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pacific region
The US Kicks Off World’s Largest Naval War Games: RIMPAC, China, and the Cost of War
Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
Jul 14, 2026
June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercises, the world's largest international naval war games. Led by the US, the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, five submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of US preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.
At the same time, the US and partner nations kicked off the 10-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.
At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: There is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heatwaves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.
This past week, while US military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Coming only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.
Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”
These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of US military activity have caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.
Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the US continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to "deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”
The US conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the US military's economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1% in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land's estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the US military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Similarly, US militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The US military controls roughly 27% of the island's land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS" forever chemicals" linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam's drinking water wells, threatening the island's primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.
These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the US strategy of "peace through strength." Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify US-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.
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Why We Need to Disarm the Anti-China Discourse
From expanding military bases in the Philippines to building a fleet of AI drones to target China, militarists are creating conditions for a hot war in the Pacific.
Oct 21, 2023
From racist tweets to rising hate crimes, the media’s anti-China propaganda has created a climate of aggression. Two weeks ago, a man drove a car into the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, yelling “Where’s the CCP?” Arab Americans have been targeted during the Persian Gulf War, the War on Terror, and U.S.-backed atrocities in Palestine. It’s no surprise that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are in the crosshairs of white supremacy as the U.S. targets China. Back in April, a Columbia University found that three in four Chinese Americans said they’d suffered racial discrimination in the past 12 months.
When the Trump administration launched the China Initiative to prosecute spies, the Department of Justice racially profiled Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of Chinese researchers who dropped their affiliation with U.S. institutions jumped 23 percent. The Biden administration has ended the initiative, but the Department of Justice and the congressional anti-China committee are still targeting political leaders in the Chinese community.
As Biden continues the crackdowns of his predecessor, his administration is also escalating in the Asia-Pacific region. From expanding military bases in the Philippines—including one potential base in the works intended to join contingencies in Taiwan—to building a fleet of AI drones to target China, militarists are creating conditions for a hot war in the Pacific. As the U.S. prepares for war, Forbes published an article on September 25 about an aircraft carrier “kill chain” and its potential use in a war with China. In February, CNN journalists accompanied a U.S. Navy jet approaching Chinese airspace. As a Chinese pilot warned the U.S. to keep a safe distance, an American soldier remarked: “It’s another Friday afternoon in the South China Sea.”
Not only are we normalizing U.S. aggression. We’re also relying on the military-industrial complex as an unbiased source. Pro-war propaganda is derailing China-U.S. ties, increasing anti-Asian hate, and hiding the realities of public opinion across the Pacific.
After launching the AUKUS military pact between Britain and Australia in 2021, as well as stiff export controls designed to limit China’s economy last year, the U.S. began 2023 with what appeared to be an olive branch. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit China in February. Then came the “spy balloon.”
A Chinese balloon was blown off course and eventually shot down by the U.S. military. The Wall Street Journal and NBC uncritically printed and broadcasted statements from US Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder about the balloon's surveillance capabilities. On February 8, citing three unnamed officials, The New York Times said “American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of global surveillance.” The same story mentions the U.S. State Department’s briefings to foreign officials that were “designed to show that the balloons are equipped for intelligence gathering and that the Chinese military has been carrying out this collection for years, targeting, among other sites, the territories of Japan, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines.”
On April 3, the BBC and CNN published conflicting stories on the balloon that cited anonymous officials but contained inconsistencies about its ability to take pictures. It wasn’t until June 29 that Ryder admitted no data had been transmitted. In September, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told CBS the balloon wasn’t even spying. This matched China’s statements about the balloon, as well as that of American meteorologists. But the damage was done. Blinken had postponed his trip to China. He eventually went in June, after a trip to Papua New Guinea, where its student protesters rejected his plans to militarize their country under a security pact.
War profiteers are edging us closer to a conflict. From sending the Patriot weapons system to Taiwan to practicing attacks with F-22 Raptors in the occupied Northern Marianas Islands, Lockheed Martin is raking in lucrative contracts while residents of the region fear an outbreak of war.
On May 26, Blinken made a speech, referring to China as a “long-term challenge.” Politico went further, publishing a piece on May 26, called “Blinken calls China ‘most serious long-term’ threat to world order” with a same-day USA Today article also taking the liberty of using challenge and threat interchangeably.
A Princeton University study found Americans who perceive China as a threat were more likely to stereotype Chinese people as untrustworthy and immoral. Intelligence leaks about a China threat combined with the age-old Yellow Peril syndrome have allowed for incessant Sinophobia to dominate our politics.
Misinformation, the other pandemic
In May 2020, Trump told a scared country with 1 million recorded COVID-19 cases and almost 100,000 dead that the pandemic was China’s fault. Again, our leaders cited undisclosed intelligence. For its part, CNN showed images of wet markets after The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Walter Russell Mead called “China Is The Real Sick Man of Asia.” A year later, Politico eventually acknowledged Trump cherry-picked intelligence to support his claims but the Biden administration ended up also seeking to investigate the lab leak theory. And the media went along with it.
For The Wall Street Journal, pro-Iraq War propagandist Michael Gordon co-authored an article claiming that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.” An anonymous source said, “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality.” But the source admits it’s not known why researchers were sick.
The article relies on the conservative Hudson Institute’s Senior Fellow David Asher’s testimony and the fact China has not shared the medical records of citizens without potential COVID-19 symptoms. It is even admitted that several other unnamed U.S. officials find the Trump-era intelligence to be exactly what it is—circumstantial.
A year earlier, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries moderated by CNN, Dana Bash asked Bernie Sanders: “What consequences should China face for its role in its global crisis?” She asked the question referencing how Wuhan’s authorities silenced Dr. Wenliang but failed to mention China’s People’s Supreme Court condemned the city’s police for doing so. She also didn’t acknowledge how Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli revealed in July 2020 that all of the staff and students in her lab tested negative for COVID-19. Shi even shared her research with American scientists. Georgetown University COVID-19 origin specialist Daniel Lucey welcomed Shi’s transparency: “There are a lot of new facts I wasn’t aware of. It’s very exciting to hear this directly from her.”
But from the Page Act of 1875, which stereotyped Chinese as disease carriers, to job discrimination during the pandemic, it is Asian Americans who ultimately pay the price for the media’s irresponsibility and participation in medical racism. They are already among the casualties of the new cold war. But that war not only threatens residents of the U.S. but the entire planet too.
Profit, not principle
This summer, the U.S. armed Taiwan under the Foreign Military Transfer program, reserved for sovereign states only. This violates the one-China policy which holds that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge that there is one China. Biden is also trying to include Taiwan weapons funding in a supplemental request to Congress. Weapons sales to Taiwan go back to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, as well as Reagan administration’s assurances that the U.S. will keep sending weapons but not play any mediation role between Taipei and Beijing. In 1996, a military standoff between the U.S. and China erupted in the Taiwan Strait, followed by an increasing flow of lethal weaponry up to the present.
The New York Times published a story on September 18, mentioning Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which it says was “a show of support for the island.” Never mind that the majority of Taiwan residents surveyed by the Brookings Institute felt her visit was detrimental to their security. The media also often ignores voices from Taiwan who don’t want war, favor reunification, or reject attempts to delete Chinese history in their textbooks.
Still, Fox News continues to give a platform to lawmakers like Representative Young Kim who wrote a piece on September 20 advocating for more military patrols in the South China Sea. On October 17, The Washington Post published a story about the Pentagon releasing footage of Chinese aircraft intercepting U.S. warplanes over the last two years. The story does not share the context of U.S. expansionism or how multiple secretaries of defense have threatened Beijing over its disputed maritime borders. Microsoft is even getting in on the action, with articles from CNN and Reuters last month uncritically sharing the software company’s claims that China is using AI to interfere in our elections, despite no evidence shared with the voting public.
It demonstrates how war profiteers are edging us closer to a conflict. From sending the Patriot weapons system to Taiwan to practicing attacks with F-22 Raptors in the occupied Northern Marianas Islands, Lockheed Martin is raking in lucrative contracts while residents of the region fear an outbreak of war. RTX supplies Israel’s Iron Dome and is now designing engineering systems for gunboats in the Pacific. When arms dealers make money, victims of imperialism die. With strong links to the military, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft, News Corp, and Warner Bros. Discovery would care as long as their stocks go up too. Intelligence spooks and media moguls don’t know what’s best for people or the planet. And it’s time for a balanced and nuanced understanding of China. That begins with disarming the discourse and keeping the Pacific peaceful.
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Fiji Joins Call for Global Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at UN Climate Talks
"The time for bold, ambitious, and transformative measures is now," said a representative of the Fijian government.
Jun 13, 2023
Fiji on Monday became the latest country to speak out on the world's stage for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The country had already joined with five other Pacific island nations in backing the treaty at a summit in Port Vila, Vanuatu, in March. Now, it raised its voice to call for a global treaty to phase out fossil fuels at a side event at the ongoing U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.
"We cannot afford to delay action any longer. Our climate is radically changing, and with it, our ecosystems, our livelihoods, and our cultures all come under increasing threat," Genevieve Jiva, the principal international relations officer for the government of Fiji, said at the conference. "The time for bold, ambitious, and transformative measures is now."
The 14 Pacific Island Developing States are responsible for only 0.23% of global greenhouse gas emissions that cause the climate crisis, compared to the 14 most fossil-fuel burning nations, which contribute more than 70%. Despite this, Pacific nations are disproportionately vulnerable to climate impacts.
Fiji, for example, is already suffering economic damage and population displacement because of more extreme tropical cyclones. Warmer ocean waters are bleaching its coral reefs, which help protect its coasts, provide habitat for fish, and attract tourists, while changing rainfall patterns and rising temperatures threaten its agriculture and freshwater supplies.
"Even as one of the nations least responsible for the climate crisis, we shoulder some of the most devastating loss and damage," Alisi Rabukawaqa, a 350.org Pacific Council Elder from Fiji, said in a statement. "The fight against the climate crisis is fought on multiple fronts—through community and storytelling, through activism and diplomacy."
"Tuvalu calls on all countries to follow the example set by Fiji today and commit to addressing the root cause of the climate crisis: Fossil Fuels."
Pacific island nations have emerged as diplomatic leaders in the struggle for a just response to the climate emergency. Fiji was the first nation to formally ratify the Paris agreement. Then Vanuatu became the first nation to call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September 2022, followed by Tuvalu at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, two months later.
"Vanuatu warmly welcomes Fiji's resolute call for a Fossil Fuel Treaty," Vanuatu's Climate Minister Hon. Ralph Regenvanu said in a statement. "As fellow Pacific island nations, we share the same vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and recognize the urgent need for decisive action. Our commitment to a sustainable and renewable future sets a powerful example to the world."
Tuvalu's Minister of Finance & Economic Development, Hon. Seve Paeniu, also welcomed Fiji's statement.
"A Fossil Fuel Treaty will ensure that we do not cross the 1.5 warming threshold, which is a red line for Tuvalu, Fiji, and all Pacific Small Island Developing States who are constantly having to deal with extreme weather events and the degradation of our lands and livelihoods," Paneiu said. "Tuvalu calls on all countries to follow the example set by Fiji today and commit to addressing the root cause of the climate crisis: Fossil Fuels."
The proposed Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has three pillars: an end to fossil fuel expansion; a fair phase out of fossil fuels, with nations that have historically contributed more to the current emergency moving faster; and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy that ensures no workers, communities, or nations are abandoned.
Treaty supporters note that fossil fuels were responsible for 86% of carbon dioxide emissions this decade, yet the Paris agreement doesn't mention fossil fuels by name and the agreements coming out of COP27 did not mention oil and gas.
Six Pacific island nations–with Tonga, the Solomon Islands, and Niue joining Fiji, Vanuatu, and Tuvalu–signed the Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel-Free Pacific in March, which included support for the treaty.
"With oil CEO, Al Jabar, at the helm of COP28 this year, we are going to need all of the Pacific strength we can get to fight the propaganda of fossil fuel expansion."
"The Pacific continues to show the world what real leadership during a crisis looks like and that without greater ambition and vision, we cannot overcome the greatest threat to our planet," Auimatagi Joe Moeono-Kolio, Pacific director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said in a statement.
Outside the Pacific, the treaty has also been backed by the World Health Organization, the European Parliament, 84 municipal and regional governments including the California Senate, 101 Nobel laureates, 2,150 civil society organizations, 3,000 scientists and academics, and more than 600,000 individuals.
"Without a managed phaseout of fossil fuels, there is no hope of meeting the aims of the Paris agreement," Moeono-Kolio said. "A Fossil Fuel Treaty would play a key role in reducing the risks of extreme weather events and other physical impacts we experience almost daily now in the Pacific. We stand ready to support the Pacific's vision of a world free from fossil fuels."
Joseph Sikulu, 350.org's Pacific managing director, also hoped that Pacific leadership would yield results during the upcoming COP28 negotiations in the UAE.
"With oil CEO, Al Jabar, at the helm of COP28 this year, we are going to need all of the Pacific strength we can get to fight the propaganda of fossil fuel expansion," Sikulu said. "Another world is possible, one built on justice, equity and safe renewable energy, and I firmly believe the Pacific is going to lead us in getting there."
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What Exact “Security Threat” Does China Pose?
Any danger from China's rise is to the U.S.'s business and political elites, not its people.
May 02, 2023
Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on global warming, poverty reduction, protection of biodiversity, international disarmament, implementation of international law, and other left-wing priorities ought to be appalled by the escalating tensions between the U.S. and China and actively organizing against them.
The new Cold War between “East” (including Russia) and “West” is more dangerous than the first one, not only in having already provoked a proxy war between great powers in Europe itself, and not only in undermining any progress toward goals that are urgent for all of humanity, but also in preparing the conditions for a horrific large-scale war that might well end in nuclear winter. The coming years will, to a substantial degree, determine the future of civilization, which puts a tremendous burden on all decent people to struggle to end the madness.
“Both sides,” of course, bear responsibility for the new Cold War, just as all great powers share most of the responsibility for failing to act decisively on global warming. Given the disproportionate power and imperialistic history of the United States, however, it is this country that bears most of the blame, in both cases. So it is, first and foremost, this country’s policies that we have to change. Even were this not the case, though, the principle that Noam Chomsky has enunciated would apply: It is the dangers presented by their own states, not enemy states, that citizens have a duty to organize against. Westerners should, primarily, criticize their own governments, which they can hope to influence. They can’t meaningfully influence China or Russia.
Two questions pose themselves: First, is China indeed a threat, and if so, to what, precisely? Second, is confrontation the best means to deal with whatever threat China represents?
The question arises, then, as to how best to steer America from a course of aggression to one of cooperation and conciliation. That is, how can we build an antiwar movement? A crucial task, evidently, is to delegitimize the direction of policy vis-à-vis China that began under Trump and has continued under Biden, the pursuit of military provocation and economic warfare. This entails a relentless focus on refuting the reasons Washington gives to justify its aggressive posture.
Americans are inundated with the message that China is a “threat,” and that for this reason it must be confronted. They hear it from every major media outlet—CBS, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. This message reflects the attitude of Washington, which obviously views China as a major threat—to American “security,” “national security” (as stated for example in the 2022 National Defense Strategy). Two questions pose themselves: First, is China indeed a threat, and if so, to what, precisely? Second, is confrontation the best means to deal with whatever threat China represents?
National Security
The concept of “national security” has been thrown around promiscuously for generations, not only in politics and the popular media but even the international relations scholarship. Rarely is it noticed that the term, unless clarified, is meaningless, or that its meaning varies by context. Was George W. Bush protecting America’s “security” by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, thereby massively increasing terror, and terrorist recruiting, across the Middle East? Is the government protecting Americans’ present and future security by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, thus accelerating global warming? Prima facie, the most obvious meaning of security is something like Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of religious belief, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But this kind of security for the average person—is this a high priority of the U.S. government? Is it what is meant by the mantra that China is a security threat? Is China responsible for the economic insecurity of most Americans, or their housing insecurity, or their fear of mass shootings, or their fear of getting sick because they won’t be able to pay medical bills?
“Security,” therefore, apparently doesn’t mean the security of Americans, at least not of the vast majority. The government could invest $800 billion in, say, upgrading infrastructures of public health and housing—you know, actual security infrastructures—rather than upgrading the military and thereby encouraging a dangerous arms race with China. Realist scholars like John Mearsheimer propose an alternative definition: Security in the technical sense means the state’s very survival in an anarchic system of international relations. Potential rivals exist everywhere, so states have to be prepared for military confrontations. Their need to survive, therefore, has a corollary: “Great powers [seek] to maximize their relative power,” Mearsheimer writes, “because that is the optimal way to maximize their security. In other words, survival mandates aggressive behavior,” in order that the state can defend itself against a potential aggressive rival. The ultimate goal in this dog-eat-dog security competition is to be a regional hegemon that can trounce any opponent, and then to prevent any other country from becoming a rival hegemon.
Only through its arsenal of nuclear weapons can China even conceivably threaten the U.S., which means that the most rational American policy is not to provoke a nuclear arms race but to try to phase out all nuclear weapons worldwide.
This “realist” reasoning might sound plausible, although one can see right away that it tends to rationalize and legitimize militarism (as shown by Mearsheimer’s judgment that the brutal expansionism of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and ’40s was quite rational, for they were only trying to survive!). Can it really be maintained, however, that contemporary China threatens the very survival of the United States? Only through its arsenal of nuclear weapons can China even conceivably threaten the U.S., which means that the most rational American policy is not to provoke a nuclear arms race but to try to phase out all nuclear weapons worldwide. This would certainly increase America’s security. Since the new Cold War only exacerbates the nuclear threat, the U.S. government’s motivation for it, contra Mearsheimer, cannot be to ensure its own survival. So, if “security” concerns are, as is often said, what motivate America’s confrontational policies, we need another definition of that perplexing word.
The work of earlier realists such as Hans Morgenthau, as well as Marxists, provides the answer: In the absence of genuine military threats to a country (like the very fortunate United States since 1812), security is nothing but a euphemism for state power and prestige. The struggle for power as an end in itself is what motivates all ruling elites and governments. Economic, military, geopolitical, ideological, cultural power—even a hegemon will insatiably strive for more power, total power, crushing all dissent everywhere to the extent possible. “A political policy,” says Morgenthau, “seeks either to keep power, to increase power, or to demonstrate power.” Whether this is because of human nature, as Morgenthau argues, or the inevitable dynamics of powerful institutions, or the fact that only power-hungry people rise to the top, it is a general principle.
Since Americans rarely look favorably on government as such, opponents of the new Cold War would do well to constantly emphasize that its primary purpose is to defend and assert the hegemonic power (i.e., “national security”) of the U.S. government, together with certain segments of the business community—for example, defense contractors—that are closely interlinked with government. Constant exposure of the belligerence of U.S. policy, as contrasted with China’s relative restraint, would undermine public support for confrontation. When U.S. officials, in characteristic fits of mind-boggling hypocrisy, charge that China is threatening global peace and stability, one might quote Kishore Mahbubani’s article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “What China Threat?”:
Quite remarkably, of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom), China is the only one among them that has not fired a single military shot across its border in thirty years, since a brief naval battle between China and Vietnam in 1988. By contrast, even during the relatively peaceful Obama Administration, the American military dropped twenty-six thousand bombs on seven countries in a single year. Evidently, the Chinese understand well the art of strategic restraint.
China is indeed a threat—to the dominance of a small American elite, centered in finance, government, and tech, over world politics and the world economy. As Deborah Veneziale explains in Washington’s New Cold War, much of the hostility of America’s capitalist class (or particular sectors of it) to China results from the difficulty of accessing the Chinese market: “U.S. tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have virtually no market in China, while companies like Apple and Microsoft face increasing difficulties… [These companies] yearn for a change to the political system in China that would open the door to the country’s massive market, and major actors in this sector are actively working to advance Washington’s hostile foreign policy.” Finance, likewise, is unhappy with China’s capital controls, which restrict capital flows into and out of the country. George Soros expressed the frustration of many financiers when he tweeted in January 2022 that “Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today.”
Aside from grievances due to China’s non-neoliberal character, a significant reason for Washington’s strategy of aggressive confrontation is simply that expansion of U.S. military capacity is an end in itself, for which pretexts have to be sought. As Morgenthau might say, such a policy demonstrates (and can help keep) power, which is the whole point of being a government. It is also the kind of thing that companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and BAE Systems will benefit from and lobby for. It’s hardly a secret that there is a revolving door between the Pentagon and private military contractors: Even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was on the board of directors of companies like Raytheon before Biden appointed him. Cold Wars are in the interest of very wealthy corporations and very powerful government bureaucracies, which can use them to justify larger congressional appropriations and expansions of their power.
China Will Constrain the U.S. Empire
Returning to “security” risks—risks to the security of the global dominance (“leadership” is the preferred term) of U.S. elites—it is true that as China’s economy grows, its geopolitical power will necessarily grow as well, thus challenging U.S. “leadership.” There is some sense, therefore, if not much justice, in Biden’s attempts to slow China’s economic growth by restricting exports of cutting-edge semiconductor chips and other high-tech equipment. Whether such restrictions are in the interest of American consumers, or of humanity as a whole, is much more debatable. In any event, to partially delegitimize the trade wars that the U.S. is escalating, and which may well become quite harmful to Americans, it suffices for dissenters to note at every opportunity that these wars’ entire purpose is to hurt China’s economy so it will have more trouble challenging the global dominance of America’s tech industry and the U.S. government. Most Americans are smart enough to know that their interests and those of the government don’t usually coincide.
Indeed, that’s the crucial question to keep asking in public forums: Why should we hate and fear China so much? It makes a lot more sense to hate and fear our own government, together with the corporate sector with which it is fused. China caused none of the vast human suffering, the desolation of hundreds of millions of lives over two generations, that has brought American society to its knees; it merely benefited from the decisions by corporate executives to relocate factories abroad, where it was easier to exploit labor at a higher rate. The fight of working Americans is not with China.
But what about China’s theft of intellectual property? What about its military threat to Taiwan? What about that terrifying balloon that floated into U.S. airspace? Surely all this justifies a new Cold War that could last a generation or more! Well, in fact, as every reasonable person knows, the right way to deal with whatever genuine threats China might pose is to pursue diplomacy, preferably through one of the multilateral institutions that exist for precisely such cases as these, including the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. When the U.S. rejects the obvious path of diplomacy in favor of military escalation and overblown rhetoric, it is clear that it’s merely seizing on real or imagined provocations as pretexts for pursuing some other goal it prefers not to publicize. This was clear when the Bush administration flailed around for excuses to invade Iraq—from weapons of mass destruction to ousting Saddam Hussein to building a wondrous new democracy—and it’s clear now, as the Biden administration orchestrates the wholly unnecessary military and economic containment of China.
Maybe a forced reining in of the U.S. empire could be good for Americans. Whatever constrains the power of the elite is likely to expand the power of the majority.
In fairness, it is perfectly natural for a hegemonic government, used to getting its way and running rampant over most of the world, to try to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor. As Marco Rubio said plaintively in a moment of refreshing candor some weeks ago, “Brazil cut a trade deal with China. They’re now going to do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.” From a superpower’s point of view, these are major crimes, the worst crimes possible. To constrain the ability to bully and browbeat that the U.S. has enjoyed since the late 1940s is totally unforgivable.
But the American people should question whether such a threat to their government’s power is also a threat to them. Maybe a forced reining in of the U.S. empire could be good for Americans. Whatever constrains the power of the elite is likely to expand the power of the majority. Those who favor peace, in any case, should welcome the emergence of a new superpower that can challenge the policies of the most warmongering country on earth, such as by brokering peace agreements the United States refuses to. However authoritarian China is internally, its role in the world might end up being relatively constructive.
This is especially the case given that, in its search for support among other countries and peoples, it can’t appeal to any democratic ideology it supposedly represents, as the U.S. at least rhetorically can. To win moral authority, China has to actually deliver rather than merely preach.
In the end, then, China’s rise poses a straightforward security threat: It threatens the security of the old order, the Washington-directed, neoliberal, war-as-a-first-resort order. It threatens to bring about a more multilateral world, with less impunity for America’s crimes and more recourses to which victims can turn. People everywhere—except the West’s power centers—should cheer this fact.
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Does the Rise of China Mean the Fall of the United States?
A decade on, Beijing's relentless economic expansion across Eurasia has begun to manifest itself in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence.
Apr 28, 2023
From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America's wartime commanders—George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific—knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass. Whether you're talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.
That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.
And to be blunt, these days, China's gain is America's loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington's presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.
A Cold War Strategy
After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America's wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.
In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia's Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts—with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington's global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.
After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America's postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas—the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.
After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America's postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains.
Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name "containment" and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure. After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China's subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation—in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term "the bleeding wound," the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department's policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase "the end of history." He argued that America's liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism… seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture."
The Invisible Power of Geopolitics
Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently "shallow."
For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the world's population and productivity, was always "the chief geopolitical prize." To perpetuate its "preponderance on the Eurasian continent" and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: "the expulsion of America from its offshore bases" along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its "perch on the western periphery" of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of "an assertive single entity" in the sprawling center of Eurasia.
Arguing for Eurasia's continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior "heartland." In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive "world island" and offered this bold geopolitical formula: "Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World." Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.
But today, by combining Mackinder's geopolitical theory with Brzezinski's gloss on global politics, it's possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planet's tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth's surface. Now, let's try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.
China's Geopolitical Gambit
In the decades since the Cold War's close, China's increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent's geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washington's foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). "Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community," confessed two former members of the Obama administration, "shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States' liking… All sides of the policy debate erred." In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing's annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.
In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, China's new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports—from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africa's coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany. In launching what soon became history's largest development project, 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijing's geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinski's fear of the rise of "an assertive single entity" in Central Asia.
Unlike the U.S., China hasn't spent significant effort establishing military bases.
Unlike the U.S., China hasn't spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of them in 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmar's Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.
Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy). In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent's underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it's winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.
Tectonic Shifts Shake U.S. Power
After a decade of Beijing's relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent's geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.
First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there. To provide critical air support for its infantry, U.S. jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf—an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the U.S.-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic U.S. retreat in defeat became unavoidable.
Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armored vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border. If Putin is to be believed, his "special military operation" was to be a bid to undermine NATO's influence and weaken the Western alliance—one of Brzezinski's conditions for the U.S. eviction from Eurasia.
After a decade of Beijing's relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent's geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions.
But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xi's support, a seemingly tall order given China's decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nations' relations were "superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era" and a denunciation of "the further expansion of NATO."
As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijing's Winter Olympics. So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30% to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijing's geopolitical chessboard.
Then, just last month, Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billion infrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing—a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.
Finally, the Biden administration was stunned this month when Europe's preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijing for a series of intimate tête-à-tête chats with China's President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced "a global strategic partnership with China" and promised he would not "take our cue from the U.S. agenda" over Taiwan. A spokesman for the Élysée Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that "the United States is our ally, with shared values." Even so, Macron's Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that bloc's ever-closer economic ties to China
The Future of Geopolitical Power
Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwan's fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the "shock and awe" of aerial bombardments, Washington's default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure. In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally—first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles—in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.
Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasia's geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing's grasp.
Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the U.S. strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a "second island chain" from Japan to Guam—the last of Brzezinski's criteria for the true waning of U.S. global power. In that event, Washington's leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.
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AUKUS Nuclear Submarines: Accelerating the Sleepwalking to War With China
Nuclear-powered submarines are designed for one purpose: attack. We must recognize the perils of continuing down this dangerous path.
Mar 26, 2023
The March 13 Biden-Albanese-Sunak summit in San Diego to demonstrate alliance solidarity and to sign the multi-billion AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, US) nuclear submarine deal accelerated the pace of the U.S. and China sleepwalking toward catastrophic war. Compounding the dangers that came with the creation of the alliance in 2021 as part of the Biden administration's Indo-Pacific military buildup, the new deal also adds to the mountain of obstacles blocking the way to the U.S.-Chinese cooperation that is essential if the climate emergency is to be reversed, the world's nuclear arms races stanched, and if the planet's two most technologically advanced nations collaborating to prevent pandemics and discover cancer cures.
The San Diego deal was designed to seal the southern flank of what Chinese President Xi Jinping describes as the West's "all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression" of China. Initially, the U.S. is to sell Australia three and possibly more nuclear powered and nuclear-capable Virginia class submarines in the 2030s. A decade later the U.S. subs will be augmented with nuclear-powered submarines built by Britain and Australia with advanced U.S. technologies. In addition to deepening dangerous military tensions and provocations across the Indo-Pacific where an accident or miscalculation could trigger World War III. At an estimated cost of $268 to $368 billion, the submarine deal is a massive windfall for the three powers' military-industrial complexes at the cost of spending for climate resilience and essential human needs. And even before Australia takes command of the most advanced U.S. and British nuclear submarines, Australian harbors will host U.S. and U.K. nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines as that land down under becomes a forward-based repair and maintenance hub for the United States' seventh fleet.
To be clear, Beijing is not innocent in this. The new cold war era is defined by a classic Thucydides Trap, the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers that in most cases—see most recently World War I and World War II—have climaxed with catastrophic conflicts. In this case, with its imperial claims to more than 80% of the resource-rich and strategically vital South China Sea, its occupation of Spratly and Parcel Islands claimed by six other nations, and its military modernization including its nuclear arsenal, China is behaving like most rising great powers.
Despite its calls for "common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security" and for others to honor the United Nations, it is not adverse to seizing others' maritime territories or violating international law to create a buffer zone or to revise, if not revolutionize, the rules of the road. But Xi had a point in decrying U.S. encirclement and containment. Building on the Obama-era U.S. Pivot to Asia, the Biden administration has deepened and expanded its alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia; expanded its military bases in Guam; and deepened military cooperation with India via the QUAD (U.S., Japan, Australia and India) collaboration.
My friend, the Australian peace and anti-bases movement leader Hannah Middleton, was unsparing in her opposition to AUKUS deal, writing that "Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Marles, like their predecessors Morrison and Dutton, are now exposed as traitors and agents of a foreign power. They are willing to sacrifice Australia's economy, to risk massive military and civilian casualties for the United States to retain dominance, economically and militarily in the Indo-Pacific. They are prepared to risk WW3 and the possibility of it going nuclear with devastating worldwide consequences?"
Looking back at history, it is worth recalling that with its 1898 conquests of the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa and the annexation of Hawaii, the United States launched its Asia-Pacific empire. Unlike the war to defeat Nazi Germany, the Pacific theater of World War II was an imperial competition between Japan, the U.S., and Britain. Japan lost. Britannia no longer ruled the waves. And the Pacific Ocean became an "American Lake," patrolled by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and reinforced by hundreds of U.S. military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and other U.S. protectorates. This guaranteed U.S. access to East Asian markets and labor along with the implicit threat that U.S. naval and air power could enforce blockades and strangle rival economies, especially China's.
Beginning with the sacrifice of 60,000 Australian lives in the futility of WWI, the dispatch of troops to fight in the Korean War, and its brutal complicity in Washington's Indochina War, the Australian government has long served as Anglo-America's poodle. Its hosting of the Pine Gap intelligence base has given Australia a role in U.S. preparations for fighting a nuclear war. And the expansion of Holt Naval base in Perth and the permanent deployment of thousands of U.S. marines in Darwin (both in northern Australia) reinforce U.S. control of the strategically vital Malacca Strait, with their presence also challenging Chinese ambitions in the Indian Ocean.
Now comes AUKUS to reinforce U.S. Indo-Pacific hegemony. In addition to augmenting U.S. and Japanese military plans to bottle up the Chinese Navy within the first island chain, AUKUS begins to harness Australia into the first stage of a possible and certainly catastrophic war for Taiwan. In anticipation of a possible Chinese blockade of what Beijing perceives as its renegade province, U.S. war planners anticipate that the PLA will establish a naval blockade around Taiwan in the tradition of siege warfare. The Pentagon's answer? Breaking the blockade with its and its allies' submarine supremacy. (To calm Chinese fears the Australian government denies that it has yet to commit to defend Taiwan in case of war.)
AUKUS is the latest iteration of U.S. campaigning to maintain military supremacy to reinforce its declining Indo-Pacific hegemony. In response to the 1996 Taiwan crisis, when President Clinton dispatched two U.S. aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Strait (and terrifying Chinese leadership as a result), Beijing has invested heavily in building a 21st military and laid its unjust claim to more than 80% of the South China/West Philippine Sea thus challenging U.S. Pacific hegemony, and built a Navy as it competes for control of the Inner Island Chain. The U.S. response has been a redoubled campaign to "contain" China, augmenting U.S. fire and economic power with expanded and deepened alliances.
First came Obama's "Pivot to Asia," the commitment to deploy 60% of U.S. naval and air power in what is now called the Indo-Pacific region, then Trump's China-bashing, provocative assaults on the (Taiwan-related) One China Policy and "Freedom of Navigation" forays in territorially disputed waters. Now the Biden administration's National Security Strategy is targeted primarily against China.
There are also questions and a debate about the nuclear implications of the deal. The three allies insist that while the submarines will be nuclear-powered, they will not be nuclear-armed, and Australia's foreign minister claims that the navies of a "number of other countries" have nuclear-powered submarines. Missing from that claim is that the number is five, and that those five nations are the P-5 nuclear weapons states.
Beijing is not having it, claiming that the deal violates the "object and purpose" of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and that it violates the NPT's requirement that exchange of nuclear equipment be only "for the peaceful use of nuclear energy." There are also fears that the AUKUS submarine precedent will inspire other nations to field nuclear-powered submarines, thereby increasing the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. And, as the renowned physicist Frank Von Hipple report reminds us, nuclear-powered submarines are designed for one purpose: attack.
However, as the Quincy Institute reports, in 1972 a "submarine loophole" was inserted into the NPT. The deployment of these extraordinarily deadly and dangerous war machines may not violate international law. But they do severely undermine the chances that we can escape what Australian Ambassador Kevin Rudd describes as "the avoidable war."
As Hannah Middleton's writing indicates, the AUKUS submarine deal has not been unanimously welcomed in Australia. Citing the monumental cost of the deal, former Australian Prime Minister Keating has termed the agreement "the worst deal in all history."
The Australian peace movement is mobilizing to block implementation of the deal, focusing on the dangers of ratcheting up tensions with China, the submarines' staggering costs, and the need to pursue common security diplomacy across the Asia Pacific. We in the U.S. are also called to oppose AUKUS and the submarine deal, to begin finding ways to act in solidarity with our Australian partners. And, rather than sleepwalk into World War III, we would do well to at least test China's commitments to common security by prioritizing diplomacy instead of thoughtlessly and dogmatically pursuing the chimera of military domination.
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Militarized Japan and the Biden-Kishida Summit Signal Moment in the New Cold War
Across the Indo-Pacific, as well as in the escalating Ukraine War, humanity stands an accident or miscalculation away from the calamity of nuclear war.
Jan 10, 2023
"Japan in December adopted a set of three security and defense strategy documents that break from its exclusively self-defense-only stance. Under the new strategies, Japan vows to build up its counterstrike capability with long-range cruise missiles that can reach potential targets in China, double its defense budget within five years and bolster development of advanced weapons." —Asahi Shimbun
"U.S. officials have welcomed Japan's willingness to take on more offensive role, while experts say it could also help widen cooperation with Australia, their main regional defense partner." —Asahi Shimbun
Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida comes to Washington on Friday, January 13. Unlike Japan, his summit with President Joe Biden will not garner much press attention here in the United States, but it marks a signal moment in Japan's rise in military power and in the implementation of the Biden Administration's National Security Strategy. The Strategy, which prioritizes Chinese and Russian challenges to the so-called "rules-based order", a euphemism for U.S. primacy which is rife with contradictions, prioritizes the centrality of alliances to U.S. global power, stating that "our alliances and partnerships around the world are our most important strategic asset."
The revitalized 70-year-old U.S.-Japan alliance has renewed importance in enforcing U.S. defense of Taiwan and resisting the expansion of Chinese influence across the South China/West Philippine Sea. This Sea is the geopolitically critical expanse of ocean across which 40% of world trade—including Middle East oil which fuels East Asian economies—flows. Similarly, further integration of the Japanese and U.S. economies and technological resources are encompassed by the alliance and seen as essential to the power and wealth of both nations.
Prime Minister Kishida has stated that the summit will be a "very important" opportunity to "demonstrate at home and abroad the further strengthening of the Japan-U.S. alliance." The alliance is not a new development. In 1952 the Mutual Security Treaty (AMPO in Japanese) was secretly imposed on Japan as a condition for ending the postwar military occupation. Since then, contrary to Japan's "peace constitution," the island nation has served as the center of the United States' hub and spokes Asia-Pacific alliance structure. It reinforced the Cold War containment doctrine in Asia, and in the 21st century it plays a critical role in containing and managing China's rise and its challenge to U.S. regional hegemony.
Misconceptions About the Peace Constitution and the Growth of Japan's Military
Misconceptions about Japan's "Peace Constitution" abound. The document's Article 9, which has been fervently defended by most Japanese, states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." It goes on to commit that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
Yet, in the tradition of law being what those with power say it is, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and courts have been "elastic" in their interpretation of Article 9. Over recent decades, Japan's military spending has grown to $50 billion a year and is about to be doubled. Japan currently ranks as the world's eighth greatest military spender, well behind China, but significantly ahead of U.S. allies like Israel, Italy, Australia, and Canada.
In addition to its major role in drafting Japan's postwar constitution, U.S. occupation forces identified and empowered the country's post-war ruling elite. In the 1930s and 40s Japan's elite was divided by the "militarists" who aimed to win "the whole melon", completely destroying and replacing U.S. and British Asia- Pacific colonial empires with their own. The militarists were opposed by more sober-minded members of the elite who understood the folly of the "militarists'" ambitions and sought to expand the Japanese empire under the umbrella of U.S. and British imperial power. It was this latter camp that the U.S. occupation brought to power. Their descendants have ruled Japan almost continually since then via the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. (The successes of the occupation of Japan provided the model for the George W. Bush Administration's ambitions in Iraq.)
During the Korean War, to protect the rear flank of its military bases across Japan, occupation forces led the Japanese government to take its initial steps in what was to become its military, euphemistically branded as the "Japan Self Defense Force" (SDF). In 1952, what had been a minimal national police force was renamed the National Safety Force and expanded to 110,000 personnel. Two years later the Safety Force was rechristened the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, shattering essential constitutional restraints. Over time the SDF would grow, as did its capabilities and regional roles.
Until recent decades, the U.S. and Japanese militaries operated with a division of labor. The SDF was responsible for guarding Japan and the more than 100 U.S. military bases and installations across the Japanese archipelago, including the massive Yakota Base in the Japanese capital and the massive concentration of bases in Okinawa which have transformed Japan into an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for the United States. Washington's "responsibility" has been to ensure "peace" through the exercise of its regional hegemony. This has included defense of Japan via "extended deterrence," Washington's nuclear umbrella over Japan, which has also served as a check on the nuclear ambitions of segments of the Japanese elite and military.
Given strong Japanese pacifist commitments as a consequence of the country's disastrous 15-year war of aggression (beginning with the 1931 invasion of China, not the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor), the military and the elite have pursued a "salami strategy" by expanding the Japanese military and its roles one slice at a time. Boiling frogs might be the better analogy. By 1989 the SDF moved to increase its capacities for overseas military deployments under cover of participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations from Cambodia and East Timor to Haiti and South Sudan. Tokyo came under enormous pressure in 1991 when popular opposition prevented the SDF from joining the "coalition of the willing" in the first Gulf War. But soon thereafter Chinese military potential as manifested in the 1996 Taiwan crisis and growing fears of North Korea's nuclear weapons program spurred greater Japanese military commitments. A month after Chinese military forces bracketed waters around Taiwan with demonstration missile strikes, and in the wake of Okinawan protests that shook the U.S.-Japan alliance to its core, also in 1996 Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and President Bill Clinton signed the Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security Alliance for the 21st Century.
Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi invoked Japan's "responsibilities as a member of the international community" as necessitating Maritime Self Defense Force operations to provide logistical support to U.S. forces in the form transporting supplies, especially oil, across the Indian Ocean. And in 2003, this time under cover of a U.N. resolution for Iraqi reconstruction, a small SDF force was dispatched to Iraq with U.S. guarantees that they would not suffer casualties.
While it added nothing to the U.S.-led war, it was designed to whittle away at popular Japanese resistance to sending SDF forces into war zones. In 2017, Japan joined a revitalized QUAD alliance (U.S., Japan, Australia, and India) and has since participated in joint naval operations with the U.S. and partner nations in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf, and over the past year it has signaled its willingness to join the U.S. in battle in the event of a war for Taiwan. Today the Japanese military is anything but inconsequential with more than 300,000 troops, an Air Self Defense Force comprised primarily of advanced U.S. fighters, and a Maritime Self Defense Force of 155 ships including destroyers and helicopter carriers, some of which can double as aircraft carriers. Japan's rockets can reach Beijing and Pyongyang as well as Mars. It has intelligence satellites, and the Kishida government is in the process of committing to develop precision conventional first-strike attacks against North Korea and China.
At last count, Japan possessed 47 tons of weapons-grade plutonium in its stockpiles, and it has long been assumed that it is just "a turn of a screwdriver" away from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. Sheila A. Smith writes in Japan Rearmed that "the Japanese government has never argued that Article 9 would prevent the nuclear option." And in 1996 the lead author of Japan's Defense White Paper stated that for 30 years the SDF has believed that it has the right to deploy tactical nuclear weapons (which can be as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs). It was, he simply said, a right that the SDF had yet to exercise. In times past, U.S. diplomats have sought to influence Chinese policy decisions by threatening to rescind the nuclear umbrella over Japan, opening the way for Tokyo to become a rival nuclear power.
Responding to China's Rise and North Korea's Nukes and Missiles
With memories of Japan's brutal WWII conquests and military/colonial occupations, Asian nations—especially China and Korea—have been wary of Japanese militarism and rearmament. However, China's rise, replacing Japan as the world's second wealthiest country, the military buildup the Chinese economy has made possible, and North Korea's nuclear and missile programs came as a massive shocks to the Japanese people and establishment. They have spurred and provided the political rationale for Tokyo's near total abandonment of Article I, its military buildup, and the expanding alliance with the United States.
In part, it's an identity crisis that dates back to the Japanese elites' response to Admiral Perry's 1853 "opening" of Japan with his Black warships. The Meiji restoration, which overthrew the shogunate and created modern Japan, opted to integrate many dimensions of Western civilization, methods, and ambitions as it began to identify more with the West than the East. Throughout the 20th century, most Japanese viewed China as poor and backward, and there were complex feelings, including guilt, about their nation's brutal invasion and colonization of much of China. Ironically, China's industrial modernization under Deng Xiaoping was largely fueled by Japanese technologies and investments.
Despite this modern history of cooperation, the 2012 right-wing Japanese initiative to purchase the uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu islets which lie in the East China Sea between Japan and China triggered intensifying military tensions between Beijing and Tokyo. These uninhabited rocks are claimed by both nations and could potentially influence a struggle for control of Okinawa and the waters leading to Taiwan. Japanese and Chinese naval and air forces have conducted almost daily provocative operations around and over the islets to reinforce their claims. A collision or other accident could easily spark a military escalation, which in turn could precipitate U.S. intervention on Japan's behalf in order to fulfill its alliance Treaty obligations.
In the face of China's growing military power and North Korea's increasing military capabilities, Tokyo has repeatedly increased its military budget, breaking what was the long-honored spending cap of 1% of its GDP for the SDF. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—who ruled from 2012 to 2022 and was the son of the accused Class A war criminal and later Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi—pressed the expansion of the Japanese military and unsuccessfully prioritized the elimination of Article 9, constitutional limitations be damned.
In mid-December, without national debate, Prime Minister Kishida—Abe's successor—appears to have shattered the last vestiges of Article 9 restrictions. In the last month he has committed to doubling Japan's military expenditures. In the words of Japan's newspaper of record, Asahi Shimbun, the Kishida Cabinet adopted new versions of three major security policies: the National Security Strategy, the Defense Strategy, and the Defense Capability Enhancement Plan. As Asahi Shimbun editorialized, "the centerpiece of his new defense strategy is the possession of the ability to strike enemy bases, which…entails the risk of triggering a Japanese action that is seen as a pre-emptive strike in violation of international law. The policy shift could also risk provoking military countermeasures from potential enemies and heighten tensions in the region."
Japan has played the role of prized and largely obedient Asia-Pacific ally, even secretly allowing for the U.S. to introduce nuclear weapons into its Japanese bases despite Japan's three non-nuclear principles (not to possess, manufacture or allow introduction of nuclear weapons). At the same time, its ruling elite is proceeding with an awareness that there is no permanence between friends and enemies. In the words of Sheila A. Smith, Japan has been preparing for "the U.S. abandonment of its longstanding maritime dominance in Asia [which] would leave Japan open to greater Chinese pressure." This fear may be taking on greater traction as the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives threatens to cut Pentagon spending by $75 billion. Via its coalition building and joint operations with other Indo-Pacific naval powers, Tokyo is laying the foundations for a possible new 21st century alliance structure to restrain China
Common Security Diplomatic Alternatives
All of this is taking place in the context of spiraling arms races and provocative military activities in East Asia and more broadly across the Indo-Pacific. China responded to December's massive increase in U.S. military spending by sending a wave of 71 warplanes and 7 warships across the medial line in the Taiwan Strait. Subsequently, a Chinese warplane intercepted a U.S. spy plane threatening a collision as it came within 10 feet of the American aircraft.
Responding to renewed and massive U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which include the toppling of the North Korean regime, Kim Jung Un launched dozens of missiles near South Korean and Japanese waters and claims to have tested a new ICBM rocket engine capable of reaching the United States. In response, the right-wing Yoon government in Seoul and the Biden administration are meeting to deepen their nuclear weapons collaborations. Meanwhile, deeper into Asia, Chinese and Indian forces came to blows again in their contest to control oxygen-thin heights in the Himalayan mountains.
Were the stakes not so high, these reckless demonstrations of power could be compared to Mafia battles for street cred. Just as there are rules for the games of Mafia struggles for power, there are also diplomatic rules and international law designed to prevent catastrophes in great power and other international competitions. Not the least is the United Nations charter which obligates states to "refrain….from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state", and requires that international disputes be resolved by peaceful means. These rules were further enhanced in the 1980s by the common security commitments that no nation will seek to enhance its security by jeopardizing that of other nations. Common Security served as the paradigm on which the Cold War was brought to an end prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and it defined Euro-Atlantic relations throughout the 1990s, the first decade of the post-Cold War era.
Today, across the Indo-Pacific, as well as in the escalating Ukraine War, humanity stands an accident or miscalculation away from the calamity of nuclear war. It is past time for the U.S., Japan, China, and the Koreas to pursue their national interests—including human survival—by backing away from and reversing their dangerously spiraling military confrontations and embrace common security diplomacy and solutions. With necessity being the mother of invention, as it faces possible massive cuts in U.S. military spending by the newly-installed GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the Biden Administration could proactively get ahead of the curve. It could renew appeals for Common Security diplomacy and solutions, urging great and lesser power collaborations—including reversal of the dangers of the climate emergency—instead of pursuing primacy.
Rather than pouring military fuel on the fire, the U.S. and Japan, each of which faces major economic and social challenges, should cease encouraging Taiwanese independence and encourage what would be difficult and extended Taiwanese-Chinese negotiations over the self-governing island's future. As in the days that immediately followed the brief Biden-Xi summit, the two great powers could ratchet down the number and intensity of their provocative military exercises.
Much as the 1924 naval agreement between the U.S., Japan, and Britain ensured more than a decade of relative peace across the Pacific, today's Asia-Pacific powers could agree to collaborate in securing South China/West Philippine sea lanes, encourage ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a regional code of conduct, and share the Sea's vast resources. The U.S., South Korea, and Japan could reengage diplomacy with North Korea by signaling a willingness to reduce and then halt their escalating tit-for-tat military operations and press for a resumption of a version of the Six-Party Talks of the first decade of this century.
Reprising the words of a Japanese-American prophet, Yoko Ono, "War is over if you want." Solutions are known. The question is if we have the will to secure them.
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