Alternative Radio - Wednesday, June 3, 2026

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1. Hi, this is Curt Elling. You're listening to KPFK, 90.7 FM Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara, and on the World Wide Web at kpfk.org.
2. Night town, lady bright, in the arms of night.
3. The first of these is to learn from China rather than to think of them as a rival that we must overwhelm.
4. China found ways of producing win-win relations with more than 150 countries.
5. It didn't rely on military expansion to achieve its global stature.
6. And as often been said, it's a master of the long game of international relations.
7. That's Richard Falk, and this is Alternative Radio. I'm David Barsamian. This edition of AR
8. features Richard Falk on learning from China. The geopolitical checkerboard has seen in recent
9. years a major shift. China, once a poor and ravaged country, is now challenging the U.S.
10. for supremacy, and Washington doesn't like it. The Pentagon is flexing its muscle. The U.S.
11. military budget is over a trillion dollars and climbing. It's triple what China spends.
12. The Pentagon is planning for war. U.S. military bases surround China, yet Washington says
13. that it's China that is a threat. The U.S. is used to getting its way, but China won't be easily
14. bullied or pushed around. It has a global economic strategy. It is expanding its influence by
15. investing in the global south, particularly in Africa and Latin America. It's taking the lead
16. in sustainable energy, manufacturing 80% of the world's solar panels. While the U.S. is a military
17. powerhouse, China is increasingly an economic one and most likely will supplant the U.S.
18. as the global hegemon in the coming decades. Our guest today is Richard Falk. He's Professor
19. Emeritus of International Law at Princeton. He's the recipient of the UNESCO Peace Education Prize.
20. He served as Special Rapporteur for the United Nations from 2008 to 2014 on the situation of
21. human rights in the Palestinian territories. He's the author of numerous books, including
22. the Great Terror War and unlocking the Middle East. At 95, he continues to be active. In April,
23. he spoke at a special event organized by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
24. in Santa Barbara, California. And now, Richard Falk.
25. Thank you all for coming We happen to be meeting at a time in world history and in the American experience that will long be remembered I think in the same way that the Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered
26. I had assumed we'd be meeting in the midst of a genocidal escalation of the Iran war.
27. And that was something that could be a decisive experience in negativity, not only for Iran, but for the U.S. and for much of the world.
28. But it also is a challenge to do more than protest, to manifest a spirit of resistance.
29. It is a time when we should be talking seriously about invoking the 25th Amendment.
30. If we really value our constitutional heritage and the promise of this country to remain silent at this time
31. is to be complicit in a criminal process that is not only dangerous,
32. but undermines our sense, our positive sense of national identity.
33. We cannot let that happen, and I hope we will not let it happen.
34. We know now from historical reckoning and good scholarship that we evaded an apocalyptic catastrophe in 1962
35. by what was described by the leading historian of the subject, Martin Sherwin,
36. as stumbling into good luck.
37. And whether that can happen again
38. is something we should not be counting on.
39. We need a system of governance
40. nationally, regionally, and globally
41. that isn't vulnerable to the sort of warmongering leadership
42. that Israel and the United States have brought to the Middle East and to the world.
43. It a time of serious reckoning with who we are and what we will become
44. And it's in that spirit that I just want to preface what I would like to talk about
45. with a quote from our president and another quote that warns us of what is at stake.
46. Trump said in a manner that needed to be taken seriously that a whole civilization, I'm
47. quoting, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.
48. I don't want that to happen. However, now that we have complete and total regime change,
49. where different, smarter and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily
50. wonderful can happen.
51. That those few words are so filled with delusion
52. and apocalyptic thinking as to
53. justifiably scare us into what I described
54. as the moment where the failure of the human mind
55. to invoke the 25th Amendment will be long remembered in the history of the country.
56. The other quote I want to read was looking toward this abyss, which could be a nuclear abyss.
57. Paul Krugman, a respected Nobel economist, a former colleague of mine at Princeton for a while,
58. had this to say on his substack.
59. Damned if I know what's going to happen.
60. I mean, at some level, I think that the civilization that may be destroyed tonight is our own.
61. I mean, are we civilized if we do this kind of thing?
62. If America as a nation doesn't stand up against this, what are we?
63. So God help us, normal life will continue. It's going to be a really weird thing to be out there, you know, grocery shopping and taking the subway and all of these things.
64. but this is in a way the defining moment. The fate of the whole American idea is on
65. the line I have no idea how this ends And I think that those kinds of sentiments
66. are on many minds, confusion as to what to do
67. and bewilderment as to how we got to where we are
68. and how we escape once more.
69. And how can we escape without relying on, whether you call it luck or divine intervention, that's not the way to govern a planet that has this kind of weaponry and is faced with these sorts of severe ecological challenges.
70. It won't last forever, that kind of thinking.
71. We've tempted the apocalyptic disaster now in ways that should perform as a kind of pedagogy of living in the 21st century,
72. or, in the words of the name of this foundation, of living in the nuclear age.
73. We are no longer children of the nuclear age,
74. and we seem to be suffering at the moment from premature dementia,
75. but let's hope that's a temporary passing phase.
76. As someone that has been happily connected with the Nuclear Age Foundation,
77. I wanted to say the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has been more than an organization
78. dedicated to what may be the most pressing challenge of our time.
79. but it has also established a human community that is, in its own way, a microcosm of what we would like the world to be.
80. And that's a great achievement and a tribute to this kind of leadership that the organization has enjoyed.
81. David Krieger was the president of the organization from its founding 37 years ago.
82. We happened to be friends before we came to Santa Barbara due to our shared commitment
83. to a denuclearizing world.
84. In the spirit of remembrance, I want to read the last stanza of David's fine poem, Promises
85. of Peace, not only to affirm his legacy, but it so well expresses the motif of my remarks.
86. And I quote, there is no beauty in war,
87. nor decency, nor wisdom.
88. There is only force and blind obedience.
89. Bombs fall, children die,
90. and generals are celebrated.
91. In the public square, new names, new sacrifice, promises of peace give way to war.
92. I find talking about peace and justice particularly daunting these days for two reasons,
93. aside from the existential crisis of this very hour.
94. First, the nuclear and ecological storm clouds presently hovering over the planet and our country are beset by the radical unknowability about what will come next.
95. We just have no real insight into the future given this degree of uncertainty.
96. And learning to live with uncertainty is a challenge that few of us can really meet.
97. This is accentuated by the chaos and uncertainties that haunt us even as we speak tonight,
98. accentuated by the latest of Trump's arrogant ultimatums that unnerve even the most serene among us.
99. And secondly, the second reason for reluctance to speak on these grandiose themes is that humanity as embodied in distinct sovereign states and bound together due to a shared species destiny is multiply entangled at present.
100. within a series of death traps from which there is no realistically visible escape.
101. And indeed, scant evidence of even the will to escape from world leaders,
102. aside from the denialism of our present leader.
103. The warmongering entrapment is linked to a militarist pathology prevailing at this time in our own country and being played out in this war of unprovoked aggression waged against Iran, its government, and above all, its people.
104. With some sense of shame, as a U.S. citizen, I quote the defining words of President Trump's latest bit of notorious foreign policy guidance posted just a few days ago on his private Truth Social channel.
105. He says Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.
106. There will be nothing like it Open the f straight you crazy bastards or you be living in hell
107. Just watch.
108. And then the final words are the most mystifying.
109. Praise be to Allah.
110. What could that leader of ours have been thinking?
111. in the spirit of taking seriously what it means to live in the nuclear age.
112. What and why have things gone so wrong in what was a prosperous and powerful country
113. and its people, and why its people are tolerating such leadership for this long?
114. And, of course, he is among those American presidents who've been elected twice.
115. So we can't just blame him.
116. It's a feature of present society that's linked to the way we've,
117. the way both political parties have performed in relation to what is best for America,
118. not making America great as a dominant military power,
119. but what would make it great as a country that created a model of how to live together in mutual respect and benefit.
120. As suggested, the collective malady in this country should not be exclusively attributed to Trump,
121. although his antics certainly bring them to the surface,
122. perhaps naively I find shocking the establishment branding of the Iran war at the outset
123. as a war of choice rather than calling it what it is, as a war of unabashed aggression.
124. Even the New York Times, which I grew up revering as the most trusted source of commentary,
125. has the reckless temerity to uncritically refer to the Iran war as the ultimate war of choice.
126. This terminology recalls the earlier use of choice that was current during the 2003 Iraq War.
127. And it's a disturbing twist in public discourse.
128. A war of choice should have no place in a law or morality governed world order.
129. Indeed, the whole point of the UN Charter is to remove from national sovereignty the question of choice when it comes to waging war
130. and to limit recourse to war to a strict definition of self against a prior armed attack
131. In practice, this legal concept of war has been somewhat expanded by the urgencies of provocation
132. or by credible evidence of aggressive intent by the state attacked.
133. Iran is a clear victim of aggressive war, unprovoked, and as we speak,
134. it is also living under the shadow of this threat of genocidal escalation,
135. And what we should not forget is that that escalation is built upon a originating crime of aggression.
136. Somehow the conversation in the media and in more sophisticated circles has shifted to whether we're winning or losing the war,
137. rather than thinking about how to get out of a war that was unlawful from its first day.
138. We should remember that back in 1945, the architects of the New World Order privileged the winners of World War II
139. by giving them an unrestricted right of veto that paralyzed the decisional power of the UN at its birth.
140. This constitutionally undercut the UN capacity to fulfill its war prevention mission
141. as set forth in the preamble to the UN Charter.
142. As the Mexican delegate to the drafting conference that established this UN architecture exclaimed when asked what kind of organization has been achieved, his response is notable, I think.
143. His words, we have created an organization that regulates the mice while the tigers run free.
144. This deference to geopolitics was reinforced at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes
145. that imposed criminality only for the crimes of the losers.
146. refusing altogether to scrutinize, much less to prosecute, the crimes of the winners.
147. This refusal meant that the development of nuclear weapons was never effectively prohibited.
148. This tempts, reflecting on an intriguing counterfactual,
149. Let us suppose that Germany, which had its own advanced nuclear program, had won the
150. race to develop the bomb and then dropped two atom bombs on British cities yet went on to lose the war As it was the liberal West led by the U did not have the moral compass and political acumen
151. it needed to give the world not only a victory over fascism and imperialism,
152. but a peace-building process for the future that included the prohibition of the development, possession, threat, and use of nuclear weaponry.
153. Might humanity have been spared the endless traumas of the nuclear age that is now at the edge of the most frightening nuclear abyss, had it not been the winner of World War II?
154. It's a frightening thought of its own.
155. It is also a disturbing part of the picture that the original aggression toward Iran has virtually been erased from commentary on the wars in the Middle East by the most rational and wonkish of foreign policy establishment experts.
156. bipartisan mainstream talk, as I've suggested it, has been focused on whether the U.S. is winning or losing this asymmetric war between countries of dramatically different capabilities.
157. You're listening to Richard Falk on Learning from China.
158. This is Independent Alternative Radio.
159. For copies of this program, call us 1-800-444-1977 or online our website, alternativeradio.org.
160. At this moment, to take account of the pre-Trump background accentuated by the threatened escalation in Iran and further stressed by the persistence of Israeli genocidal expansionism in Lebanon and the West Bank of occupied Palestine,
161. if we are to avoid public gloom and private despair, it seems crucial to acknowledge all that is at stake if we wish for a better future.
162. Cornel West, a friend of mine for many years and quite long ago a faculty colleague,
163. said some impassionate words recently that expressed the danger of our time.
164. We are not just facing a political crisis, we are facing a spiritual one.
165. When greed is normalized, truth is disposable, and cruelty marketed, the soul of the nation is at stake.
166. It's about our moral decay that rewards corruption and punishes integrity.
167. We must call our young people back to courage, truth, justice, and love.
168. I would only add to Cornell's words that it is not just our young people, but all people,
169. and not only our people, but people throughout the world.
170. I want also to call attention to the warnings given by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark
171. Carney at this year's meeting of the World Economic Forum.
172. Carney shocked his elite audience by an insistence
173. that the unfolding internationally
174. and historically of the present period
175. is one of rupture rather than transition.
176. And he used rupture as a negative word
177. to talk about the tensions
178. that Trump has largely brought to the surface
179. and has created a fracturing of the Atlantic alliance
180. that had served to provide Western leadership ever since the end of World War II.
181. It's an interesting way of seeing the present context,
182. which is one of challenging the coherence of this Western regional alliance that is racial and religious in part,
183. not just geographical, as it includes Australia and New Zealand.
184. But the point is that what Carney was talking about and what he underscored by endorsing the initial strike of the U.S. and Israel against Iran is that this was an intramural Western crisis of rupture or transition.
185. not a global crisis.
186. And I think that's a fundamental mistake
187. if we are to create a world
188. where the diverse peoples and civilizations
189. learn to live together in a durable way
190. that is committed to peace and justice
191. and to a more harmonious relationship with nature,
192. until we get that globality as the central feature of global governance,
193. we will have this hierarchy in the world where it is the West against the rest.
194. And that was the point of Samuel Huntington notorious comments on the end of the Cold War didn mean international stability or a geopolitical accommodation it was the prelude to a clash of civilizations
195. And what we've seen in the Middle East and are seeing, and it makes these civilizational
196. comments of Trump particularly relevant is that these conflicts are not only
197. traditional wars between states they also have a civilizational identity it
198. It was not accidental that all the countries that supported Israel in what it did in Gaza
199. were from the white Christian West.
200. non-geographically conceived to include Australia and New Zealand.
201. It had that character, and of course it was preordained by the 9-11 attacks
202. and the way in which President Bush responded to those attacks without sensing it could
203. have been a moment to repair the hierarchy and exploitation of the global south rather
204. than an occasion to jump into a war against quote-unquote terror, as if that can be delimited
205. and civilizationally confined to the Islamic world.
206. I want to just refer, in bringing these remarks to an end,
207. that there are two avenues, I believe,
208. that lead in a positive direction.
209. But they require a rethinking of how we conceive of the other.
210. And the first of these is to learn from China
211. rather than to think of them as a rival that we must overwhelm.
212. China achieved what very few countries achieved, an ascendancy from being one of the worst
213. off of major third world or global south countries to being an economic superpower that didn rely on military expansion to achieve its global stature
214. but rather found ways of producing win-win relations with more than 150 countries.
215. and it's far from a perfect society
216. and has internal issues that are grave
217. although it raised 300 million people
218. in less than a decade
219. out of a condition of extreme poverty
220. and no other country has done that
221. And it has been attentive to the well-being of its own people, not just the projection of its power.
222. And it's often been said it's a master of the long game of international relations, not of the immediate agenda of win-lose connections that were epitomized by the colonial relationship between European colonialism and the global south.
223. that hierarchy, exploitative hierarchy, that we understood in racial terms with South African
224. apartheid, but also had its economic, economistic terms in relation to the post-colonial period,
225. and then has its nuclear dimension in the hegemonic possession of nuclear weapons by
226. these permanent members of the Security Council that are unwilling to be accountable as sovereign,
227. equal states and are willing to go to war to prevent others from acquiring the weaponry
228. that they insist upon using without accountability and without any kind of restrictions.
229. One has the sense that China is ready to make an accommodation that would denuclearize international
230. relations.
231. And the other kind of learning is more historical.
232. And it's a matter of taking the opportunities to enhance the human experience rather than
233. to view it as a moment of where material and political
234. domination can occur And I been personally influenced by a famous poem of Robert Frost called The Road Not Taken
235. And I read just a few lines from this last stanza.
236. And I shall be telling this with a sigh.
237. somewhere here
238. ages and ages hence
239. two roads diverged in a wood
240. and I took the one least traveled by
241. and that has made all the difference
242. and why it's relevant to our circumstance
243. is that the U.S.
244. as the victor in World War II, had an extraordinary opportunity to structure the world in a way
245. that would have brought prosperity and peace for at least a generation, if not longer.
246. But it chose, as I mentioned, to play the traditional winner's game of not seeking systemic
247. benefits, but seeking to maximize the gains of the winners.
248. And to project that into the future by way of the veto, by the notion of criminality
249. for the losers, by that whole way.
250. And there was a second opportunity at the collapse, unexpected collapse of the Soviet
251. Union and the moment where this nuclear weaponry could have been eliminated through a monitored
252. agreement and the UN reform to make it able to play the role that was hoped for it as
253. a war prevention institution.
254. And I'm not optimistic because you
255. have the collision of two extremisms, the extremism
256. of a leader that can't accept the reality of political
257. defeat and the extremism of a political configuration
258. in Iran that prefers martyrdom to some kind of compromise.
259. And when you have these two extremisms colliding
260. with each other, you have to be a wild-eyed optimist
261. to think that they can come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.
262. And so in closing, I feel that these two learning to
263. seize these moments of flux, whether you call them ruptures or transitions, and trying to
264. follow a path that learns from China are two ways forward toward a better future for all
265. of humanity.
266. Let me stop there.
267. Well, the whole idea of the Gaza People's Tribunal was that governments were not stopping the carnage,
268. And the UN was helpless and useless in the setting of the ongoing genocide.
269. And Jeremy Corbyn did a version of it in London.
270. Their tribunal focused on British complicity, and there was another in Canada that focused on Canadian complicity.
271. These were, I think, effective in reaching a certain part of the relevant communities.
272. Our two public sessions were in Sarajevo and in Istanbul and a side event at the UN in New York.
273. And I think it generated very powerful testimony from witnesses, survivors, and experts.
274. And a jury of conscience delivered the verdict.
275. And it was a very distinguished group of six people,
276. led by Christine Chinkin, a respected professor at London School of Economics.
277. To call it a jury of conscience was to suggest that we weren't pretending to be a court of law.
278. The voice of the people aggrieved, outraged, disturbed by what was happening in Gaza
279. and by the failure of the liberal democracies to be at least detached,
280. if not helping to find a way toward accommodation and peace, peaceful approach.
281. The Palestinian people have been not helped by the wishes of others, including the UN, that partitioned historic Palestine without ever consulting the resident population.
282. And the present period where Trump presides over this board of peace is a terrible moment both because it received the blessings of the UN
283. and it has engaged in a kind of Orwellian doublespeak as to what is peace and justice.
284. It rewards the criminal and punishes the victim.
285. And that's not a good way of establishing a humane future.
286. As far as two states or one state, most Palestinians that I've been in touch with don't feel the two states can work.
287. There are too many settlers that are determined to remain and are violent and militant and
288. would create a very problematic future.
289. I was a close friend of Edward Said, who's probably the most distinguished public intellectual
290. among the Palestinian people, at least living outside.
291. They have a large number, certainly a large number,
292. of very articulate and thoughtful personalities.
293. He died in 2003, but his vision earlier than that
294. was that only a one secular state based on equality
295. of the two peoples could succeed.
296. And he deeply believed in that.
297. If there was a two-state, it's almost certain it would be a mini-state dominated by Israel
298. and probably neutralized sitting next to this Prussian militarized state.
299. and that would not be very stable as far as the future is concerned.
300. I think younger Palestinians wouldn't accept it over time
301. and Israel, I don't know how they would respond to it.
302. My own sense is there will not be peace between Israel and the Palestinians
303. until on the Israeli side, Zionism is either rejected as part of the governing ideology
304. or is radically changed in its view of how to live with the Palestinians.
305. And we should all remember that before this Gaza war occurred, there were a series of thoughtful, objective studies that established that the Israel-Palestine relationship was one of apartheid.
306. In other words, that Israel as the occupying power was committed to a policy of apartheid.
307. And that was validated by the judgments of the International Court of Justice and indirectly by the International Criminal Court The other thing something has to be done about the Palestinian refugees that have lived as refugees since 1947
308. That's been a no-go issue for Israel and a must issue for the Palestinians.
309. So again, it's a collision of views.
310. I do feel that the Palestinians are far readier for an accommodation and compromise than is Israel,
311. which views its mission to be, at least as influenced by Zionist ideology,
312. its mission to be one of occupying and being sovereign in the whole of historic Palestine.
313. You were just listening to Richard Falk on learning from China.
314. He spoke at a special event organized by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, California in April.
315. Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton.
316. He's the recipient of the UNESCO Peace Education Prize.
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