Bloggers note  : Good read ... Plausible . 

https://www.sprottmoney.com/Blog/the-real-new-world-order-is-coming-to-life-rory-hall.html

The Real “New World Order” Is Coming To Life - Rory Hall

November 1, 2017

If you want to see what is going to change the lives of your children and grandchildren, look no further than the map published below. This is WHERE the future will be, regardless of the naysayers. The Belt and Road Initiative is going to transform the world and, once this project is 25-30% complete – within the next 5-7 years – the impact will be felt globally.
Natural resources will be funneled into the Eastern countries, or they will simply never leave from the country they mined or extracted. Global employees will disappear from Western market places as their services will be needed in the East and so it will go right down the line. Buckle up kids, as we are going to be faced with a very bumpy ride unless the criminal scum holding onto yesterday suddenly have their “come to Jesus” moment and realize they are outside looking in.
As reported by ZeroHedge

Dear Mustafa,
I arrived in Karachi at 5.30am this morning on the direct PIA flight from Heathrow. The city of 26 million people had not yet woken up and I made it to the Sind Club in under 20 minutes. But as I write this now I can hear the horn-filled throb of city life on all four sides of the Club walls; this city pulsates with growth.

If you click on the map I attach here you will see one of the main reasons – the Chinese Economic Corridors – otherwise know as ‘One Belt…One Road’. Pakistan lies directly on one of these routes, but look at this map carefully as it will change our world and world order, wherever we live.

Let's look at some facts on ‘One Belt…One Road’:

• It connects 65 countries and 4.4 billion people.
• In 2016 Chinese companies signed 8,158 contracts in 61 countries worth $150b.
• In 2016 China’s trade with the One Belt…One Road countries reached $953b.

Over the next 10 years, China will spend $2 trillion on ‘One Belt…One Road’ infrastructure, and, more amazingly, they are not asking the investee countries and corporates to pay it back ; 80% of the money spent will be a perpetual bond, with only the interest needed to be paid. The principal is never returned.

What is also very clear from the map is that China has no interest in controlling the seas. In fact they have taken a conscious decision to bypass the seas, to bypass the 7th, 8th and 9th US fleets that currently ring the Eurasian landmass. The US navy can sail the oceans to their heart’s content, the action is now on land. And to that end the first test train from China arrived directly in London in July this year; it took 20 days less than by sea. This is all pretty revolutionary stuff.

China is attempting ‘the project of the century.’
And as I am served a cool lemonade at the Club, a final remnant of the British empire, it is another empire – the American empire – that may be taking its last few sips of leadership.
See you in London next week.
Chris

No since in acting like this is not happening or that China is going to run out funds or somehow not be able to complete this project – you would be 100% wrong in that assessment. The Belt and Road Initiative is going to place China back at the head of the global economy; exactly where she was until the West all but destroyed the nation with the opium wars beginning in the early part of the 1800’s. China, up until that time, was the worlds only super-power and the worlds largest economy. China occupied these positions before these positions were measured/known – she just was and the world knew it. The day for her to reclaim the throne is coming, what it will mean for the rest of the world, at this time. is unknown.

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Rory Hall, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Coin, has written over 700 articles and produced more than 200 videos about the precious metals market, economic and monetary policies as well as geopolitical events since 1987. His articles have been published by Zerohedge, SHTFPlan, Sprott Money, GoldSilver and Silver Doctors, SGTReport, just to name a few. Rory has contributed daily to SGTReport since 2012. He has interviewed experts such as Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Dr. Marc Faber, Eric Sprott, Gerald Celente and Peter Schiff, to name but a few. Visit The Daily Coin website and The Daily Coin YouTube channels to enjoy original and some of the best economic, precious metals, geopolitical and preparedness news from around the world.

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The author is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Sprott Money Ltd. The views and opinions expressed in this material are those of the author or guest speaker, are subject to change and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sprott Money Ltd. Sprott Money does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and reliability of the information or any results from its use.

#China, #Belt and Road Initiative, #Belt and Road, #buy gold, #buy silver, #Sprott Money, #Rory Hall Posted in: Sprott Money News

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Democrat Fingers in the Vatican Pie: Did Obama Force Benedict’s Abdication?

https://onepeterfive.com/obama-benedict-abdication/

Alessandro Rico August 11, 2017 51 Comments

On May 17, I published an article in the Italian newspaper La Verità about pope Benedict’s abdication. A few days before, in a renowned Italian geopolitical magazine called Limes, Professor Germano Dottori had argued that Joseph Ratzinger’s 2013 abdication, and the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation in 2011, after a financial storm sold to public opinion as a “public debt” crisis, were the result of pressures on the part of Obama administration in the United States.

According to Dottori, Obama was eager to dethrone Benedict XVI for two reasons. On the one hand, his presidency was close to fundamentalist Islam (de facto fostered by regime change in Libya and Egypt and civil war in Syria, provoked by U.S. former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy design), whereas Ratzinger, ever since his famous Regensburg lecture, had been identified internationally as a strong opponent of Islamism. 

On the other hand, Obama was worried about the Church’s reconciliatory efforts toward Moscow’s Orthodox patriarch, within the scope – Dottori wrote – “of a geopolitical project aimed at European-Russian integration, actively supported by Germany and Italy.”


The Obama administration may have resorted to two instruments: fostering scandals within the Church and the Italian government and threatening to drain away Italian and Vatican financial resources. Italy was at risk of being excluded from international financial markets. 

The menace against the Vatican was to bar the IOR (Istituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican bank) from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network. 

Taking as an excuse the fact that the IOR did not abide by international rules of transparency, Deutsche Bank (which runs point-of-sale payment systems in the Vatican and was suspected by Bankitalia of hosting an IOR account where all money earned within the Vatican converged) had been induced to block all ATMs in Vatican City, a service curiously reactivated, Dottori noticed, right after Pope Benedict’s abdication.


With regard to this story, it is useful to spend a few more words on an important figure: former president of the IOR Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. Chosen by Pope Benedict in 2009 to reform the IOR and bring it back to international standards of transparency, in 2010, Tedeschi was the subject of a money-laundering investigation.
 

Notice how suspicious the events look: two years after the beginning of the inquiry, in 2012, Tedeschi was fired from his office; in 2014, after Pope Benedict’s resignation, Rome’s judge dismissed the inquiry and all allegations against Tedeschi; in 2015, in an interview with The Catholic Herald, Tedeschi declared that he had been kicked out by the IOR’s board of directors because of his intention to make radical reforms. And in a 2012 interview released to the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, Tedeschi had already revealed that in those months, he was so scared of being assassinated that he had written down a secret report on the IOR. (According to my sources, he had written his will as well.)


 The secret report had been entrusted to two of Tedeschi’s close friends as a sort of insurance policy on his own life. Tedeschi stated that he had discovered “something scary” and had engaged a struggle against the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was resolutely opposing any disclosure of the IOR’s secret archives to Italian authorities.


If you connect Tedeschi’s story to Dottori’s claim regarding financial blackmail enacted against the Vatican Bank in order to pressure Pope Benedict, you might suspect that Tedeschi was well aware that obscure forces, from within and without the Vatican, were swarming, and that his opposition to those influences was probably the cause of his misfortunes.


Dottori’s considerations should be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, his interpretation of Berlusconi’s government crisis in 2011 is slightly in contrast with the prevailing reading, which assigns responsibility to German chancellor Angela Merkel and French former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Moreover, it has to be noticed that the Obama administration’s main concern was unlikely to be Ratzinger’s ideological opposition to radical Islam. It is probably more useful to focus on the Russian question.


On the one hand, the perspective of a tighter political integration between Europe and Russia, supported by the Catholic Church for the sake of the construction of a sort of religious “conservative front,” was a cause of anxiety for Obama and Clinton. 

The role of the pope could be that of a trait d’union (literally, a hyphen) between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin – as a German, and as a moral leader, Benedict XVI could mediate to ease friction between two politicians joined by a love-hate relationship, but whose intentions, beyond all, were to deepen the ties between their countries. 

That the United States backed Ukraine’s revolt against the pro-Russian government there and supported civil war in Donbas region (the Obama administration’s involvement was denounced by Foreign Affairs in 2014), and that they sabotaged the project for the South Stream pipeline (with the help of Senator John McCain, who literally threatened Bulgaria’s prime minister and obtained his withdrawal from the project), is proof that Democrats were willing to do anything they could to prevent a closer political and economic partnership between Europe and Russia. In this sense, Berlusconi, Putin’s (and Libyan dictator Gaddafi’s) personal friend, was a troublesome individual.


On the other hand, the Obama administration was likely to be frightened by Pope Benedict’s conservative stance on the liturgy, morals, and politics. A conservative pope, in a moment when the Church’s aid was no more required to fight communism in the Soviet Union – and Russia was becoming a conservative nation – could mean an undesired, and politically dangerous, rightist breakthrough for American Catholics and an unseen convergence between religious conservatives in the U.S. and Russia.


That Obama’s fear was well informed is apparent, since Donald Trump won the Catholic vote in the 2016 election in spite of a progressive pope who almost openly endorsed Hillary Clinton, and despite Catholics’ leftward turn in the two previous elections of 2008 and 2012.


In this light, one may also interpret the recent article in La Civiltà Cattolica (a journal whose content has to be supervised by the papacy for publication) that attacked the allegiance between Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States. The message from the Vatican is clear: according to Pope Francis, good American Catholics should vote for Democrats again. Why is the new papacy so worried that conservative Catholics and Protestants might join forces in politics when it favors “inter-religious dialogue” whenever it amounts to unconditional veneration of Lutheranism?
That the Catholic vote was at stake in the Obama administration’s conspiracy against Benedict XVI is also proved by WikiLeaks’ revelations on Hillary Clinton’s right-hand man, John Podesta. His leaked emails showed that he was planning to foster a “Catholic spring,” a revolution intended to supplant conservative sections of the Church and make progressives take over.


Now, try to read against this background the new papacy’s stances on moral and political issues. The Church is almost silent on abortion, the redefinition of marriage, and euthanasia. And it is astonishing that on the question of migrants, Pope Francis is embracing George Soros’s agenda. 

Do not forget that Soros is one of Clinton’s most generous financiers, with a $11-million donation for her electoral campaign and a $6-million donation from the Soros Foundation to the Clinton Foundation. Soros came up nearly 60 times in John Podesta’s leaked emails. One may admit that such a triangulation among a leftist presidential candidate, a liberal billionaire accused of several political conspiracies in different nations, undesired by the government of his country, and by Israel as well in spite of his Jewish birth, and the Catholic Church’s pope is, to put it lightly, bizarre.


Now, even if Italian journalist Sandro Magister, on August 3, published for L’Espresso an article where he declares that in fact, Pope Francis is still pursuing friendly relations with Russian Orthodoxy – thereby upsetting Catholics in Poland and Ukraine, who would rather look to NATO countries, especially now that the U.S. is governed by Trump – there seems to be a substantial difference between the Russian policies of Popes Benedict and Francis. 

The former could at least have been a moral mediator between Europe and Russia for political and economic integration, and he was keen to converge with Russian conservatives as regards religion in society and other moral priorities. Francis, for his part, seems to be moved by concerns for the condition of Christians in Syria, where only Russia has a clear long-term strategy. 

But apart from formal appreciation from liberal anti-Trump leaders like Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau, or complete outsiders like Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, Pope Francis is internationally isolated, especially after his ill advised support of Hillary Clinton.
Other commentators have thrown shadows over the Church’s ambiguous connections with American Democrats. 
 
On July 4, Piero Laporta published in La Verità an article about Libero Milone, a 67-year-old manager who had been appointed by pope Francis as supervisor of the Vatican’s finances in 2015. His mandate was supposed to last for five years, but in June 2017, he decided to resign after complaining of having his office violated and his computer hacked. 


However, the true story behind this unexpected resignation might be different. According to Laporta, Milone was nosing around in the ambiguous maneuvers alleged to have brought about an approximately $1-million donation to Hillary Clinton’s electoral campaign, taken from Peter’s Pence. 

Rumors about it were already circulating in February 2016, when Laporta gathered leaks by a secret source, ironically called “Pretino” (“Little Priest”), who declared that the Vatican was providing Clinton with financial aid but that Trump would win the election thanks to an FBI investigation against Clinton.

 According to Laporta, it is not by chance that at the same time as Milone resigned, Cardinal George Pell was being investigated on allegations of sexual abuse for events that had occurred forty years ago. Someone was trying to divert attention from the Peter’s Pence story, and at the same time was indirectly reassuring all subjects potentially involved in the scandal that silence would be maintained.


Now, while Laporta claims to be “90% sure” of this report, it is much harder to ascertain whether, or to what degree, Pope Francis was aware of a financial and political operation that, nonetheless, was likely to have been buttressed by the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, and to have required the American Apostolic Nunciature’s mediation. 

Laporta hypothesizes that during his visit to Rome, in June 2017, President Donald Trump might have had an animated discussion with Pope Francis, as he asked for elucidations on the Church’s aid to Clinton. 

According to him, the pope’s waxen and scrawny expression in the photographs taken next to the American president was due precisely to their quarrel and to Francis’s embarrassment.


Elucidations are precisely what we need. In the spirit of the letter addressed by The Remnant to Donald Trump, American Catholics should ask their new president to investigate the Obama administration’s involvement in the events that led to Pope Benedict’s abdication. 

Clarifications would be welcome also on the ambiguous maneuvers between the Holy See and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. These seem to be much more urgent questions than Russophobic hysteria over Trump’s alleged plot with Vladimir Putin.


Anyway, in this troubled time, we should also be confident that the Church has a certain strength its enemies lack: it is bound to survive in spite of herself.

This article has been updated

http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/its-time-for-canada-to-stand-up-to-chinas-censorship-crackdown/

It’s time for Canada to stand up to China’s censorship crackdown

China just strengthened its Great Propaganda Firewall to limit what its citizens can see and read about the outside world. The Liberals should be outraged.

Terry Glavin

July 24, 2017

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Wu Hong/Pool

You won’t hear any loud alarms being rung about this from either the starry-eyed or the sinister China trade enthusiasts in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, or Global Affairs Canada, the Canada China Business Council or the Asia Pacific Foundation, but the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing has made it official.
The Communist Party of China has ordered a shutdown of all unauthorized and unmonitored communication between China’s 1.3 billion people and the outside world. In its formal statements, the Ministry announced that it is closing the last digital breaches in the Great Firewall of China—the outer ring of the regime’s vast snooping, censorship and website-blocking superstructure.

MORE: Ottawa’s despicable display in China

Any VPN (virtual private network), proxy server or special cable service operating without Beijing’s approval, under Beijing’s tight controls, are now outlawed.
Chinese citizens require independent VPNs to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Youtube, Tumblr and all the other web applications that allow one-on-one and group discussions with the outside world that the regime has blocked. The technology research firm GlobalWebIndex reckons that one in three Chinese citizens has used VPNs, which redirect Chinese web traffic through offshore servers, allowing users to access outside-world websites undetected.
The corporate sector needs VPNs too, which is why Beijing has been biding its time. International companies with operations in China will be able to hold onto some perks, at least on paper. Foreign firms will still be permitted to use VPN services—but only to communicate with head office. The VPN must be a Chinese corporation. Sensitive company data must now be stored in China. The identities of every employee using a VPN workaround must be given to the ministry.
Without VPNs to traverse the catacombs under the Firewall or to scale circumvention “ladders” to get over it, Chinese citizens cannot access the regime-banned New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the Economist, the Financial Times, or Reuters news services—for starters. The CBC has been blocked in China since 2014. According to the results of a URL test attempted Sunday on the freedom-of-information site ‪Greatfire.org, “100 per cent” of CBC’s online presence is off-limits inside China.
The ministry has set a deadline of March 31, 2018 to fully secure the regime’s propaganda wall around China by “urgent regulation and governance” of China’s internet systems, in order to correct what it called the industry’s “disordered development.” To that end, internal censorship has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, most noticeably to cover up the scandal surrounding the torment and July 13 death of the imprisoned Nobel laureate and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.

READ MORE: As the U.S. retreats on trade, China is quietly picking up the pieces

A further tightening of the regime’s paranoid censorship of public discussion was already in the works, besides, owing to the upcoming national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at which President Xi Jinping is expected to further consolidate his stranglehold on the Chinese state. Unless he rewrites the rules, Xi and Premier Li Keqiang are expected to be the only members of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee who won’t be shuffled out.
The one glimmer of hope is that Beijing’s efforts at an across-the-board VPN clampdown may not even be possible. Fast-moving offshore operators usually pick up a lot of the slack when Chinese VPNs get shut down. Within three years of the regime’s banning of the online edition of the New York Times in 2012, the newspaper had regained its pre-censorship readership through VPNs.
Now, however, it’s not clear how Chinese citizens will find out how to access offshore VPNs, or whether they will risk attempts to go over or under the Firewall. On WeChat and Weibo, two of China’s most widely used (though intermittently non-functioning) discussion platforms, Beijing’s censors have now added “VPN” to the list of keywords that trigger eavesdropping, blacklisting and blackouts.
Last month, the Ministry of Public Security’s Network Security Squad was already issuing orders to internet service providers, warning them to expunge all software that circumvent the Firewall. China’s state-owned telecommunications giants, among them China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, were instructed to bring themselves in line with President Xi’s draconian “internet sovereignty” push. The popular Hong Kong Chinese proxy-service provider GreenVPN told its customers it was being shut down by the authorities in Beijing. Last week, Guangzhou Huoyun Information Technology Ltd. told Reuters that the company had received a directive to begin blocking VPN services. Similarly leaked and off-the-record accounts have been coming fast and thick in recent weeks.

READ MORE: China is no friend to Canada

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology communiques don’t just make it official that a digital Iron Curtain is shutting China off from the rest of the world. The ministry is putting the lie to any further claims by Canada’s China trade lobby and its many friends in the Liberal government that “free trade” talks are about bringing Canadians and Chinese people closer together. That is not what is happening here. We are being driven further apart.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948, could not be more plain in this matter: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This is not just about the rights of Chinese citizens, to speak freely with one another, without fear, through any media, across frontiers. It is about the rights of Canadians to do the same. It is an inalienable human right that is being trampled upon here, openly and brazenly, and the Liberal government has only one choice in this: to carry on in its disgrace, serving the Chinese slave state as a collaborator and an accomplice, or to stand up for once and fight.
MORE ABOUT CHINA:

• François-Philippe Champagne has things to say
• Canada’s regulatory process will deter Chinese infrastructure investment, says envoy
• Trudeau downplays security fears in Chinese tech firm takeover
• Canada signs no-hacking deal with China
• As the U.S. retreats on trade, China is quietly picking up the pieces
• Is war between America and China inevitable?
• Is China to blame for the global avocado shortage?
• China and Europe want to build a ‘Moon Village’

CHINA IN CONTEXT

http://mailchi.mp/epochtimes/without-lips-the-teeth-are-cold?e=772a3f03d9

Dear readers, North Korea, famous for its nuclear brinksmanship, has recentlycriticized its Chinese ally with unprecedented candor. Recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests have angered the Xi Jinping administration in Beijing, causing something of a fall-out between the two communist powers. The state-run Korean Central News Agency published a report on May 3, warning China that there would be “grave consequences” for “chopping down the pillar of the DPRK–China relations.” (DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.) Rumors abound that China is preparing armies along the Yalu River to secure its border with North Korea. This signifies a sharp reversal in relations from when the two countries formed a communist bloc that stopped United Nations forces in the Korean War and granted the Kim regime over six decades in power. But if North Korea collapses, what's in store for Beijing? As the ancient Chinese political saying goes, “without lips, the teeth are cold.” The end of Kim Jong Un's multigenerational communist regime would weigh heavily on China, which is under another communist regime that formerly, under Mao Zedong, resembled today's North Korea writ large. Since the launch of China's economic reforms, Pyongyang's eccentricity has allowed China to project an image of normalcy and progress even as grievous human rights abuses—including those unprecedented in the history of totalitarian abuse, such as forced live organ harvesting—took place en masse under the direction of the Chinese regime’s communist leaders. North Korea's nuclear threat also provided a convenient point of crisis that leaders in Beijing could use to leverage against its neighbors and the United States. Under Xi, however, Beijing has arrived at a crossroads. The nuclear threat is too grave to tolerate for much longer. And as U.S. President Donald Trump's many recent negotiations with his Chinese counterpart suggest, the Xi administration is open to cooperating to neutralize the Kim regime. At the same time, viewed from the lens of Communist Party doctrine, Xi and his cohorts cannot afford to simply give up on North Korea, which still holds a solid place in the revolutionary mythos. Adding another dimension to the problem is the upcoming 19th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where Xi Jinping has a chance to clear the Politburo Standing Committee of his factional rivals—or spend another five years locked in some degree of political impasse. How Xi's government handles North Korea, should the crisis flare up again, could make—or break—his designs for the reconstitution of China's leadership. —Leo Timm Across China, regional communist leaders affiliated with former regime leader Jiang Zemin continue to trouble the Xi Jinping leadership, writes Larry Ong. Xi and his administration have removed and replaced dozens of provincial leaders shown to be close to Jiang, reducing their numbers by two thirds. China may be preparing for instability or even national collapse in North Korea, writes Joshua Philipp. According to reports, the Chinese authorities are urgently looking to recruit workers in areas like border security, public security, trade, customs, and quarantine, as well as Chinese-Korean interpreters. The anti-corruption agency of the Chinese Communist Party has putVancouver-based real estate developer Cheng Muyang on its wanted list, writes Larry Ong. Cheng, accused of embezzlement and “concealment of illegal gains,” fled China in 2000 and became a political donor. The Canadian Liberal Party and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continued to accept Cheng’s donations and support, despite a tip off about his background, according to an exposé by South China Morning Post. China's new impetus to rein in its financial sector has been underway for more than three months. Its effects are already being felt in the financial markets, impacting short-term borrowing rates and the global commodities market, writes Fan Yu. The China Banking Regulatory Commission, under the direction of new chairman Guo Shuqing, has issued a flurry of new policy directives with the goal of regulating the shadow banking sector and reducing liquidity in the banking system. American universities risk promoting Chinese regime interestsvia the heavily subsidized and ideologically narrow Confucius Institutes, writes Gary Feuerberg. A Canadian documentary released last year and an April 26 report commissioned by the National Association of Scholars offer new insights on the the discriminatory and repressive practices of the institutes. Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas gave a presentation on the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China at a conference held at Presidency University in Kolkata, India, writes Jonathan Zhou. In particular, Matas said that hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have been murdered for their organs under the direction of the Chinese communist regime.

The "TrumpEffect" at the UN> April 2017 Monthly Forecast "Reviewing Peacekeeping Operations"

PEACEMAKING, PEACEKEEPING AND PEACEBUILDING

Reviewing Peacekeeping Operations

Expected Council Action

In April, at the initiative of the US, the Council is expected to hold a briefing on reviewing peacekeeping operations. Secretary-General António Guterres will brief.

Background

A concept note circulated ahead of the meeting stresses the important role that political foundations play in the success of peacekeeping missions. One of the conclusions of the 2014-2015 review by the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) was the “primacy of politics”, which implied the need for the Council to bring its collective leverage to bear in support of political solutions. 


In a 25 November 2015 presidential statement, the Council underlined “the significant impact its statements and actions can exert in situations of armed conflict or in support of peace processes.” However, the Council has often failed to agree on a political strategy in support of peace operations for many reasons, including decision-making processes that do not prioritise the emergence of strategic or collective thinking, divergent political priorities, inadequate Secretariat analysis and planning, and host state hostility.

The concept note encourages Council members to review missions and identify areas where mandates no longer match political realities, asking whether it is advisable or possible to operate a mission without the strategic consent of the host government. 

Even though the Council resolved in 2016 to send a regional protection force to Juba in South Sudan, and a police component to Burundi, these decisions have not been implemented promptly, if at all, in part due to the resistance of host states. 

The fact that the resolutions adopting these decisions were non-consensual testifies to the divisions among Council members faced with host state resistance. However, host state hostility has also featured in situations where the Council has continued to unanimously extend mandates of long-standing missions in Darfur and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).


The achievability of Council mandates and the need to bridge the gap between expectations and resources have been a key element in the discussions related to peace operations reform since at least 2000. The HIPPO report observed how, in recent years, mandates have become lengthier and more specific, and at times less realistic, manageable or achievable. 

It maintained that “too often, mandates and missions are produced on the basis of templates instead of tailored to support situation-specific political strategies”. This is particularly relevant in missions facing “conflict management” situations for which the concepts, tools, mission structures and doctrine originally developed for peace implementation tasks may not be well suited.

 The Secretariat and the Council have been unable to escape the so-called “Christmas tree mandates”, where template language for many tasks routinely appears in mission mandates. This is influenced by the lack of restraint on the part of Council members—and those lobbying them—in pressing specific issues, and internal Secretariat negotiations reflecting an arbitrage of interests rather than prioritisation. 

Although the 25 November 2015 presidential statement stated that the Council will consider sequenced and phased mandates, where appropriate, when evaluating existing UN peace operations or establishing new ones, so far this agreement in principle has had little impact on the Council’s mandating patterns. Prioritised and sequenced mandates, geared towards the achievement of clear objectives, could also provide a framework for clearer exit strategies. 

The concept note asks what the Council should do in situations where missions serve a valuable protection role, but without any conceivable conclusion to this role, and quotes the HIPPO report’s injunction that “protection mandates must be realistic and linked to a wider political approach.”

One of the issues raised in the concept note is the need for the Council to re-examine the value of a mission where there is no political process or the political process breaks down. In Council practice, most mandates are reviewed at the end of their cycles, irrespective of developments, unless these are especially dramatic, as in South Sudan in December 2013. 

Even though the conditions on the ground might change (for example, an increase in asymmetric attacks, a change in the nature of threats to civilians or the unravelling of the political process), Council members are often reluctant to reassess the appropriateness of mandates in light of bad news in the hope that tactical changes within the existing mandates can mitigate the new threats. 

The HIPPO report recommended that independent evaluations of peace operations should be commissioned at key decision points to provide objective assessments of progress in mandate implementation and overall context. 

The Secretariat has conducted several “strategic reviews” of peace operations, sometimes at the request of the Council, but these have had no independent element.

Some recent dynamics show increased attention to the political context of peace operations: Council members are now regularly inviting regional actors, including mediators, to engage with them, formally and informally; and despite political divisions, Council members are increasingly striving to deliver unified messages after private meetings or during visiting missions.

 At the meeting, Council members are expected to discuss the range of options at the Council’s disposal to exert its political leverage.


The US decision to hold this discussion follows Ambassador Nikki Haley’s statement, in her Senate confirmation hearing, regarding the need for a mission-by-mission review of peacekeeping as well as the intention of the US administration to reduce its peacekeeping funding. 

The case for a close re-examination of the assumptions underpinning Council mandates throughout the life spans of peace operations challenges the past management of mandates by the Council, dominated by the P3 as penholders, as well as by the Secretariat. Other Council members may resist an approach which appears budget-driven, while recognising that these are issues which have not been sufficiently addressed since the HIPPO report.

 Council negotiations regarding the reduction of the troop ceiling in the renewal of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) have already seen divisions. The briefing constitutes an opportunity for the Secretary-General to lay out his approach to greater effectiveness of peace operations reform and for the Council to have a candid discussion about the way it establishes and oversees mandates.

UN DOCUMENTS ON PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS

April 2017 Monthly Forecast     www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2017-04/reviewing_peacekeeping_operations.php