Re: The Nature of Foxes
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2022 3:04 pm
As U.S. threatens war with Russia, Biden administration unveils imperial strategy for Indo-Pacific that could lead to war with China
Posted Feb 23, 2022 by Jeremy Kuzmarov
Originally published: CovertAction Magazine (February 19, 2022 ) |
Already threatening war with Russia, the White House this month has unveiled a new imperial grand strategy for the Indo-Pacific that raises the prospects of war with China.
The new strategy starts by repeating familiar clichés about America’s supposed humanitarian intentions in Southeast Asia and role in providing the security that “allowed regional democracies to flourish,” while ritualistically condemning Chinese aggression “spanning the entire globe.”
According to the report,
…from the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Lines of Actual control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.
The U.S. mission over the next decade, as outlined in the report, is to stymie the PRC’s efforts to “transform the rules and norms that have benefitted the Indo-Pacific and the world.” The way to achieve this goal is to a) support a strong India—considered an engine of regional development—as a “partner in a positivist regional vision;” b) fortify the anti-China Quad alliance between the U.S., India, Japan and Australia—which the U.S. has promised to deliver nuclear powered submarines to; c) increase support for Taiwan’s self-defense and d) push for North Korea’s denuclearization while extending coordination with South Korea and Japan to respond to North Korea’s alleged provocations.
The U.S. also plans to a) promote democracy in Burma; b) expand U.S. embassies including in the Pacific Islands; c) enforce a rules-based approach in the maritime domain and promote a free press; d) deepen relationships with allies such as South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam, and e) encourage Japan and South Korea to strengthen their ties with one another.
Pacific Deterrence Initiative
At the heart of the Biden administration’s strategy is a vow that the U.S. will “increase the scope of its military exercises and operations” in the Indo-Pacific, build greater maritime capacity, “deploy more advanced warfighting capabilities,” bolster cyber warfare, artificial intelligence and regional undersea capabilities, and work with Congress to fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI).
Signed by President Biden in December, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has provisioned a whopping $7.1 billion for the PDI, whose aim is to ensure that U.S. military forces “have everything they need to compete, fight, and win in the Indo-Pacific,” according to Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and James Inhofe (R-OK),1 top ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who first promoted the PDI in Congress.
Everything they need includes a new Aegis missile facility on Guam that would assist in naval operations. The PDI also calls for stationing offensive missiles, previously banned by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, along a string of densely populated islands that includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
In addition, the PDI aims to: a) develop and launch space-based radars linked to the Aegis missile system in Guam and another system on the island of Palau, b) develop “discreet intelligence surveillance” capacities, and c) improve training ranges and joint exercises with Allies in the Pacific.
The drive.com reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been employing contractor-owned and operated aircraft in recent years to conduct overwater surveillance missions in the Pacific, which the PDI will further enable an expansion of.
Reductio ad Absurdium
The absurdity of the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy is evident in the fact that the U.S. already outspends China on the military by at least three times.
China is considered an aggressor—on a global scale—when i t has only one international military base—which it acquired in 2017 in Djibouti in response to a major U.S. military facility there—and has not invaded another country since 1979 when it invaded Vietnam.
The U.S. has at least 750 overseas military bases, including 23 in Japan alone—and has invaded at least a dozen countries since 1979, killing countless civilians in that time.
In Southeast Asia, the U.S. waged aggressive wars in Korea and Vietnam that killed millions of civilians during the Cold War, and fought covert dirty wars in Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, and Indonesia that killed many more.
The condemnation of China’s “bullying behavior” in the South China Seas ignores the fact that China’s efforts to reclaim the Spratley and Paracel and Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus to Japanese)—which the U.S. claimed the right to defend under the U.S.-Japan treaty of Mutual Cooperation—are legitimate.
The islands were effectively stolen from China as booty of Japan’s victory in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.2 Japan has further spurned two Chinese offers—in 1990 and 2006—to jointly develop the resources of the islands which potentially include oil and gas.3
China in the report is blamed for economic coercion directed against Australia for levying tariffs—which the U.S. has done to China. China’s grievances against Australia were very real—interference in China’s internal affairs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan and its spearheading a crusade against China in international forum.
China is also blamed for border skirmishes with India, though China does not recognize the boundary between the two countries that was drawn up by a British colonial official Henry McMahon after signing a treaty with Tibet in 1915 that China had rejected.
India is presented in the report as a great partner for the U.S. and progressive nation compared to China, when the New York Times has reported on the incitement of Hindu violence by Prime Minister Narendra Modi towards Muslims and erosion of human rights under his rule.
The silence on India’s human rights abuses—extending to its mistreatment of Muslims in occupied Kashmir—and playing up of China’s abuses towards Muslims in Xinjiang points to a clear double standard that undermines any moral imperative behind U.S. foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific.
The Tragedy of U.S. China policy
The greatest tragedy of U.S. policy is that China has never been antagonistic to the U.S.
Premier Xi Jinping in 2015 proposed a win-wing strategy in which both the U.S. and China accommodate one another’s interests and pursue common development along with their own interests as nation-states.
Charles Freeman Jr, a thirty-year veteran of the diplomatic corps who served as an interpreter for Richard Nixon’s historical visit to China in 1972, told me several years ago that the U.S. policy of a military buildup, or Asia Pivot policy, first enacted by Barack Obama, was misdirected because it “provided a military response to an economic problem.”
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was focused more on internal security, the defense of the Chinese homeland against neighbors with a history of invading, and on countering the powerful U.S. naval and air forces constantly mapping and probing its coastal defenses.
“A better response to China’s economic rise,” Freeman said, “would have been to try and leverage China’s prosperity to our own,” and “build better supply chains,” which he said, “corporate America was already attempting to do.”
The Obama administration could have also “worked to settle competing claims to islands on the South China seas and negotiated on a united basis with China.” Instead, it undertook “provocative measures,” including “mock attack runs on Chinese installations,” which were “not much appreciated by the Chinese,” and led to Chinese counter-measures that included sending ships off the coast of Hawaii and Guam.”4
Little has changed in the Biden era, except that the scale of U.S. provocations has now increased, along with the dangers of World War III breaking out.
The domestic political climate has become even more Sinophobic—with the media having used the Beijing Olympics as another opportunity to rail against China and its supposed evil.
NOTES:
1.↩ Not surprisingly, both Inhofe and Reed have been lavishly funded by aerospace and defense industries, along with oil and gas in Inhofe’s case. Reed has been a strong champion of drones, having received generous financial backing from leading drone-maker, General Atomics.
2.↩ Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 200; Han Yi-Shaw, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind the the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands,” The New York Times, September 19, 2012, https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... u-islands/ In his biography Koga Tatsushiro, the first Japanese citizen to lease the islands from the Meiji government, attributed Japan’s possession of the islands to “the gallant military victory of our Imperial forces.”
3.↩ Ivy Lee and Fang Ming, “Deconstructing Japan’s Claims of Sovereignty Over the Diaoyu Islands,” The Asia Pacific Journal, December 30, 2012, apjjf.org
4.↩ Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 201, 202.
https://mronline.org/2022/02/23/as-u-s- ... ith-china/
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IMPERIALISM, THE ENEMY OF PEACE
Posted by Greg Godels | Feb 22, 2022 | Featured Stories | 1
BY GREG GODELS
February 14, 2022
On February 2, I wrote: “Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales.” The point is that US behavior can be explained and is best explained as that of an imperialist superpower in the classic Leninist sense.
It was not concern for a fragile new democracy and human rights, nor was it resistance to autocratic power that motivated the US in the Ukraine crisis, as government officials and media in the US would have it.
Nor was it a misguided foreign policy or poor political choices exhibited by US leaders, as some liberal critics and center-left analysts would maintain.
Instead, the US was saber-rattling, fomenting discord, and war-mongering in the classic late-nineteenth century fashion chronicled by Lenin in his 1917 book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Standing behind the high-minded, moralistic goals voiced by Biden, Blinken, and Nuland were the economic interests of the most powerful capitalist state. With his trumpeting of the war danger, Biden was carrying water for the US energy and military industrial sectors and guided by the imperatives of finance capital.
The “Western Marxists,” post-Marxists, and neo-Marxists that have seduced so many of the younger anti-capitalist activists in the West will recoil from this analysis, denouncing it as “reductionist,” reducing complex motives to simple, basic economic exploitation.
But US behavior is impossible to explain in any other way. US allies, with their own imperialist interests, have sought to defuse the US-generated crisis. As I wrote earlier, the Schönbach affair in Germany, resulting in the firing of the German Naval leader (explained in detail by Victor Grossman), along with the hectic diplomacy of France’s Macron, illustrate the depth of European resistance to Biden’s war baiting. They, along with Ukraine’s President, Zelensky, have sought to moderate Blinken and Nuland’s hysteria and slow the rush to war.
After Biden’s first formal meeting at the White House with Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, on February 2, Biden could only enthuse that war would suspend the development of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. He is quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.”
Scholtz, on the other hand, would not link war with the pipeline’s fate. The shameless US media saw Scholtz’s response as a sign of his newness on the job!
Those who remain skeptical of the economic motives behind the US warmongering must explain why Biden placed natural gas politics ahead of any other matter before him and his German ally in this first significant policy exchange. Biden’s glee– not shared by his German counterpart– reveals the importance the US government places on seizing the natural gas market from the Russians, their rival in the energy business.
The Ukraine crisis presents other economic advantages as well. In less than two weeks, the US has sent eight cargo planes to the Ukraine with military supplies, part of the $200 million Biden authorized in new military aid. The xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Baltic states and Poland have sent massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine as well, much of which is sourced from US corporations and will be replaced by aid or purchases from the US.
Whether Ukraine joins NATO or not, Ukraine is being militarized and will continue to be a destination for US arms. On this front, the US military-industrial establishment will win, regardless of the crisis outcome.
Adversaries on both sides of the Cold War-like divide will be armed to the teeth and the possibility of war raised accordingly.
Now that Afghanistan is gone as a source of demand for US military hardware, Biden’s team is looking for new conflicts to generate dollars for the misnamed “defense” industry and to prime the pump on a stagnating US economy.
The old term for the linkage between US economic performance and military spending is “military Keynesianism,” the idea that economic activity can be stimulated with unending, costly, and wasteful military contracts for exotic weapons and instantly obsolescent munitions. Since it’s out of fashion to blame the swollen bi-partisan military budget for our ills (like inflation!), the floodgates for future military spending are now open.
In a recent op-ed piece, an academic and foreign policy think-tank heavyweight, who is well-situated in ruling class circles, Walter Russell Mead, makes the case for dramatically increasing military spending. Mead offers little or no compelling reasons for expanding military expenditures beyond the now conventional foes: Russia, the PRC, and Iran. Nonetheless, “America must again get serious about defense [sic] spending.”
Mead goes to great lengths to unfavorably compare the current share of GDP devoted to the military budget with that of past periods: the Cold War, the so-called War on Terror, the Reagan era, and even World War II. By these standards alone, we are not spending enough! A rather arbitrary and self-serving argument!
But that is just window dressing for Mead’s real purposes:
Increased defense spending wouldn’t be a drag on economic growth. The capacities America needs to add to its defense arsenal are mostly high-tech and have civilian as well as military applications. Just as Israel’s investments in cybersecurity and high-tech weaponry helped it become a startup nation with the most dynamic civilian economy in its history, a renewed commitment to national defense can increase the competitiveness of American industry while boosting national security [my emphasis].
So, behind the facade of national defense and serving America is the economic advantage that Mead sees from pouring hundreds of billions more into military spending.
The Ukraine crisis should underscore lessons about US foreign policy that the often disoriented US left should have long drawn from our history.
The US media functions like every other monopoly-dominated industry: driven by profits and expediency, while serviced by and serving the state. It’s trusted service to the state is rewarded with front-row seats in the state’s propaganda circus and full access to its ministers of misinformation.
CNN, a network swamped with turmoil and scandal, demonstrated the depths of state servility with a recent bizarre public scolding of Putin for his vulgarity in the gentlemanly and gentlewomanly diplomatic process– an indulgence in triviality.
The Guardian, the supposed left flank of the mainstream media, expressed alarm over French President Macron’s energetic diplomatic initiative to de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine, accusing him of “freelancing” and expressing “his particular view of Russia as a European nation, and lofty talk of new security guarantees…” which “will have set alarm bells ringing” in the exclusive NATO club.
Both commentaries are all too fitting and predictable from a lapdog capitalist press.
It should also be obvious to opponents of war that this risk and all risks of conflict in the era of imperialism spring from the clash of imperial powers or the pressing of their interests on other nations. While the anti-war movement is and should be a big tent, it will be limited in its success if it fails to grasp this point. Moralistic arguments or appeals to the political parties committed to imperialism, like the US Democratic Party, will have little effect. The long established bi-partisanship of the two parties on foreign policy and aggression, except in periods of a severe crisis of policy like late in the Vietnam war, should shine the necessary light on that fact.
Further, a genuine left committed to building a mass anti-war movement must not link the fortunes of such a movement to the fortunes of pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist (they are the same thing!) political parties like the Democratic Party.
With the Democrats holding power, fear of disrupting their rule disables the effort to avert war, as it does today.
https://mltoday.com/imperialism-the-enemy-of-peace/