered the 3M company to stop exporting its masks to Canada and Latin American countries, and to temporarily cancel all existing orders. The US bought out short-term supply of Remdesivir, an antiviral drug expected to be of great use for COVID-19 treatment, and banned the export of US medical supplies such as masks to other countries, including its allies.

India has provided drug assistance to the US in the early days of the pandemic. After the severe outbreak in India, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and many others called on the US to remove the export ban on vaccine raw materials to increase India’s vaccine production, but the US said it would prioritize controlling the outbreak at home and vaccinating its people.

The move sparked anti-US sentiment in India and drew criticisms from US allies and the international community. Indian media outlet ZEE reported that after taking office, Biden immediately cited the Defense Production Act to prohibit exports of key raw materials for vaccine production, so as to ensure that US vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer could have abundant material supplies and realize all-day production. The Times of India has said that Washington’s acts of hoarding vaccines and keeping a blind eye to the severe pandemic in India have ignited anti-US sentiment among Indian netizens.

On May 5, 2021, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said her country supported the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s proposal on the waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines, and it would actively participate in the WTO negotiations about the possible waiver and encourage other countries to do so as well.

Germany and France objected to that. A spokesman for the German government said the US-proposed waiver of intellectual property rights for vaccines would cause “serious problems” for global vaccine production. French President Emmanuel Macron told the EU summit that the COVID-19 vaccine patents were not the key question at present, and criticized Britain and the US for blocking the exports of vaccines and raw materials to other countries. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU was holding an open attitude to patent talks, but sharing technology was not a quick response to the pandemic.

• In order to maintain regional dominance, the US has never hesitated to abandon, sanction or suppress its allies.

In July 2016, an attempted military coup broke out in Turkey, killing more than 240 Turkish citizens and injuring over 2,000 others. Turkish authorities accused US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen of inciting the coup, listed the Gulen movement as a terrorist organization, and asked 83 countries including the US to extradite 425 members of the group. The request has always been rejected by the US government.

In order to combat the extremist group “Islamic State,” Washington has long supported a Kurdish-led armed group in Syria and regarded it as a major ally. However, the US suddenly abandoned it later to reduce the burden of garrison and ease its relations with Turkey. In the second half of 2019, before the Turkish government launched a cross-border military offensive against the armed group, Washington suddenly withdrew its troops from relevant areas and stated that it would “not support or participate.”

Guarding against Turkey for a long time, the US tried its best to disrupt Turkey’s efforts to move closer to Russia, and imposed sanctions on Turkey for its purchase of Russian weapons, applying provisions of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act to a NATO ally for the first time. The Biden administration announced that it recognized the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “genocide” and promoted the legislation of relevant sanctions, pressuring Turkey to bow to the US.

In 2018, Turkey sought to purchase US-made Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles but failed. Later, Ankara signed an S-400 air defense system contract with Moscow. In response, Washington took multiple measures to put pressure on Turkey, including sanctions, prohibiting the Export-Import Bank of the US from providing credit for Turkey, and kicking Turkey out of the F-35 fighter jet program without returning the R&D funds and the fighter deposit paid by Turkey.

• The US economic bully is “an equal treatment” to all allies.

Washington not only unscrupulously conducts trade protectionism, but also increases its control over its allies through trade agreements. In the USMCA negotiations, the US forced Canada to give up its sovereign right to sign trade agreements with other countries independently, and accept the unreasonable demand from the US to include a “poison pill clause” in the agreement, which stipulates that a signatory country has to get a green light from other signatories when negotiating and settling a free trade agreement with “non-market” economies. The clause obviously targeted specific countries such as China, and seriously disrupted and damaged the global free trade order.

One month after signing the USMCA, then US President Trump again raised the stick of sanctions against Canada, announcing the resumption of an additional 10% tariffs on some aluminum products imported from Canada in August 2020. The Canadian government slapped retaliatory tariffs on 3.6 billion Canadian dollars’ worth of US aluminum products. After months of consultations, Trump officially canceled the decision in October of that year, but at the same time he threatened to resume tariffs if Canadian aluminum export to the US surges.

After Biden took office, he signed an executive order to revoke the permit of Canada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline, which has caused significant impact on the economy of the energy-rich Canadian province of Alberta, and even exacerbated the Canadian economic situation amid the pandemic.

In 1996, the European Union enacted the EU Blocking Statute, which prohibits EU operators from complying with certain US laws. According to the statute, EU operators that comply with US laws instead of EU laws will be sanctioned, and they are allowed to sue the beneficiaries or the winning party in US-related cases in the Court of Justice of the EU.

In recent years, insisting that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is threatening the energy security of Europe, Washington opposed the project and imposed sanctions. In January 2021, the US announced sanctions on the Russian pipe-laying ship Fortuna. On March 25, Blinken said the Nord Stream 2 ran counter to the energy security goals set by the EU and might harm the interests of Ukraine, Poland and other countries. He reiterated Washington’s position on this project, including imposing sanctions on relevant companies committed to completing the pipe-laying work.

• The US used the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to suppress allies’ companies.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of the US prohibits American individuals and entities from paying bribes to foreign government officials to get business deals. In 2020, US prosecutors unsealed an indictment against two former executives of French transportation company Alstom and a former executive of Japanese trading company Marubeni Corporation, who allegedly bribed Indonesian officials. The three defendants were charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to Wall Street Journal reports in January 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on a bigger role in foreign investigations with US ties. It has expanded the international anti-corruption unit in recent years to find out individuals and organizations involved in crimes related to bribery, kleptocracy and antitrust.

In a case related to Alstom in 2014, Alstom and Marubeni Corporation respectively reached an accommodation with the US Department of Justice, agreeing to pay $772 million and an $88 million for reconciliation to resolve charges related to the Indonesian project as well as projects in other countries.

• There is constant bickering within the Group of Seven (G7), and the members appear to be odd bedfellows, with each having different ideas about the group’s internal and external issues.

In June 2018, the G7 summit was held in Canada. The communique of the summit pledged to reduce tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers and subsidies. But Trump said he refused to sign the joint statement. The US also announced that it will cancel the tariff exemption for steel and aluminum products of the EU, Canada and Mexico from June 1, and impose 25% punitive tariffs on steel and 10% on aluminum. The EU and Canada immediately stated that they would take reciprocal measures to defend their rights and impose roughly equivalent tariffs on sensitive American products. Besides trade issues, the G7 also put forward solutions such as reducing single-use plastics. However, two member countries, the US and Japan, have not signed the Ocean Plastics Charter.

In August 2019, the G7 summit was held in France. Trump said before the summit that the US will tax French wines if France levies a digital tax on US internet technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. For his part, Donald Tusk, then president of the European Council, said the EU will “respond in kind” if Washington imposes tariffs on France.

Reuters listed a series of controversial issues before the summit: Trump’s dissatisfaction with France’s passage of the bill to levy the digital services tax in July; the US dismissed other members’ efforts to address climate change; the US and Europe had differences on whether to re-admit Russia back to the G7; European powers tried to ease the tensions between the US and Iran.

In May 2021, the G7 meeting of foreign ministers was held in Britain. The US Department of State said in a statement that Blinken once again expressed strong opposition to the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline project in a meeting with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on the sidelines of the G7 meeting. Some experts pointed out that major European countries such as Germany and France will not follow the US in its policy toward Russia, given the continent’s dependence on Russian energy supplies.

Khairy Tourk, an American professor of economics, said that economic factors made it difficult for the US and Britain to expand the anti-China camp within the G7, as there are direct and enormous trade contacts between Germany, Japan, South Korea and China. India, one of the main beneficiaries of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank advocated by China, also will not openly take the American side.

• The US paid lip service to allies.

Recently, the Australian government rejoiced that the US declared its support for Australia to counter China’s “economic coercion.” However, other countries in the “Five Eyes,” including the US, not only paid lip service to Australia, but took the opportunity to expand their exports to China and quickly squeezed Australia’s market share in China.

According to Australian media, Australian wine exports to China decreased 98% from October 2020 to February 2021. Despite politicians from other “Five Eyes” countries expressing support for Australian wine, Australia’s exports to these countries saw a 25% decrease rather than an increase.

From December 2020 to February 2021, Australian coal exports to China fell to zero, while the share of other “Five Eyes” countries’ coal in the Chinese market rose from 2.7% to 6.1%. China’s market share of imported food and beverage claimed by Australia declined from 6.3% in April 2020 to 3.6% in February 2021, while the market share held by other countries of the “Five Eyes” grew from 25.5% to 39.5%.