Pepe Escobar

Neoliberal Dragons, Eurasian Wet Dreams, and Robocop Fantasies

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Goldman Sachs -- via economist Jim O’Neill -- invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t...

Following the Money in the Iran Crisis

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Let's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth.  Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop...

The Decline and Fall of Just About Everyone

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

More than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy’s top ten -- but not until...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the twenty-first century before dying and being embalmed.

President Bush: Frank, please consider filling a post I'm creating. It may mean long hours and dangerous nights, surrounded by some of the scummiest elements in our society.

Frank: You want me to be in your cabinet?
- The Naked Gun 2 1/2, starring Leslie Nielsen

It was not May '68 remixed. But in the end, micro-Napoleonic former casual populist French President Nicolas Sarkozy got his May '68 -- he of all people who always derided the "poisonous" heritage" of that time.

He may be destined for the dustbin of history as a one-term fiasco,...

Last Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stunned the world by declaring, in front of young members of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), that multiculturalism - or multikulti, as it is known in Germany - was dead.

The day before, I was in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt airport...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009.  That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang...

SAO PAULO -- Brazil is the country the whole world loves to love. Brazil is a (joyful) riddle wrapped in an (chaotic) enigma, with the added complexity that the riddle and the enigma are ritualistically juggling with a football, dancing a samba, ogling a sensual mulata, watching a telenovela and...

One may be tempted to evaluate American foreign policy as concocted by some deviant disciple of cinema exploitation genius Russ Meyer -- of Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! fame -- minus the profusion of breasts, of course.

And so as that self-appointed court stenographer Bob Woodward reveals in his latest court...

Former United States president Bill Clinton now says President Barack Obama is "getting his groove back". The same would apply to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. No stranger to New York's charms, the pious Mahdist -- who believes the occult 12th imam will be back soon to deliver us all from...

I'm already making plans to arrive at terminal 2 of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in the spring of 2011 sporting my burqa. The cruel doubt is, which one? Shall I deplane swathed in the classic light blue I used to cross to Talibanistan? Or the slick black number...

This is the conclusion of a three-part report.
PART 1: 'Throw these infidels in jail'
PART 2: The degree zero of culture

Ten years ago, Taliban Afghanistan -- Talibanistan -- was under a social, cultural, political and economic nightmare. Ten years ago, New York-based...

This is the conclusion of a two-part report.

PART 1: In Tierra del Fuego, Darwin still rocks

Perito Moreno Glacier -- "Desert and sterile" Patagonia (in Charles Darwin's initial assessment) boasts no less than 230,000 square kilometers of river basins flowing into the Atlantic. It holds 4,000...

Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, "tightly disciplined" political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul....

Mistah Kurtz - he dead. ~ Joseph Conrad

When it comes to American wars, history has a kinky habit of repeating itself as farce over and over again. So now the Pentagon has been plunged into turmoil because General Stanley McChrystal, former United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander...

Why would Israel, in a deliberate and methodical operation planned over a week in advance -- according to statements by senior Israeli military commanders made in Hebrew-language media days before the attack -- target an unarmed ship on a humanitarian mission flying the flag of Comoros? (Unlike Turkey, Comoros is...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to meet Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva this Thursday in Brasilia. As much as the Barack Obama administration has been moving mountains to undermine the Iranian nuclear fuel swap deal mediated by Brazil and Turkey, both leaders (and US allies)...

Let's face it: Hillary Clinton is one hell of a dominatrix.

At first the United States Secretary of State said the Brazil-Turkey mediation to get Iran to accept a nuclear fuel swap was destined to fail. Then the US State Department said it was the "last chance" for an agreement...

A city of 19.2 million, 8 years in the make-up room, at a cost of US$45 billion, all decked up in a skin-tight techno silk cheongsam and vertiginous high heels, huskily commands the whole world to listen: "Look at me, guys, this is how the future looks like. Your future"....