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zbigniew brzezinski
Pushing for Regime Change in Russia Implies an Embrace of Endless War in Ukraine
It goes without saying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is wrong, violates the UN Charter, and cannot be justified under international law. Yet still we must ask: where is the path towards ending this conflict and the horrors being faced by Ukrainians?
Mar 12, 2023
Is it Russian imperialism or great-power politics that explains Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? And how likely is it that we could see regime change in Moscow? Moreover, do ideological labels matter in today’s political climate? C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He contends that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime but that the ongoing war is rooted in NATO’s eastward expansion and associated with the game of great-power politics. As for those who compare Putin to Hitler and call for regime change in Russia, Polychroniou argues that such claims and demands are both absurd and dangerous.
Alexandra Boutri: Let me start by asking you to share with me your views about an international relations topic that has dominated headlines for the past year, namely, the Russia-Ukraine war. Does it have its roots on Russian imperialistic aggression, which is the general view among most mainstream pundits, including many on the Left, or is it something more complicated than that?
C. J. Polychroniou: I think the best way to address your question is by putting this unnecessary tragedy, which, incidentally, could very well drag on for years to come, in historical context and thus realizing how easily it could have been avoided. Indeed, Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, may have taken everyone by surprise but the seeds of this war had been sown long before. Now, Ukrainians tend to emphasize Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 as the origin of the conflict between the two countries. This is not an accurate description because the great-power rivalry between the United States and Russia is left out of the equation.
But let’s start with Crimea. For whatever reason, Crimea was gifted from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming majority of the population of Crimea in the 1950s was ethnic Russian and there was still an ethnic Russian majority of over 60 percent in 2014. It should also be pointed out that the Crimean Peninsula has always been a strategically vital location on the Black Sea. Indeed, Crimea’s position in the Black Sea holds such strategic importance that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, made strong hints in a 1997 book titled The Grand Chessboard that the Crimean Peninsula could become a major source of instability in the territories of the former Soviet Union. Putting aside for now the legality of the Russian operation to annex Crimea, what is often ignored in the Ukrainian and western narrative is that it took place in the aftermath of NATO’s enlargement following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it wasn’t just Putin who was wary of NATO’s eastward expansion. Gorbachev was also suspicious of the perpetuation of NATO following the end of the Cold War while Boris Yeltsin, in a letter sent to President Clinton in 1993, had strongly opposed NATO’s expansion to the east.
It seems appropriate here to recall that Putin did not mince words when it came to giving his opinion about the eastward expansion of NATO at the Security Conference in Munich on February 2007:
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: "the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee." Where are these guarantees?
Each round of NATO expansion since the fall of the Berlin Wall (NATO grew from 16 countries at the peak of the Cold War to 30 today, several of which were part of the Warsaw Pact) was followed by loud complaints from Russia that such moves posed a threat to Russia’s national security. Moreover, the prospect of Georgia and Ukraine becoming members of the trans-Atlantic military alliance constituted a red line for Moscow. Yet pledges were made by NATO leaders at the Budapest Summit in April 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO member states. In fact, relations between NATO and Ukraine go back to the early 1990s and, after 2014, the level of military cooperation between the two intensified in critical areas.
From the perspective of the Kremlin, what NATO (i.e., the US) was up to amounted to an “encirclement” of Russia. Indeed, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand why Russian leaders felt this way, and there is no doubt that US officials knew all along that they were crossing Russia’s red lines on NATO expansion.
In this context, Russia’s invasion of the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia in 2008, Crimea’s annexation in 2014, and the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are all part of the game of great-power politics and have little to do with Putin’s alleged push for a new Russian empire.
Alexandra Boutri: So, according to the analysis you just provided, the idea that Putin might want to invade countries in Europe is utter hogwash. But what about the suggestion that Putin is a tyrant, this generation’s Adolf Hitler, and therefore his regime must be overthrown?
C. J. Polychroniou: The idea that Putin has plans to invade countries in Europe is so absurd and ridiculous as to be laughable. Indeed, the only serious question here is why so many refuse to acknowledge that NATO and the US bear responsibility for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and are now failing to pursue a diplomatic path in order to put an end to this great tragedy, which is going to get much worse in the months to come as Ukraine keeps receiving more and more weapons from the west and Russia is preparing for a bigger fight. The losses on both sides are already staggering and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure are on the verge of collapse. This is a completely senseless war that could have easily been avoided if U.S. and NATO had paid proper attention to Russia’s red lines. In fact, many top-level diplomats and academic experts had predicted that NATO’s provocative actions would lead to war.
Having said that, it goes without saying of course that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, violates the UN Charter and cannot be justified under international law. Moreover, Russia could easily be charged with war crimes for the Ukraine invasion. Yet isn’t it interesting that the Kremlin’s legal justification for the invasion is based on the “pre-emptive principle” first argued by the US when it invaded Iraq in 2003? Of equal interest is to see how the western community has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in comparison to the way it reacted to the US invasion of Iraq. Most Americans still have no idea of the level of destruction that the invasion unleashed. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated in a 2006 study that more than 600,000 Iraqis were killed during the first 40 months of war and occupation in Iraq. But the western community is king of the double standard.
To address your question about Putin, he is no doubt a ruthless autocrat. Manipulation and repression are integral components of his regime. They have been so from the day he was sworn in as president of Russia, more than 20 years ago. Now he is also a war criminal, but we must be careful with crazy comparisons with Hitler. If Putin is the new Hitler because of his decision to invade Ukraine, why shouldn’t the same be said about George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq? However, such analogies are not only ludicrous but extremely offensive because they cheapen the memory of millions of innocent people killed by the Nazis. Hitler’s monstrous regime carried out various major genocides and countless of mass murders. This may run counter to how major segments of the media are portraying Putin these days, but he is a rational and strategic actor, though he badly miscalculated his military strength when he decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as well as Ukrainian resistance. Furthermore, he has always been very popular with the Russian people and is even more popular today. In September 2022, his popularity level stood at 77 percent. After the invasion of Ukraine, the approval rating increased. In February 2023, Putin’s approval rating at home jumped up to 82 percent.So, when pundits and experts alike in the US and elsewhere speak of regime change in Russia, one really wonders what they may have in mind. Is regime change going to come from the inside, through a coup or revolution, or from the outside, through a foreign invasion? The security forces, which are the core and backbone of Putin’s regime, answer directly to Putin and they will surely protect him from any possible coup. On the other hand, his popularity is so great that simply precludes the possibility that he can be overthrown by his own people. A foreign invasion of Russia to overthrow Putin’s regime is sheer madness and totally out of the question, so all this talk about regime change in Moscow amounts to nothing more than dangerous political posturing. Why so? Because regime change seekers suspect, and they are probably right, that the most likely scenario for Putin to be removed from power is through the weakening of Russia. This means either Putin losing the war in Ukraine or witnessing the collapse of his own economy. In either case, achieving the goal of Putin’s removal from power mandates an indefinite continuation of the war regardless of what happens to Ukraine itself. But even so, what guarantee is there that Putin won’t be replaced by someone even more ruthless? A weakened and humiliated Russia will most likely lead to the emergence of an even more ruthless leader. After all, it was the economic collapse and humiliation of the 1990s that made Putin such a popular figure with the Russian people.
Alexandra Boutri: The far-right seems to have sided with Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine, while many of the left are defending Ukraine and even going so far as to support a stronger NATO. Do political labels matter in today’s world? Indeed, is the left-right political spectrum still valid today?
C. J. Polychroniou: The situation with far-right groups and individuals supporting Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine is a bit complicated. Some on the far-right in both the US and Europe seem to have sided with Putin simply because they see him as a white supremacist and the “savior” of western culture. But my own impression is that this is the case far more so with America’s far-right than it is with Europe’s far-right. Indeed, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric of many extreme right-wingers in Europe since the war started. For instance, both Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, both of them long-time admirers of Vladimir Putin, have condemned “Russian aggression.” They may have done so purely out of political opportunism, but there you have it. Anyway, ideological consistency is not the forte of the far-right. However, the same can be said nowadays about certain segments of the Left. Indeed, who would have thought 10 or even 5 years ago that the Left might one day be defending the enlargement of NATO? But we live in a time of interminable crises and perhaps political identity plight comes with the territory.
Today, more than any other time in recent history, the traditional political terms “left” and “right” have become a bit redundant, though I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination of doing away with the distinction. But consider this: Some of today’s conservative governments in Europe are pursuing policies, such as trying to tame the market and using the state to support vulnerable populations, that are hardly representative of neoliberalism or even traditional conservatism. Greece and Poland come to mind, both countries governed by right-wing political parties. By the same token, so-called “left” parties have moved ever so closer to the right, pursuing even neoliberal policies when they are in power, to the point that blue collar workers have switched allegiances. And the Green parties of today bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Green Movement of the seventies. The German Green party, for instance, is now advocating for stronger U.S. militarism.
Today, more than any other time in recent history, the traditional political terms “left” and “right” have become a bit redundant, though I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination of doing away with the distinction. But consider this: Some of today’s conservative governments in Europe are pursuing policies, such as trying to tame the market and using the state to support vulnerable populations, that are hardly representative of neoliberalism or even traditional conservatism. Greece and Poland come to mind, both countries governed by right-wing political parties. By the same token, so-called “left” parties have moved ever so closer to the right, pursuing even neoliberal policies when they are in power, to the point that blue collar workers have switched allegiances. And the Green parties of today bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Green Movement of the seventies. The German Green party, for instance, is now advocating for stronger U.S. militarism.
In the United States, of course, the situation is in some ways quite different. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it has developed a serious extremism problem while the Democratic Party has drifted towards its progressive faction. However, both “left” and “right” in the US are involved in a growing “culture war” and both practice cancel culture. The mania over political correctness and identity politics, which are the last things that the Left should be embracing given its historical commitment to free speech and universality, is terrible business. It is in fact helping today to give shape and form to the reactionary politics and policies of Ron DeSantis, the rising star of America’s hard- right.
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Amnesia and the 'Bleeding Wound': Afghanistan and the Implosion of America
If you were against the single most disastrous, megalomanic foreign policy act of this century, there’s no place for you in present-day Washington, not in the administration, either party in Congress, or even in memory
Jan 23, 2019
As I approach 75, I'm having a commonplace experience for my age. I live with a brain that's beginning to dump previously secure memories--names, the contents of books I read long ago (or all too recently), events, whatever. If you're of a certain age yourself, you know the story.
Recently, however, I realized that this experience of loss, like so much else in our world, is more complex than I imagined. What I mean is that such loss also involves gain. It's turned my mind to, and made me something of an instant expert on, one aspect of twenty-first-century America: the memory hole that's swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history. In fact, I've been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar. There's a difference, though, when it comes to the elites of the aging empire I live in at least. They don't just dump things relatively randomly as I seem to be doing. Instead, they conveniently obliterate all memory of their country's--that is, their own--follies and misdeeds.
Let me give you an example. But you need to bear with me here because I'm about to jump into the disordered mind of a man who, though two years younger than me, has what might be called--given present-day controversies--a borderline personality. I'm thinking of President Donald Trump, or rather of a particular moment in his chaotic recent mental life. As the New Year dawned, he chaired what now passes for a "cabinet meeting." That mainly means an event in which those present grovel before, fawn over, and outrageously praise him in front of the cameras. Otherwise, Trump, a man who doesn't seem to know the meaning of advice or of a meeting, held a 95-minute presidential ramble through the brambles in front of a Game of Thrones-style "[Iran] Sanctions Are Coming" poster of... well, him. The media typically ate it up, even while critiquing the president's understanding of that HBO TV series. And so it goes in the Washington of 2019.
Excuse me if I seem to be wandering off subject (another attribute of the aging mind), but I'm about to plunge into history and our president is neither a historian, nor particularly coherent. Read any transcript of his and not only does he flip from subject to subject, sentence by sentence, but even--no small trick--within sentences. In other words, he presents a translation problem. Fortunately, he's surrounded by a bevy of translators (still called "reporters" or "pundits") and, unlike the translators in the president's meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, we have their notes.
So here, as a start, is a much-quoted passage of his on this country's never-ending Afghan War from that cabinet meeting, which reporters and pundits jumped on with alacrity and criticized him roundly for:
"We're going to do something that's right. We are talking to the Taliban. We're talking to a lot of different people. But here's the thing -- because mentioned India: India is there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there; they should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting.
"The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot [of] these places you're reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan."
As I said, Donald Trump is no historian. So it's true that the Red Army didn't move into Afghanistan in 1979 thanks to a terrorist presence in Russia. And yes, every stray pen or talking head in Washington seemed to skewer the president for his ignorance of that reality, including the Atlantic's eminent neocon pundit David Frum who basically claimed that the president was simply pushing the latest dish of pasta Putinesca our way. ("It's amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion. What's even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: 'terrorists' and 'bandit elements.' It has been an important ideological project of the Putin regime to rehabilitate and justify the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan...")
While critics like Frum did begrudgingly admit that the Soviet fiasco in Afghanistan might have had just a teensy-weensy something or other to do with the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, less than two years after the Red Army limped home, the president, they insisted, basically got that wrong, too. The Soviet Union bankrupted by Afghanistan? Not in your dreams, buddy, or as the Washington Post's Aaron Blake wrote in a piece headlined "Trump's Bizarre History Lesson on the Soviet Union, Russia, and Afghanistan":
"The overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan is obvious. The USSR invaded in 1979 and left a decade later, in 1989. The superpower dissolved shortly thereafter in 1991. But correlation is not causation... It was perhaps among the many reasons the USSR collapsed. But it was not the reason."
And then, of course, came the next presidential tweet, and everyone--except me--moved on with alacrity. I was left alone, still dredging through my memories of that ancient conflict, which, these days, no one but the president would even think of bringing up in the context of the ongoing U.S. war in Afghanistan. And yet here's the curious thing when it comes to an aging empire that prefers not to remember the history of its folly: Donald Trump was right that Russia's Afghan misadventure is a remarkably logical place to start when considering the present American debacle in that same country.
Two Empires Trapped in Afghanistan
Let me mention one thing no one's likely to emphasize these days when it comes to the Russian decision to enter that Afghan quagmire in 1979. At the highest levels of the Carter and then the Reagan administrations, top American officials were working assiduously to embroil the Soviets in Afghanistan and would then invest staggering sums in a CIA campaign to fund Islamic extremist guerrillas to keep them there. Not that anyone in Washington is likely to play this up in 2019, but the U.S. began aiding those Mujahidin guerrillas not after the Red Army moved in to support a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, but six months before.
Here's how President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, would describe the situation almost two decades later:
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that's to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention."
Asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski responded:
"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"
Think about that largely missing bit of history for a moment. Top U.S. officials wanted to give the Soviet Union a version of their own disastrous Vietnam experience and so invested billions of dollars and much effort in that proxy war--and it worked. The Soviet leadership continued to pour money into their military misadventure in Afghanistan when their country was already going bankrupt and the society they had built was beginning to collapse around them. They were indeed suffering from what General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to call "the bleeding wound." And if that isn't the language of disaster (or bankruptcy or, perhaps more accurately, implosion), what is? Yes, Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires," wasn't the only thing that took their world down, but the way their much-vaunted army finally limped home a decade later was certainly a significant factor in its collapse.
Now, let me tax your memory (and especially elite Washington's) just a bit more. Think again about the history that led up to the American war President Trump was fretting about in that cabinet meeting. Under the circumstances, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Brzezinski and his successors were just a tad too successful--or, to put it another way, that they lured not one but two empires into their trap; the second being, of course, the American one.
After all, in that 10-year Afghan proxy war (1979-1989), they laid the foundations for the creation by a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden of a resistance outfit of Arab fighters. You know, "al-Qaeda," or "the base." They also funded other extremist Islamic figures and groups like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or the Haqqani network that would, more than a decade after the Soviets straggled home, go to war against... well, us. And through their investment in that brutal quagmire, they also helped lay the foundations for the destruction and destitution of significant parts of Afghanistan, and so for the brutal civil war that followed in the early 1990s amid the ruins. Out of that, of course, came another group whose name might still ring a bell or two: the Taliban.
Brzezinski & Co. laid the foundations for what would become a nearly 30-year American quagmire war.
In other words, Brzezinski & Co. laid the foundations for what would become a nearly 30-year American quagmire war (with a decade off between its two parts) in a land that, in 1979, few Americans other than a bunch of hippies had ever heard of. Here, then, is a small hint for the president: you might consider starting to refer to Afghanistan--and I assure you this would be historically accurate (even if you were roundly criticized for it by the Washington punditariat)--as America's "bleeding wound."
No matter how many years it goes on, one thing seems probable: like the Red Army, the U.S. military will finally limp out of that country in defeat and will also, in some way, bring that defeat home with them. It may not be what finally bankrupts or implodes the great(er) and far wealthier imperial power of the Cold War era, but as with Russia it will surely lend a helping hand.
There's No Success Like Failure in Washington
In a country in which implosive elements are already being mixed into its politics, President Trump had his finger on something when he brought up the Russian war in Afghanistan. However historically and syntactically mixed up he might have been, his brain was still far more on target than those of most of the wise men and women of the present Washington establishment.
Take David Frum. Who today thinks much about his role in the history of American folly? As a speechwriter for George W. Bush, however, he was memorably ordered to produce "in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq." In other words, he was to make a case for the invasion of that country in the president's 2002 State of the Union address. At that time, with America's superpower enemy, the Soviet Union, long gone and the U.S. seemingly unopposed on planet Earth, he somehow found three weak countries--Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--to turn into a World War II-style "axis of evil." In doing so, he produced this memorable passage for the president:
"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic."
Mission accomplished! No matter that neither Iraq, nor the other two countries were anywhere near having nukes.
Donald Trump has often been accused of megalomaniaas if that were a unique trait of his, but that's because we've blotted out Washington's other megalomaniacs of this century. I'm thinking of the neocon officials of the Bush administration with their urge to turn this planet into an American possession and their disastrous invasion of Iraq. Because of that sense of amnesia, David Frum, Mr. Axis of Evil, like the rest of his neocon companions has, a decade and a half later, risen again in Washington. Like him, many of them are now critics of the Trump administration, while others, like National Security Advisor John Bolton, are ascendant in that very administration.
In the end, when it comes to history and memory, it all seems to prove one thing: if you want to ensure your success in twenty-first-century Washington, there's no way you can be too wrong. (The key figures in that city these days are evidently only familiar with the first of those two famed lines in Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero": "She knows there's no success like failure/And that failure's no success at all.")
You now have 60 seconds (and the clock's already ticking) to answer a question: Who, in or out of the administration, critic, pundit, or official, was against the invasion of Iraq once upon a time? I think you know the answer to that one. If you were against the single most disastrous, megalomanic foreign policy act of this century, there's no place for you in present-day Washington, not in the administration, either party in Congress, or even in memory. You are not worth listening to, writing about, thinking about, or remembering in any way. You are the anti-Frum and have been deposited in the proverbial dustbin of history along with all those other embarrassing memories like... to mention just one more... the myriad elections in other countries that the U.S. interfered with before we were shocked (shocked!) to discover that some country might have meddled with one of ours.
Think of those neocons, the ones who have yet again made it into positions of power or influence and respect in Washington, as the gang who helped pave the way for Donald Trump to become president. Think of them as the imploders. Think of them as our domestic bleeding wound and (when it comes to taking down the system) the truest pasta Putinesca around.
What Might Have Been?
And now that I've left you with a completely bad taste in your mouth, let me bring up another small forgotten memory, one that might qualify--in an alternate universe of memories at least--as utopian, rather than dystopian. I'm thinking about "the peace dividend." You don't remember it? Well, that's not surprising. But after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 (something official Washington hadn't faintly expected and initially greeted in a kind of stunned silence), it briefly seemed as if the great-power struggles that had preoccupied history since perhaps the fifteenth century were finally over. The U.S. was the lone superpower left on planet Earth. Enemies were beyond scarce. A judgment of some sort had been rendered and, for a brief moment, even in Washington, people began talking about that most miraculous of things: a peace dividend.
The U.S. was the lone superpower left on planet Earth. Enemies were beyond scarce. A judgment of some sort had been rendered and, for a brief moment, even in Washington, people began talking about that most miraculous of things: a peace dividend.
The staggering sums that had gone into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state in the Cold War years were visibly no longer necessary. So it was time to bring it all--billions and billions of dollars that had long been invested in the militarization of our American world--home. There was, after all, nothing left to build up military power against and so that money could now be put into what wouldn't for another decade be called "the homeland."
In fact, though modest cuts were made in U.S. forces and military spending in those years, they would prove to be anything but a dividend and would soon enough simply evaporate in the face of the military-industrial complex and, of course, that "axis of evil."
In the years that followed, the very idea of a peace dividend, even the phrase itself, would simply vanish. Still, just for a moment, in a country whose infrastructure is now crumbling, whose teachers are underpaid, whose health care system is under siege, it was possible to dream about a world in which the bleeding wounds of the planet might begin to be staunched. Imagine that and think about what the future might have been.
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William Blum, US Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85
You know you’ve lived well—well enough to rattle the establishment—when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you
Dec 16, 2018
You know you've lived well--well enough to rattle the establishment--when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13).
That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer who aspired to "take part in the great anti-Communist crusade," he quit government in 1967 out of disgust with the Vietnam War and became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, one of the first alternative papers of the New Left. In books like The CIA: A Forgotten History (re-released as Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Blum documented the violent and anti-democratic record of the US empire; he was a reference that FAIR frequently turned to when noting what was missing from the corporate media's version of history.
How did the New York Times (12/11/18) frame this remarkable life? With this remarkable headline:
William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85
Yes, to the Times, the most important thing about Bill Blum's life is that Osama bin Laden once remarked to Americans, in a tape released from hiding, that Rogue State would be "useful for you to read."
"Blum denounced the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington," obituary writer Sam Roberts acknowledged, "and said he would not want to live under an Islamic fundamentalist regime." But, Roberts scolded,
he did not disavow the recommendation or express regret that bin Laden, the orchestrator of those attacks, shared his disdain for the policies carried out by the department where he had once worked.
It's unclear what formulation Roberts was looking for from Blum; should he have denied that his book would be "useful...to read," or wished aloud that bin Laden had been a supporter of the State Department policies? There are certainly some policies where you'd find the State Department, Al Qaeda and the New York Times on one side, and Blum on the other--such as the invasion of Afghanistan that bin Laden hoped to provoke with the 9/11 attacks, and the protection of Idlib, Al Qaeda's last stronghold in Syria, from Syrian government attack. Should the Times "express regret" that it finds itself on the same side as the 9/11 orchestrators? The editors would no doubt protest that they backed the invasion of Afghanistan and the defense of Idlib for very different reasons than Al Qaeda would, but that's a distinction that they don't grant their ideological enemies.
If it wanted to give a better sense of the relationship between William Blum, the US foreign policy establishment and Islamic extremism, it might have noted that it was William Blum who spotted and translated (with David Gibbs) the interview Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, gave to the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur (1/15/98). In the interview, Brzezinski boasted of launching a secret program in 1979 to undermine the government of Afghanistan, a covert operation that he correctly predicted "was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Asked by the interviewer, "Do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?" Brzezinski responded:
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
When Brzezinksi died in 2017, his New York Times obituary did not bear the headline, "Brzezinski, Official Who Boasted of Promoting Al Qaeda, Dies at 89''--though surely that is more relevant to Brzezinski's legacy than bin Laden's book review is to Blum's.
The Blum obit achieved what former FAIR staffer Peter Hart described as "peak NY Times" with this petty putdown:
He also reiterated his unpopular, but not unique, position that American intervention abroad had been breeding enemies and inviting terrorism.
It's not clear how "unpopular" Blum's views were--in a 2013 YouGov poll, 61 percent agreed with the statement, "In the long run, the United States will be safer from terrorism if it stays out of other countries' affairs"--but what is certainly "not unique" was the Times' attempt to use an obituary to settle ideological scores.
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Trump's Trade Czar, The Latest Architect of Imperial Disaster
Five Academics Who Unleashed the “Demon” of Geopolitical Power
Dec 02, 2018
As Washington's leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence. Xi Xinping has launched his trillion-dollar "Belt and Road Initiative" to dominate Eurasia and thereby the world beyond. To recover the Soviet Union's lost influence, Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar, while threatening to dominate a nationalizing, fragmenting Eastern Europe through raw military power. The Trump White House, in turn, is wielding tariffs as weapons to try to beat recalcitrant allies back into line and cripple the planet's rising power, China. However bizarrely different these approaches may seem, they all share one strikingly similar feature: a reliance on the concept of "geopolitics" to guide their bids for global power.
Over the past century, countless scholars, columnists, and commentators have employed the term "geopolitics" (or the study of global control) to lend gravitas to their arguments. Few, though, have grasped the true significance of this elusive concept. However else the term might be used, geopolitics is essentially a methodology for the management (or mismanagement) of empire. Unlike conventional nations whose peoples are, in normal times, readily and efficiently mobilized for self-defense, empires, thanks to their global reach, are a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to yearn for strategic visionaries who can merge land, peoples, and resources into a sustainable global system.
The practice of geopolitics, even if once conducted from horseback, is as old as empire itself, dating back some 4,000 years. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the conquerors themselves -- from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte -- whose geopolitical visions guided the relentless expansion of their imperial domains. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch tried to capture (or perhaps exaggerate) the enormity of Caesar's conquest of Gaul -- a territory that comprises all of modern France and Belgium -- by enumerating the nine years of war that "took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred tribes, and fought pitched battles... with three million men, of whom he slew one million... and took as many more prisoners."
In his own account, however, Caesar reduced all of this to its geopolitical essentials. "All Gaul is divided into three parts," he wrote in that famous first sentence of his Gallic Wars. "Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because... they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war; for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valor, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles." When those formidable Helvetii marched out of their Alpine cantons to occupy Gallic lowlands in 58 BC, Caesar deployed geopolitics to defeat them -- seizing strategic terrain, controlling their grain supplies, and manipulating rival tribes. Instead of enslaving the vanquished Helvetii as other Roman generals might have, Caesar, mindful of the empire's geopolitical balance, returned them to their homelands with generous provisions, lest the German "barbarians" cross the Rhine and destabilize Gaul's natural frontier.
In more modern times, imperial expansion has been guided by professional scholars who have made the formal study of geopolitics a hybrid field of some significance. Its intellectual lineage is actually remarkably straightforward. At the end of the nineteenth century, an American naval historian argued that seapower was the key to national security and international influence. A decade later, a British geographer observed that railroads had shifted the locus of global power landward into the interior of the vast Eurasian continent. In the succeeding century, a succession of scholars would draw on these two basic ideas to inspire bold geopolitical gambits by Nazi Germany, Cold War Washington, post-Soviet Russia, and even Donald Trump's White House.
There is, in fact, a common thread in those disparate scholarly lives: in each case, the study of geopolitics seemed to change the trajectory of their careers, lifting them from the margins of society to the right hand of power. There, at moments when the empire they lived in was experiencing a crisis, their unconventional, even eccentric, ideas won influence -- often in what would prove in the long term a nightmarish fashion.
Over the last century or so, while the actual application of such thinking regularly proved problematic at best and genuinely horrific at worst, geopolitics would remain a seductive concept with a persistent power to entice would-be practitioners. It would also prove an enormously elusive style of thinking, making it difficult to distinguish between the banal and the brilliant, between the imperially helpful and the imperially devastating.
Charting the interplay of land, people, and resources inside any empire, much less in a clash between such behemoths, is impossibly difficult. Admittedly, geopolitics in the hands of a grandmaster has, in the past, led to the crushing of armies and the conquest of continents. But seemingly similar strategies have also produced searing defeat and disaster. Caesar's deft geopolitical balancing of Gaul and Germany on the fulcrum of the Rhine survived for some four centuries; Napoleon's similar attempt lasted all of seven years.
Telling the difference, in the historical moment, is a daunting task and one that hasn't turned out well in the last century. With that in mind, let's now approach the careers of five modern "grandmasters" of geopolitics with an appropriate skepticism.
America's Strategic Visionary
In 1890, as the industrial boom of the Gilded Age prepared the nation for a debut on the world stage, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, arguably America's only original strategic thinker, published his famed Influence of Seapower Upon History. In it, he argued that naval power was the determining factor in the fate of nations. Born at West Point, where his father taught military tactics to Army cadets, Mahan came to the study of strategy almost by birthright. After graduating from the Naval Academy and having an indifferent career at sea, he became the head of the Naval War College in 1886. There, he developed novel geopolitical ideas that would revive a stalled career.
By analyzing sea power through a wide range of factors, including the defensibility of ports, national technological prowess, and the nature of good government, Mahan would produce the first serious study of geopolitics in the guise of a guide to naval strategy. In the process, he became an international celebrity, influencing admirals from London to Tokyo and inspiring leaders worldwide to join a naval arms race that would drain their treasuries to build costly battleships. The admiral who headed Germany's navy, for instance, distributed 8,000 copies of Mahan's history in translation and in the process won passage of the country's first naval bill in 1898, funding his fateful challenge to British sea power.
As Europe's empires continued to spread globally in the 1890s, Mahan's prolific prose persuaded Washington that national defense required the creation of a genuine blue-water navy and bases in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. So important were such bases for the nation's defense that, as Mahan gravely concluded, "No European state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco" -- a distance that encompassed the Hawaiian Islands, soon to become U.S. possessions.
Like many advocates of geopolitics to come, Mahan would use seemingly precise strategic concepts to project his country's current position into a murky future. As his geopolitical principles took physical form after 1898, they would produce an indefensible string of bases stretching across the Pacific from Panama to the Philippines.
Following his doctrine, the Navy ordered Admiral George Dewey's squadron to seize Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898, which he did by sinking the Spanish fleet. Within five years, however, Japan's stunning victory over the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan forced Washington to withdraw much of its navy from the Western Pacific. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt began building a new Pacific bastion at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, not in Manila Bay, saying that the Philippines, by then an American colony, is "our heel of Achilles." Making matters worse, the Versailles peace settlement at the end of World War I conceded the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific to Japan, allowing its navy to block the sea-lanes from Pearl Harbor to Manila Bay -- a geopolitical reality that would doom General Douglas MacArthur's Philippine command to a searing defeat at the start of World War II.
At that war's end, however, Washington finally resolved this geopolitical conundrum by conquering Japan and building a chain of more than 100 bases from that country to the Philippines, making the Pacific littoral the strategic fulcrum for the defense of one continent (North America) and dominion over another (Eurasia).
Sir Halford Propagates Geopolitics
Little more than a decade after Mahan wrote his influential studies of seapower, Sir Halford Mackinder, head of the London School of Economics (LSE), published a seminal article that shifted the focus of geopolitics from sea to land. Writing in 1904, as the 5,700 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway was still being built from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder argued that future rail lines would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that he dubbed "the world island." When that day came, Russia, perhaps in alliance with another land power like Germany, could control Eurasia's sprawling "heartland," allowing "the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight."
This path-breaking analysis came at a fortuitous time in Mackinder's academic career. After teaching geography at Oxford for 10 years, he had failed to win a professorship and his marriage collapsed. At this low ebb in his life, he tried to establish himself as an exploratory geographer by making the first recorded ascent of Mount Kenya. Using the "moral suasion of my Mauser" rifle to force his 170 African bearers to "obey like the faithful dogs they are," Mackinder moved through the famine-stricken foothills leading to that mountain by extracting food from hungry villages at gunpoint. Then, in September 1899, at the cost of 10 porters shot and many more whipped for "malingering," he traversed glaciers to reach the summit at 17,000 feet. His triumph before a cheering crowd at the Royal Geographical Society in London was, however, marred not by his treatment of those bearers but by his failure to bring back significant findings or scientific specimens.
So, in yet another career change, Mackinder joined the LSE where he produced that influential article on geopolitics. At the end of World War I, he turned it into a book that contained his most memorable maxim: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World."
Mackinder's expertise in imperial geopolitics helped launch his political career, including gaining him a seat in Parliament. In 1919, amid the turmoil of the Russian revolution, Britain was shipping arms to anti-Bolshevik forces there under General Anton Denikin. At Winston Churchill's behest, the cabinet then appointed Mackinder as a special high commissioner for southern Russia. In a unique test of his "heartland" theory, Mackinder made an abortive attempt to rally the Czarist forces by meeting General Denikin inside his railcar in the Caucasus to propose an alliance with Poland and promise a mass evacuation in the event of defeat. Upon return to London, ignoring the general's role in slaughtering some 100,000 Jews, Mackinder recommended recognizing his government and providing aid -- advice the cabinet quickly dismissed.
From that brief moment at the apex of power, Mackinder soon fell into obscurity -- losing his seat in Parliament, retiring from the LSE, and settling into a sinecure as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee. Were it not for the surprising later appeal of his ideas in Nazi Germany and Vladimir Putin's Russia, his name would have been largely forgotten.
The Sorcerer's Nazi Apprentice
As the Versailles peace conference of 1919 stripped Germany of its colonial empire and placed its Rhineland frontier under foreign occupation, Karl Haushofer exchanged his general's baton for a geography professorship at Munich University. There, he would apply Mackinder's concepts in an attempt to assure that his fatherland would never again engage in the sort of strategic blunders that, in World War I, had led to such a humiliating defeat.
While Mackinder himself was courting the powerful in postwar London, Haushofer was teaching geopolitics to future top Nazis in Munich -- first to his graduate assistant Rudolf Hess (later to become the deputy Fuhrer), and then to Adolf Hitler himself while he was writing Mein Kampf during his incarceration at Munich's Landsberg Prison in 1924. Both Haushofer and his son Albrecht, who would train Nazi diplomats in the geopolitics of European conquest, were later rewarded with influential positions in the Third Reich. By dressing the British don's idea of the Eurasian heartland as the pivot of world power in the local garb of Lebensraum (or "the Greater German Reich's dazzling ascent by war... for extension of its living space"), Haushofer helped propagate an enticing logic of expansion that would send Hitler's army on the road to defeat.
In 1942, Hitler dispatched a million men, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 500 tanks to breach the Volga River at Stalingrad and capture Russia's heartland for lebensraum. In the end, the Reich's forces would suffer 850,000 casualties -- killed, wounded, and captured -- in a vain attempt to break through the East European rimland into the world island's heartland.
Appalled by the attack on Russia, Haushofer's son joined the underground's attempt to assassinate Hitler and was imprisoned. Before he was finally shot by the SS (on the day the Allies captured Berlin), he would compose mournful sonnets about geopolitical power, which he saw metaphorically as buried deep under the sea until "my father broke the seal" and "set the demon free to roam throughout the world." A few months later, Karl Haushofer and his Jewish wife committed suicide together when confronted with the possibility that the victorious allies might prosecute him as a senior Nazi war criminal.
The Liberator of Eastern Europe
As the United States recoiled from its searing defeat in Vietnam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an emigre Polish aristocrat and autodidact when it came to geopolitics, went from teaching international relations in New York to being President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor in Washington. There, his risky geopolitical gambits gained an attentive audience after the SovietRed Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
As an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder, Brzezinski embraced his concept of the Eurasian heartland as the "pivot" of global power. But in marked contrast to Mackinder's failure in southern Russia in 1920, Brzezinski would prove adept at applying that geopolitician's famous dictum on the dynamic that tied Eastern Europe to Eurasia's heartland. (In the end, however, his Afghan moves would help give rise to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, and the never-ending war on terror of this century.)
Wielding a multi-billion-dollar CIA covert operation in Afghanistan like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam deep into the heart of Soviet Central Asia. In the process, he drew Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war, so weakening it that Eastern Europe would finally break free from the Soviet empire in 1989. Asked about the enormous human suffering his strategy inflicted on Afghanistan and his role in creating a militant Islam hostile to the United States, he would remain coolly unapologetic. "What is most important to the history of the world?" he responded in 1998. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
In retirement, Brzezinski resumed his study of Mackinder's theory, doing a better job as an armchair analyst than he had as a presidential adviser. In a 1998 book, he warned that dominance over Eurasia remained "the central basis for global primacy." To control that vast region, Washington, he insisted, would have to preserve its "perch on the Western periphery" of Europe and hold its string of "offshore bases" along the Pacific littoral. Should these conditions change, he predicted with some prescience, "a potential rival to America might at some point arise."
Putin's Geopolitical Visionary
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, a Russian rightist ideologue, Alexander Dugin, would revive Mackinder's ideas yet again to promote expansion into Eurasia. In the process, he would become "a major influence" on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, Dugin was still moving in Moscow's bohemian circles as a dabbler in the occult and a fringe member of the "ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic organization Pamiat." After the Soviet collapse, he became chief ideologue for an eclectic alliance of patriotic and punk-rock groups called the New Bolshevik Party, serving as its candidate for a seat in the 1995 Duma legislative elections and winning just 1% of the vote.
At this political nadir for both him and his country, Dugin recycled Mackinder's long-forgotten writings in a 1997 bestseller, The Foundation of Geopolitics: Russia's Geopolitical Future. As his book moved into its fourth printing and he "became a pole star for a broad section of Russian hardliners," he began teaching geopolitics to military officers at the General Staff Academy, later lecturing on it to elite students at Moscow State University, and anchoring Landmarks, a weekly television show on the subject. In those years, Moscow bookstores even opened special sections for geopolitics, the legislature formed a geopolitics committee, and the Russian leadership began to embrace Dugin's vision of expansionist nationalism.
Drawing on Haushofer's German writings, he argued that Russia should become a Eurasian bastion against "the conspiracy of 'Atlanticism' led by the United States and NATO... aimed at containing Russia within successive geographic rings" of the former Soviet republics. To achieve the destiny envisioned by Mackinder, Russia needed, in Dugin's view, to dominate Eurasia -- annexing Ukraine, conquering Georgia, incorporating Finland, and bringing the Balkan states (Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria) under its rule as an Orthodox "Third Rome." To advance such ideas, Dugin founded the Eurasia Youth Union of Russia in 2005, first to serve as "human shields" to fight against the Orange revolution in Ukraine and later to counter the "degeneration" caused by American cultural influence.
For the past decade, he has been a forceful advocate for Russian expansionism. During that country's war with Georgia in 2008, he was photographed with a rocket launcher in South Ossetia and quoted in the national press calling for its annexation. After serving as "the brains behind Vladimir Putin's wildly popular annexation of Crimea" in March 2014, Dugin embraced the Russian minority in eastern Ukraine, prodding the Russian president to openly support their separatist militia.
While advocacy of aggressive geopolitics has given Dugin significant political influence and Putin unprecedented popularity in Russia, it is still unclear whether in the long run such expansionism, in defiance of international norms, will prove a geopolitical masterstroke or a diplomatic debacle.
The Geopolitics of Trump's Trade War
Most recently, a dissident economist and failed California politician named Peter Navarro has parlayed his hostility toward China into the role of key architect of Donald Trump's "trade war" against Beijing. Like his Russian counterpart Alexander Dugin, Navarro is another in a long line of intellectuals whose embrace of geopolitics changed the trajectory of his career.
Raised by a single mom who worked secretarial jobs to rent one-bedroomapartments where he slept on the couch, Navarro went to college at Tufts on a scholarship and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Despite that Ivy League degree, he remained an angry outsider, denouncing the special interests "stealing America" in his first book and later, as a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, branding San Diego developers "punks in pinstripes." A passionate environmentalist, in 1992 Navarro plunged into politics as a Democratic candidate for the mayor of San Diego, denouncing his opponent's husband as a convicted drug-money launderer and losing when he smirked as she wept during their televised debate.
For the next 10 years, Navarro fought losing campaigns for everything from city council to Congress. He detailed his crushing defeat for a seat in the House of Representatives in a tell-all book, San Diego Confidential, that dished out disdain for that duplicitous "sell out" Bill Clinton, dumb "blue-collar detritus" voters, and just about everybody else as well.
Following his last losing campaign for city council, Navarro spent a decade churning out books attacking a new enemy: China. His first "shock and awe" jeremiad in 2006 told horror stories about that country's foreign trade; five years later, Death By China was filled with torrid tales of "bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products" from that land. In 2015, a third book turned to geopolitics, complete with carefully drawn maps and respectful references to Captain Mahan, to offer an analysis of how China's military was pursuing a relentless strategy of "anti-access, area denial" to challenge the U.S. Navy's control over the Western Pacific.
To check China, the Pentagon then had two competing strategies -- "Air-Sea Battle," in which China's satellites were to be blinded, knocking out its missiles, and "Offshore Control," in which China's entire coastline was to be blockaded by mining six maritime choke points from Japan to Singapore. Both, Navarro claimed, were fatally flawed. Given that, Navarro's third book and a companion film (endorsed by one Donald Trump) asked: What should the United States do to check Beijing's aggression and its rise as a global power? Since all U.S. imports from China, Navarro suggested, were "helping to finance a Chinese military buildup," the only realistic solution was "the imposition of countervailing tariffs to offset China's unfair trade practices."
Just a year after reaching that controversial conclusion, Navarro joined the Trump election campaign as a policy adviser and then, after the November victory, became a junior member of the White House economic team. As a protectionist in an administration initially dominated by globalists, he would be excluded from high-level meetings and, according to Time Magazine, "required to copy chief economic adviser Gary Cohn on all his emails." By February 2018, however, Cohn was on his way out and Navarro had become assistant to the president, with his new trade office now the co-equal of the National Economic Council.
As the chief defender of Trump's belief that "trade wars are good and easy to win," Navarro has finally realized his own geopolitical dream of attempting to check China with tariffs. In March, the president slapped heavy ones on Chinese steel imports and, just a few weeks later, promised to impose more of them on $50 billion of imports. When those started in July, China's leaders retaliated against what they called "typical trade bullying," imposing similar duties on American goods. Despite a warning from the Federal Reserve chairman that "trade tensions... could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy," with Navarro at his elbow, Trump escalated in September, adding tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatening another $267 billion worth if China dared retaliate. Nonetheless, Beijing hit back, this time on just $60 billion in goods since 95% of all U.S. imports had already been covered.
Then something truly surprising happened. In September, the U.S. trade deficit with China ballooned to $305 billion for the year, driven by an 8% surge in Chinese imports -- a clear sign that Navarro's bold geopolitical vision of beating Beijing into submission with tariffs had collided big time with the complexities of world trade. Whether this tariff dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and the world economy, none of us can yet know, particularly that would-be geopolitical grandmaster Peter Navarro.
The Desire to be Grandmaster of the Universe
Though such experts usually dazzle the public and the powerful alike with erudition and boldness of vision, their geopolitical moves often have troubling long-term consequences. Mahan's plans for Pacific dominion through offshore bases created a strategic conundrum that plagued American defense policy for a half-century. Brzezinski's geopolitical lunge at the Soviet Union's soft Central Asian underbelly helped unleash radical Islam. Today, Alexander Dugin's use of geopolitics to revive Russia's dominion over Eurasia has placed Moscow on a volatile collision course with Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, Peter Navarro's bold gambit to contain China's military and economic push into the Pacific with a trade war could, if it persists, produce untold complications for our globalized economy.
No matter how deeply flawed such geopolitical visions may ultimately prove to be, their brief moments as official policy have regularly shaped the destiny of nations and of empires in unpredictable, unplanned, and often dangerous ways. And no matter how this current round of geopolitical gambits plays out, we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
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Beijing's Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump
“America First” versus China’s strategy of the four continents
Aug 21, 2018
As the second year of Donald Trump's presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping's draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century -- or bring it all down.
The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts. China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence. The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry. After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China's president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country's strength.
Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community. There was almost no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.
By the time Xi Jinping became China's seventh president, a decade of rapid economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid, radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office, Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow in its status as the world's sole superpower after "winning" the Cold War, Washington had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities and was slow to react.
China's bid couldn't have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly 70 years as the globe's hegemon, Washington's dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed "populist" Donald Trump to power. Determined to check his country's decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.
Within months of Trump's entry into the Oval Office, the world was already witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi's advocacy of a new form of global collaboration and Trump's version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature of the world order.
Trump's Disruptive Foreign Policy
Despite their constant criticism of Donald Trump's leadership, few among Washington's corps of foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World War II rested upon what I've called a "delicate duality": an American imperium of raw military and economic power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.
On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus -- military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine -- to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.
Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that Washington would remain the world's preeminent power only as long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade before Trump's election, there were, however, already signs that America's hegemony was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from 50% in 1950 to just 15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world's number one economy by 2030, if not before.
In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump's torrent of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of America's place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world -- exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation's interests.
Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.
His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest statement in his administration's December 2017 National Security Strategy. As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced "an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats." But in less than a year of his leadership, it insisted, "We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East... to help drive out terrorists and extremists... America's allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances." Humankind will benefit from the president's "beautiful vision" that "puts America First" and promotes "a balance of power that favors the United States." The whole world will, in short, be "lifted by America's renewal."
Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump's overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington's global power since the 1950s. During the president's first foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington's European allies to pay their "fair share" of NATO's military costs, leaving the U.S. stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused even to endorse the alliance's core principle of collective defense. It was a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century that he was later forced to formally back down. (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those allies in an unforgettable fashion.)
During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that Germany was "a captive of Russia" and pressed the allies to immediately double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic product (a level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn't reached) -- a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very idea of a common defense, remarking that if "tiny" NATO ally Montenegro decided to "get aggressive," then "congratulations, you're in World War III."
Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling a British tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country's Brexit withdrawal from the European Union and "killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal." He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly abased himself before NATO's nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were even brief, angry protests from leaders of his own party.
During Trump's major Asia tour in November 2017, he addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering an extended "tirade" against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the WTO. To counter intolerable "trade abuses," such as "product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies," he swore that he would always "put America first" and not let it "be taken advantage of anymore." Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than "economic aggression" against America, he invited everyone there to share his "Indo-Pacific dream" of the world as a "beautiful constellation" of "strong, sovereign, and independent nations," each working like the United States to build "wealth and freedom.
Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe's leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman and he took it, calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is "more open, inclusive, and balanced." He spoke of China's future economic plans as an historic bid for "interconnected development to achieve common prosperity... on the Asian, European, and African continents."
As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged a more equitable world order "to bring the benefits of development to countries across the globe." For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready to make "$2 trillion of outbound investment" -- much of it for the development of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald Trump acted more like Argentina's former presidente Juan Peron, minus the medals. As if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing that agreement -- without the United States.
In addition to undermining NATO, America's Pacific alliances, long its historic fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding, too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office, the president's America First trade policy has placed a "major strain" on Washington's most crucial alliance in the region. First, he ignored Abe's pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as if his message hadn't been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he's denounced the Canadian prime minister as "dishonest" and mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi's accent, even as he made chummy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then claimed, inaccurately, that his country was "no longer a nuclear threat."
It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.
Beijing's Grand Strategy
While Washington's influence in Asia recedes, Beijing's grows ever stronger. As China's currency reserves climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013, speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia's ancient Silk Road caravan route, he proclaimed a "one belt, one road initiative" aimed at economically integrating the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing's leadership. Through "unimpeded trade" and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to connect "the Pacific and the Baltic Sea" in a proposed "economic belt along the Silk Road," a region "inhabited by close to 3 billion people." It could become, he predicted, "the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential."
Within a year, Beijing had established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for private equity projects. When China convened what it called a "belt and road summit" of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good reason, hail his initiative as the "project of the century."
Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved in his "one belt, one road" project as wasteful, sybaritic, exploitative, or even neo-colonial, its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing is expected to put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall Plan, the only comparable program, which spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II.
Beijing's low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean's busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia -- home to a full 70% percent of the world's population and its resources -- into a unified market without peer on the planet.
Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete, there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia's extensive network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe's extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.
Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent's southern rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than 30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe's extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a "Polar Silk Road," a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent's northern coast to Europe.
Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing already had doubled its annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction that has already made the continent China's second largest source of crude oil. Similarly, Beijing has invested heavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over 90% of Ecuador's oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with what once was known as its own "backyard."
A Conflict with Consequences
This contest between Xi's globalism and Trump's nationalism has not been safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years, the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat commercial competition. Apart from a shadowy struggle for dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing stated that "it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security." Backed by lethal land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first aircraft carriers.
Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China's "growing and modernized fleet" was "shrinking" the traditional American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that "we must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency." Under Trump's latest $700-billion-plus defense budget, Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46 new ships, which will raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun conducting assertive "freedom-of-navigation" patrols near many of those same installations, heightening the potential for conflict.
It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his belief that "trade wars are good and easy to win," President Trump slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country's intellectual property theft by promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs finally hit in July, China immediately retaliated against what it called "typical trade bullying" with similar tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times warned that this "tit-for-tat" can escalate into a "full bore trade war... that will be very bad for the global economy." As Trump threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing could ever comply, observers became concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New York Times called the "mountain of debt" that sustains much of China's economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued an uncommon warning that "trade tensions... could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy."
China as Global Hegemon?
Although a withering of Washington's global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with the obvious requisites for becoming the planet's new hegemon. Its phenomenal economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.
Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia, has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.
In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, "every successful empire," observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, "had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse" to win support from the world's subordinate states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural francophonie, and Britain an Anglophone culture. Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly, at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball.
China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even avowedly, particularistic. And you don't have to look far for another Asian power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.
As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of the International Court of Justice under the U.N.'s 1945 charter, the world's nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded in law.
From its founding in 1949, the People's Republic of China gave primacy to the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China's claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea "are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect." Beijing's Foreign Ministry simply dismissed the adverse decision as "invalid" and without "binding force." President Xi insisted China's "territorial sovereignty and maritime rights" were unchanged, while the state Xinhua news agency called the ruling "naturally null and void." Although China might be well placed to supplant Washington's economic and military power, its capacity to assume leadership via that other aspect of the delicate duality of global power, a network of international organizations grounded in the rule of law, is still open to question.
If Donald Trump's vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future and if Beijing's projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history's largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa, and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the "new normal" of climate change -- the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans, the intensification of flood, drought, and fire, the rising seas that will devastate coastal cities, and the cascading damage to a densely populated world -- could mean that the very idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.
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Gunboat Diplomacy and the Ghost of Captain Mahan
Or how China and the U.S. are spawning a new great power naval rivalry.
Apr 09, 2018
Amid the intense coverage of Russian cyber-maneuvering and North Korean missile threats, another kind of great-power rivalry has been playing out quietly in the Indian and Pacific oceans. The U.S. and Chinese navies have been repositioning warships and establishing naval bases as if they were so many pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. To some it might seem curious, even quaint, that gunboats and naval bastions, once emblematic of the Victorian age, remain even remotely relevant in our own era of cyber-threats and space warfare.
Yet if you examine, even briefly, the central role that naval power has played and still plays in the fate of empires, the deadly serious nature of this new naval competition makes more sense. Indeed, if war were to break out among the major powers today, don't discount the possibility that it might come from a naval clash over Chinese bases in the South China Sea rather than a missile strike against North Korea or a Russian cyber attack.
The Age of Empire
For the past 500 years, from the 50 fortified Portuguese portsthat dotted the world in the sixteenth century to the 800 U.S. military bases that dominate much of it today, empires have used such enclaves as Archimedean levers to move the globe. Viewed historically, naval bastions were invaluable when it came to the aspirations of any would-be hegemonic power, yet also surprisingly vulnerable to capture in times of conflict.
Throughout the twentieth century and the first years of this one, military bases in the South China Sea in particular have been flashpoints for geopolitical change. The U.S. victory at Manila Bay in 1898, the fall of the British bastion of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, America's withdrawal from Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992, and China's construction of airstrips and missile launchers in the Spratly Islands since 2014 -- all have been iconic markers for both geopolitical dominion and imperial transition.
Indeed, in his 1890 study of naval history, that famed advocate of seapower Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, arguably America's only original strategic thinker, stated that "the maintenance of suitable naval stations..., when combined with decided preponderance at sea, makes a scattered and extensive empire, like that of England, secure." In marked contrast to the British Navy's 300 ships and 30 bases circling the globe, he worried that U.S. warships with "no foreign establishments, either colonial or military... will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them... would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea."
So important did Captain Mahan consider naval bases for America's defense that he argued "it should be an inviolable resolution of our national policy that no European state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco" -- a span that reached the Hawaiian Islands, which Washington would soon seize. In a series of influential dictums, he also argued that a large fleet and overseas bases were essential to both the exercise of global power and national defense.
Although Mahan was read as gospel by everyone from American President Teddy Roosevelt to German Kaiser Wilhelm II, his observations do not explain the persistent geopolitical significance of such naval bases. Especially in periods between wars, these bastions seem to allow empires to project their power in crucial ways.
Historian Paul Kennedy has suggested that Britain's "naval mastery" in the nineteenth century made it "extremely difficult for other lesser states to undertake maritime operations or trade without at least its tacit consent." But modern bases do even more. Naval bastions and the warships they serve can weave a web of dominion across an open sea, transforming an unbounded ocean into de facto territorial waters. Even in an age of cyberwarfare, they remain essential to geopolitical gambits of almost any sort, as the United States has shown repeatedlyduring its tumultuous century as a Pacific power.
America as a Pacific Power
As the U.S. began its ascent to global power by expanding its navy in the 1890s, Captain Mahan, then head of the Naval War College, argued that Washington had to build a battle fleet and capture island bastions, particularly in the Pacific, that could control the surrounding sea-lanes. Influenced in part by his doctrine, Admiral George Dewey's squadron sank the Spanish fleet and seized the key harbor of Manila Bay in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War of 1898.
In 1905, however, Japan's stunning victory over the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Tsushima Strait (between southern Japan and Korea) suddenly revealed the vulnerability of the slender string of bases the U.S. then possessed, stretching from Panama to the Philippines. Under the pressure of the imperial Japanese navy, Washington soon abandoned its plans for a major naval presence in the Western Pacific. Within a year, President Theodore Roosevelt had removed the last Navy battleship from the region and later authorized the construction of a new Pacific bastion not in distant Manila Bay but at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, insisting that "the Philippines form our heel of Achilles." When the Versailles settlement at the end of World War I awarded Micronesia in the Western Pacific to Japan, the dispatch of any fleet from Pearl Harbor to Manila Bay became problematic in time of war and rendered the Philippines essentially indefensible.
It was partly for this reason, in mid-1941, that Secretary of War Henry Stimson decided that the B-17 bomber, aptly named the "Flying Fortress," would be the wonder weapon capable of countering the Japanese navy's control of the Western Pacific and sent 35 of these new aircraft to Manila. Stimson's strategywas, however, a flight of imperial fantasy that condemned most of those planes to destruction by Japanese fighters in the first days of World War II in the Pacific and doomed General Douglas MacArthur's army in the Philippines to a humiliating defeat at Bataan.
As bomber ranges tripled during that global conflict, however, the War Department decided in 1943 that the country's postwar defense required retaining forward bases in the Philippines. These ambitions were fully realized in 1947 when the newly independent republic signed the Military Bases Agreement granting the U.S. a 99-year lease on 23 military installations, including the Seventh Fleet's future homeport at Subic Bay and the massive Clark Air Base near Manila.
Simultaneously, during its postwar occupation of Japan, the U.S. acquired more than a hundred military facilities that stretched from Misawa Air Base in the north of that country to Sasebo Naval Base in the south. With its strategic location, the island of Okinawa had 32 active U.S. installations covering about 20% of its entire area.
As the Cold War came to Asia in 1951, Washington concluded mutual defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia that made the Pacific littoral the eastern anchor for its strategic dominion over Eurasia. By 1955, the early enclaves in Japan and the Philippines had been integrated into a global network of 450 overseas bases aimed largely at containing the Sino-Soviet bloc behind an Iron Curtain that bisected the vast Eurasian continent.
After surveying the rise and fall of Eurasian empires for the past 600 years, Oxford historian John Darwin concluded that Washington had achieved its "colossal Imperium... on an unprecedented scale" by becoming the first power to control the strategic axial points "at both ends of Eurasia" -- in the west through the NATO alliance and in the east via those four mutual security pacts. During the later decades of the Cold War, moreover, the U.S. Navy completed its encirclement of the continent, taking over the old British base at Bahrain in 1971 and later building a multibillion-dollar base at the epicenter of the Indian Ocean on the island of Diego Garcia for its air and naval patrols.
Among these many bases ringing Eurasia, those along the Pacific littoral were of particular strategic import before, during, and after the Cold War. As the geopolitical fulcrum between the defense of one continent (North America) and control of another (Asia), the Pacific littoral has remained a constant focus in Washington's century-long effort to extend and maintain its global power.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, as Washington elites reveled in their role as leaders of the world's sole superpower, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a master of Eurasia's unforgiving geopolitics, warned that the U.S. could preserve its global power only as long as the eastern end of that vast Eurasian landmass did not unify itself in a way that might lead to "the expulsion of America from its offshore bases." Otherwise, he asserted with someprescience, "a potential rival to America might at some point arise."
In fact, the weakening of those "offshore bases" had alreadybegun in 1991, the very year the Soviet Union imploded, when the Philippines refused to extend the U.S. lease on the Seventh Fleet's bastion at Subic Bay. As Navy tugs towed Subic's floating dry docks home to Pearl Harbor, the Philippines assumed full responsibility for its own defense without actually putting any more of its funds into air or naval power. Consequently, during a raging typhoon in 1994, China was able to suddenly occupy some shoals in the nearby Spratly Islands that went by the name of Mischief Reef -- and that would turn out to be just its first step in a bid to control the South China Sea. Without the ability to launch its own air and navy patrols, in 1998 the Philippine military, in an attempt to reassert its claim to the area, grounded a rusting U.S.-surplus ship on nearby Ayungin Shoal as a "base" for a squad of barefoot soldiers who were forced to fish for their rations.
In the meantime, the U.S. Navy suffered its own decline with a 40% reduction in surface warships and attack submarines from 1990 to 1996. Over the next two decades, the Navy's Pacific posture weakened further as the focus of naval deployments shifted to wars in the Middle East, the service's overall size shrank by an additional 20% (to just 271 ships), and crews strained under the pressure of ever-extending deployments -- leaving the Seventh Fleet ill-prepared to meet China's unexpected challenge.
China's Naval Gambit
After years of seeming compliance with Washington's rules for good global citizenship, China's recent actions in Central Asia and the continent's surrounding seas have revealed a two-phase strategy that would, if successful, undercut the perpetuation of American global power. First, China is spending a trillion dollars to fund a vast transcontinental grid of new railroads, highways, and oil and natural gas pipelines that could harness Eurasia's vast resources as an economic engine to drive its ascent to world power.
In a parallel move, China is building a blue-water navy and creating its first overseas bases in the Arabian and South China seas. As Beijing stated in a 2015 white paper, "The traditional mentality that land outweighs the sea must be abandoned... It is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security." Though the force it contemplates will hardly compete with the U.S. Navy's global presence, China seems determined to dominate a significant arc of waters around Asia, from the horn of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Korea.
Beijing's bid for overseas bases began quietly in 2011 when it started investing almost $250 million in the transformation of a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the shores of the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi Jinping committed another $46 billion to the building of a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, railways, and pipelines stretching for 2,000 miles from western China to the now-modernized port at Gwadar. It still avoided any admission that military aims might be involved so as not to alarm New Delhi or Washington. In 2016, however, Pakistan's Navy announced that it was indeed opening a naval base at Gwadar (soon strengthened with two warships donated by China) and added that Beijing was welcome to base its own ships there as well.
That same year, China began building a major military facility at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and, in August 2017, opened its first official overseas base there, giving its navy access to the oil-rich Arabian Sea. Simultaneously, Sri Lanka, located at a midpoint in the Indian Ocean, settled a billion-dollar debt to China by ceding it a strategic port at Hambantota, creating a future potential for dual military use there, too -- in effect, the Gwadar stealth strategy revisited.
As controversial as these enclaves might be (at least from an American point of view), they paled before China's attempts to claim an entire ocean. Starting in April 2014, Beijing escalated its bid for exclusive territorial control over the South China Sea by expanding Longpo Naval Base on its own Hainan Island into a homeport for its four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. Without any announcement, the Chinese also began dredging seven artificial atolls in the disputed Spratly Islands to create military airfields and future anchorages. In just four years, Beijing's armada of dredges had sucked up countless tons of sand from the ocean floor, slowly transforming those minimalist reefs and atolls into active military bases. Today, China's army operates a jet runway protected by HQ-9 anti-aircraft missile batteries on Woody Island, a radar base on Cuareton Reef, and has mobile missile launchers near runways ready for jet fighters at three more of these "islands."
While fighter planes and submarines are pawns in China's opening gambit in the contest for the South China Sea, Beijing hopes one day to at least check (if not checkmate) Washington with a growing armada of aircraft carriers, the modern dreadnaughts in this latter-day game of empires. After acquiring an unfinished Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier from Ukraine in 1998, the naval dockyard at Dalian retrofitted the rusting hulk and launched it in 2012 as the Liaoning, China's first aircraft carrier. That hull was already 30 years old, an age that would normally have assured such a warship a place in some scrap metal yard. Though not combat capable, it was a platform for training China's first generation of naval aviators in landing speeding jets on heaving decks in high seas. In marked contrast to the 15 years needed to retrofit this first ship, the Dalian yards took just five years to construct, from the keel up, a much-improved second carrier capable of full combat operations.
The narrow hulls and ski-jump prows that limit these first two carriers to just 24 "Flying Shark" fighter planes won't hold for the country's third carrier, now being built from indigenous designs in Shanghai. When launched next year, it will be able to carry on-board fuel reserves that will give it a longer cruising range and a complement of 40 aircraft, as well as electromagnetic systemsfor faster launches. Thanks to an accelerating tempo of training, technology, and construction, by 2030 China should have enough aircraft carriers to ensure that the South China Sea will become what the Pentagon has termed a "Chinese lake."
Such carriers are the vanguard of a sustained naval expansion that, by 2017, had already given China a modern navy of 320 ships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global system of surveillance satellites. Its current anti-ship ballistic missiles have a range of 2,500 miles and so could strike U.S. Navy vessels anywhere in the Western Pacific. Beijing has also made strides in mastering the volatile technology for hypersonic missiles with speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour, making them impossible to stop. By building two new submarines every year, China has already assembled a fleet of 57, both diesel- and nuclear-powered, and is projected to reach 80 soon. Each of its four nuclear submarines carries 12 ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere in the western United States. In addition, Beijing has launched dozens of amphibious ships and coastal corvettes, giving it naval dominance in its own waters.
Within just five years, according to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, China "will complete its transition" from the coastal force of the 1990s to a modern navy capable of "sustained blue water operations" and "multiple missions around the world," including full-spectrum warfare. In other words, China is forging a future capacity to control its "home" waters from the East China Sea to the South China Sea. In the process, it will become the first power in 70 years to challenge the U.S. Navy's dominion over the Pacific basin.
The American Response
After taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama came to the conclusion that China's rise represented a serious threat and so he developed a geopolitical strategy to counter it. First, he promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation commercial pact that would direct 40% of world trade toward the United States. Then, in March 2014, after announcing a military "pivot to Asia" in an address to the Australian parliament, he deployed a full battalion of Marines to a base at the city of Darwin on the Timor Sea. A month later, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines signed an enhanced defense cooperation agreement with that country allowing U.S. forces to be stationed at five of its bases.
Combining existing installations in Japan with access to naval bases in Subic Bay, Darwin, and Singapore, Obama rebuilt America's chain of military enclaves along the Asian littoral. To make full use of these installations, the Pentagon began planning to "forward base 60% of [its] naval assets in the Pacific by 2020" and launched its first regular "freedom of navigation" patrols in the South China Sea as a challenge to the Chinese navy, even sending in full carrier strike groups.
President Trump, however, cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership right after his inauguration and, with the endless war on terror in the Greater Middle East grinding on, the shift of naval forces to the Pacific slowed. More broadly, Trump's unilateral, America-first foreign policy has damaged relations with the four allies that underpin its line of defense in the Pacific: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Moreover, in his obsessive courtship of Beijing's help in the Korean crisis, the president even suspended, for five months, those naval patrols into the South China Sea.
The administration's new $700 billion defense budget will fund 46 new ships for the Navy by 2023 (for a total of 326), but the White House seems incapable, as reflectedin its recent National Security Strategy, of grasping the geostrategic importance of Eurasia or devising an effective scheme for the deployment of its expanding military to check China's rise. After declaring Obama's "pivot to Asia" officially dead, the Trump administration has instead offered its own "free and open Indo-Pacific" founded on an unworkable alliance of four supposedly kindred democracies -- Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.
While Trump stumbles from one foreign policy crisis to the next, his admirals, mindful of Mahan's strategic dictums, are acutely aware of the geopolitical requisites of American imperial power and have been vocal about their determination to preserve it. Indeed, China's naval expansion, along with advances in Russia's submarine fleet, have led the Navy to a fundamental strategic shift from limited operations against regional powers like Iran to full-spectrum readiness for "a return to great power competition." After a sweeping strategic review of his forces in 2017, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China's "growing and modernized fleet" was "shrinking" the traditional American advantage in the Pacific. "The competition is on," he warned, "and pace dominates. In an exponential competition, the winner takes all. We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency."
In a parallel review of the Navy's surface force, its commander, Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, proclaimed "a new age of seapower" with a return to "great power dynamics" from "near-peer competitors." Any potential naval attack, he added, must be met with a "distributed lethality" capable of "inflicting damage of such magnitude that it compels an adversary to cease hostilities." Summoning the ghost of Captain Mahan, the admiral warned: "From Europe to Asia, history is replete with nations that rose to global power only to cede it back through lack of seapower."
Great Power Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century
As such rhetoric indicates, there is already a rising tempo of naval competition in the South China Sea. Just last month, after a protracted hiatus in freedom-of-navigation patrols, the Trump administration sent the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, with its full complement of 5,000 sailors and 90 aircraft, steaming across the South China Sea for a symbolic visit to Vietnam, which has its own long-running dispute with China over oil rights in those waters.
Just three weeks later, satellite imagery captured an extraordinary "display of maritime might" as a flotilla of some 40 Chinese warships, including the carrier Liaoning, steamed through that same sea in a formation that stretched for miles. Combined with the maneuvers it staged in those waters with the Cambodian and Russian navies in 2016, China, like empires past, is clearly planning to use its gunboats and future naval bases to weave a web of de facto imperial control across the waters of Asia.
Naysayers who dismiss China's challenge might remind us that its navy only operates in two of the metaphoric "seven seas," a pale imitation of the U.S. Navy's robust global posture. Yet China's rising presence in the Indian and Pacific oceans has far-reaching geostrategic implications for our world order. In a cascading series of consequences, China's future dominance over significant parts of those oceans will compromise the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral, shatter its control over that axial end of Eurasia, and open that vast continental expanse, home to 70% of the world's population and resources, to China's dominion. Just as Brzezinski once warned,Washington's failure to control Eurasia could well mean the end of its global hegemony and the rise of a new world empire based in Beijing.
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The End of Empire
The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home.
Oct 02, 2017
The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.
The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.
Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power," by "a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg" that will "forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire."
Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. "In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China's would triple and come close to surpassing America's in 2030," McCoy noted. China became the world's second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world's leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world's manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World." It found that the U.S. military "no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors," and "it no longer can ... automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range." McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.
Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.
This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire--the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike--"shock and awe"--would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this "unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy."
Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of "micro-militarism." The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation's few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.
"While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power," McCoy writes. "Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way."
Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique--a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation--seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America's high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.
The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military's penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.
The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world's prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump's election--a reaction to the corporate coup d'etat and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country--have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.
"The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines," McCoy writes. "Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit--witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium's rubber lust in the Congo, British India's opium commerce, the Third Reich's rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe."
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, "empires become brittle."
"So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq]," he writes.
Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.
"For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness," McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls "insubstantial issues" will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.
A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance--wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites--will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.
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Aiding and Abetting the Tweeter-in-Chief
How the insult wars in Washington blind us to our troubles
Jul 10, 2017
I don't tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it's a world we should be focusing on!
Maybe it was the moment, more than a week ago, when I found myself reading Donald Trump's double tweet aimed at MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who, on Morning Joe, had suggested that the president might be "possibly unfit mentally."
"I heard," the president tweeted, "poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came... to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"
In response to Trump's eerie fascination with women's blood, Brzezinski tweeted a shot of the back of a Cheerios box that had the phrase "Made for Little Hands" on it. And so it all began, days of it, including the anti-cyber-bullying First Lady's rush (however indirectly) to her husband's side via her communications director who said, "As the First Lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder."
But one tweet truly caught my attention, even if it was at the very beginning of a donnybrook that, with twists and turns, including claims of attempted White House blackmail over a National Enquirer article (and Trumpian rejoinders of every kind), would monopolize the headlines and fill the yak-o-sphere of cable TV for days. That tweet came from conservative idol Bill Kristol, editor at large for the Weekly Standard. It said: "Dear @realDonaldTrump, You are a pig. Sincerely, Bill Kristol."
Blinded to Our Planet and Its Troubles
Strange but at that moment another moment -- so distant it might as well have been from a different planet or, as indeed was the case, another century -- came to my mind. Donald Trump was still finishing his high school years at a military academy and I was a freshman at Yale. It would have been a weekend in the late spring of 1963. One of my roommates was a working-class kid from Detroit, more of a rarity at that elite all-male school than this New York Jew (in the years when Yale was just removing its Jewish quotas). And here was another rarity: we had a double date with two young women from a local New Haven Catholic college.
That night, out of pure ignorance, we violated Yale's parietal hours -- a reality from another century that no one even knows about anymore. Those young women stayed in our rooms beyond the time the school considered... well, in that world of WASPs, kosher might not be the perfect word, but you get what I mean. Let me hasten to add that, in those forbidden minutes, I don't believe I even exchanged a kiss with my date.
Note to readers: Be patient. Think of this as my version of a shaggy dog (or perhaps an over-combed Donald) tale. But rest assured that I haven't forgotten our Tweeter-in-Chief, not for a second. How could I?
Anyway, the four of us left our room just as a campus cop was letting another student, who had locked himself out, back into his room opposite ours. When he saw us, he promptly demanded our names and recorded them in his notebook for violating parietal hours (which meant we were in genuine trouble). As he walked down the stairs, my roommate, probably a little drunk, leaned over the bannister and began shouting at him. More than half a century later, I have no memory of what exactly he yelled -- with the exception of a single word. As Bill Kristol did the other day with our president, he called that cop a "pig."
Now, I wasn't a working-class kid. In the worst of times for my parents, the "golden" 1950s when my father was in debt and often out of work, I was already being groomed to move up the American class ladder. I was in spirit upper middle class in the fashion of that moment. I was polite to a T. I was a genuine good boy of that era. And good boys didn't imagine that, in real life, even with a couple of beers under your belt, anyone would ever call the campus version of a policeman, a "pig." I had never in my life heard such a thing. It simply wasn't the way you talked to the police then, or (until last week) the way you spoke to or of American presidents. Not even Donald Trump.
In other words, when Kristol of all people did that, it shocked me. Which means, to my everlasting shame, that I must still be a good boy, even if now of a distinctly antediluvian sort. Mind you, within years of that incident, it had become a commonplace for activists of the left (though, I must admit, never me) to call the police -- the ones out in the streets hassling antiwar protesters, black activists, and others -- "pigs." Or rather "the pigs."
So here's a question I'm now asking myself. If Kristol can do it with impunity, then why not Tom Engelhardt, 54 years later? Why not me all these years after American presidents green-lighted secret prisons and torture, invaded and occupied countries around the world; ordered death and mayhem without surcease; sent robotic assassins across the planet to execute, on their say-so alone, those they identified as terrorists or enemies (and anyone else in the vicinity, children included); helped uproot populations in numbers not seen since World War II; oversaw the creation of a global and domestic surveillance state the likes of which would have stunned the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century; and pumped more money into the U.S. military budget than the next eight major states spent combined, which of course is just to start down a long list?
Under the circumstances, why not bring a barnyard animal to bear on the twenty-first-century presidency, the office that in its glory days decades ago used to be referred to as "the imperial presidency"? After all, as I've written before, Donald Trump is no anomaly in the Oval Office, even when, as with Scarborough and Brzezinski, he tweets and rants in a startlingly anomalous fashion for a president. He is instead a bizarre symptom of American decline, of the very thing he staked his presidential run on: the fact that this country is no longer "great."
Of course, tactically speaking, engaging in name-calling with Donald Trump is essentially aiding and abetting his presidency (something the media does daily, even hourly). He and his advisers are of a schoolyard sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones-but-names-will-never-hurt-me mentality. As the Washington Post reported recently, they consider such insult wars a form of "winning" and a way to eternally engage the "fake news media" on grounds they consider advantageous, in a way that will endlessly stoke the president's still loyal base.
To my mind, however, that's hardly the most essential problem with such language. I suspect that the tweets and insults -- whether Trump's, Scarborough's, or Kristol's -- act as a kind of smoke screen. In readership and viewership terms, of course, they're manna from heaven for the very "fake news media" Trump loves to hate. They're "wins" for them as well. In the process, however, the blood, the pigs, and all the rest of the package of Washington's insult wars help keep our eyes endlessly glued on the president and on next to nothing else in our world. They blind us to our planet and its troubles.
Can there be any question that Donald Trump's greatest talent is his eternal ability to suck the air out of the media room? It was a skill he demonstrated in stunning fashion during the 2016 election campaign, accumulating an unprecedented $5 billion or so in free media coverage on his way to the White House. It's safe to say, I think, that never in history have so many cameras, so many reporters, and so many eyes been focused so never-endingly on one man. He looms larger than life, larger than anything in our screen-rich world. He essentially blocks the view, day and night.
In that sense -- in the closest I've probably come to such an insult myself -- I recently labeled him our own "little big man." He's petty, small in so many ways, but he looms so large, tweet by bloody tweet, that it's hard to see the burning forest for the one flaming tree.
The Overheated Present and an Overheating Future
Take North Korea. On Friday, June 30th, when the Scarborough-Brzezinski brouhaha was going full blast, Trump met with the new South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and the two of them spoke to the media in the White House Rose Garden, taking no questions. The president's comments on the Korean situation were strikingly grim and blunt. "The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime," he said, "has failed. Frankly, that patience is over." He then added, "We have many options with respect to North Korea."
As it happens, we know (or at least could know) a little about the nature of those "options." Only the day before, Trump's national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, confirmed reports that a new set of options had indeed been prepared for the president. "What we have to do," he told a Washington think tank, "is prepare all options because the president has made clear to us that he will not accept a nuclear power in North Korea and a threat that can target the United States and target the American population." As McMaster himself made clear, "all options" included new military ones, assumedly for hitting the North and its nuclear program hard.
Now keep in mind that, leaving its still modest but threatening nuclear arsenal aside, the conventional firepower the North Koreans have arrayed along their border with South Korea, aimed at that country's capital, Seoul, a city of 25 million only 30 miles away, is believed to be potentially devastating. Add to that the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in that country, most relatively close to the border, not to speak of 200,000 American civilians living there, and you undoubtedly have one of the most explosive spots on the planet. If hostilities broke out and spiraled out of control, as they might, countless people could die, nuclear weapons could indeed be used for the first time since 1945, and parts of Asia could be ravaged (including possibly areas of Japan). What a second Korean War might mean, in other words, is almost beyond imagining.
At the Trump-Moon Rose Garden event, the president also announced sanctions against a Chinese bank linked to North Korea and a $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, both clearly meant as slaps at the Chinese leadership. In other words, when it came to getting China's help on the Korean situation, Trump's strategic patience, ignited in early April at his Mar-a-Lago meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, seems to have worn out, too, in mere months.
In this context, if you thought that the Trump-Scarborough-Brzezinski feud was a tinderbox, think again. But tell me, did you even notice the Korean news? If not, I'm hardly surprised. On that Saturday morning, my hometown paper, the New York Times -- you know, the all-the-news-that's-fit-to-print rag of record -- made "The Battle of 'Morning Joe': A Presidential Feud" its front page focal piece (with a carryover full page of coverage inside, including a second piece on the subject and that day's lead editorial, "Mr. Trump, Melting Under Criticism.")
As for the Korean story, it made the bottom of page eight ("Trump Adopts a More Aggressive Stance with U.S. Allies and Adversaries in Asia") and didn't even mention the president's "strategic patience" comments until its 16th paragraph. (There was also a page eight story on Trump's Chinese bank sanctions and arms deal with Taiwan.)
And the Times was anything but atypical. Under the circumstances, you might be forgiven for thinking that the greatest story in our world (and its greatest danger) now lies in the Tweet-o-sphere. It took the first North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, carefully scheduled for July 4th, to break that country into the news in a noticeable way and even then Trump's tweets were at the center of the reportage.
Similarly, if Trump and his antics didn't take up so much room in our present American world, it might be easier to take in so many other potential dangers on a planet where matches seem in good supply and the kindling prepared for burning. You could look to the Middle East, for example, and the quickly morphing war against ISIS, which could soon become a Trump administration-lit fire involving Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and even Russia, among other states and groups. Or you could look to the possible future passage of some version of a Republican health care bill and the more than 200,000 preventable deaths that are likely to result from it in the coming decade.
Or you could focus on a president who has turned his back on the Paris climate agreement and is now plugging not just North American "energy independence" but full-scale "American energy dominance" on a planet on which he promises a new fossil-fueled "golden age for America." In such an age, with such a president -- if you'll excuse the word -- hogging the limelight, who's even thinking about the estimated 1.4 billion "climate-change refugees" who could be produced by 2060 as the world's lowlands flood? As a comparison, the 2016 figure on "forcibly displaced people" globally that set a post-World War II record, according to the U.N. refugee agency, is 65.6 million, a staggering number that would be but a drop in the bucket in our overheating future if those 2060 figures prove even close to accurate.
A World of a Tweeter-in-Chief and "Some Stirred-Up Moslems"
Donald Trump's recent tweets do make one thing clear: we've been on quite an American journey over the last four decades, one that in some ways could be thought of as a voyage from Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew, who just died) to Brzezinski (Mika, his daughter).
In a way, you might say that, back in 1979, Brzezinski, the father, first ushered us into a new global age of imperial conflict. He was, after all, significantly responsible for ensuring that the U.S. would engage in a war in Afghanistan in order to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, or what Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later call its "bleeding wound." He launched what would become a giant CIA-organized, Saudi- and Pakistani-backed program for funding, training, and arming the most fundamental of Afghan fundamentalists, and other anti-Soviet jihadists, including a young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden. (President Ronald Reagan would later term those Afghan Islamist rebels "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.") In doing so, Brzezinski set in motion a process that would drive an Islamic wedge deep into the heart of the Soviet Union and, after Soviet intervention in Afghanistan resulted in a disastrous decade-long war, would send the Red Army limping home in defeat, all of which would, in turn, play a role in the implosion of the Soviet Union.
On this subject, he would be forever unrepentant. As he said in 1998, "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" And as for those millions of Afghans who would end up dead, wounded, or uprooted from their homes and lives, well, really, who cared?
We are now, of course, fully in that world of "stirred-up Moslems" and, as it happens, the U.S. is still fighting a war in Afghanistan as the new administration gets ready to surge militarily there, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time since October 2001, and who's even paying attention? Who could with the latest presidential tweets headlining the news and all hands on deck in Washington for the insult wars?
If, in 1978, you had predicted that, between 1979 and 2017, the U.S. would twice find itself at war (for more than a quarter of a century so far) in, of all places, Afghanistan, and with no end to its Second Afghan War in sight, any American would have laughed you out of the room. And if you had tried to explain that, almost 40 years in the future, a billionaire president, literally a casino capitalist, would be running the White House as an adjunct to his family business and sending out bizarre messages about the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, which would functionally be the news of that moment, you would surely have been institutionalized as a raving madman. A media obsessed with the travails of Zbigniew Brzezinski's daughter Mika at the fervently tweeting hands of President Donald J. Trump? Who woulda thunk it?
Make America great again? You must be kidding. It's time to stop insulting pigs and focus instead on the state of our planet.
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Bush-Era Foreign Policy Delusions Are Alive and Well in 2017
Trump's foreign policy advisers are plainly unhinged. But the old establishment isn't much better.
Mar 10, 2017
In trying to unravel the debates over U.S. foreign policy currently being fought out in the editorial pages of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the magazine Foreign Policy, one might consider starting in late December on a bitter cold ridge in northern Wyoming, where 81 men of the U.S. Army's 18th Infantry Regiment were pursuing some Indians over a rocky ridge.
The year was 1866 and the U.S. was at war with the local tribes -- Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho -- in an attempt to open a trail into the Montana gold fields. The fighting was going badly for an army fresh from the battlefields of the Civil War.
Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud and his savvy lieutenant Crazy Horse didn't fight like Robert E. Lee, but rather like General Vo Nguyen Giap a hundred years in the future: troops were ambushed by attackers who quickly disappeared, isolated posts overrun, supply wagons looted and burned.
The time and place was vastly different, but the men who designed the war against Native Americans would be comfortable with the rationale that currently impels U.S. foreign policy. In their view, the Army wasn't fighting for gold in 1866, but was embarked on a moral crusade to civilize the savages, to build a shining "city on a hill," to be that "exceptional" nation that stands above all others.
The fact that this holy war would kill hundreds of thousands of the continent's original owners and sentence the survivors to grinding poverty was irrelevant.
Is that so different from the way the butcher bills for the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the overthrow of Libya's government, and the Syrian civil war is excused as unfortunate collateral damage in America's campaign to spread freedom and democracy to the rest of the world?
The Roots of Exceptionalism
"We came, we saw, he died," bragged then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Libya is now a failed state wracked by civil war -- and a major jumping off place for refugees fleeing U.S. wars in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In his book The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, author and former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer traces the roots of this millenarian view that America's mission was to "regenerate the world." That this crusade was many times accompanied by stupendous violence is a detail that left unexamined by the people who designed those campaigns.
Kinzer argues that this sense of exceptionalism was developed during the Spanish-American War (1898) that gave the U.S. colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. But, as John Dower demonstrates in his brilliant book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, that sentiment originated in the campaigns against Native Americans. Indeed, some of the same soldiers who tracked down Apaches in the Southwest and massacred Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee would go on to fight insurgents in the Philippines.
The language has shifted from the unvarnished imperial rhetoric of men like Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Senator Albert Beveridge, who firmly believed in "the white man's burden" -- a line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling about the American conquest of the Philippines.
Today's humanitarian interventionists have substituted the words "international" and "global" for "imperial," though the recipients of "globalism" sometimes have difficulty discerning the difference.
At the ideological core of exceptionalism is the idea that American, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- and repeated by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton -- is the "one essential nation" whose duty it is to spread the gospel of free markets and democracy.
New Delusions, Old Delusions
On the surface there appear to be sharp differences between what one could call "establishment" foreign policy mavens -- like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wasserman, Jonathan Stevenson, and Robert Kagan -- and brick tossers like Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller.
To a certain extent there are. Bannon, for instance, predicts a major land war in the Middle East and a war over the South China Sea. Next to those fulminations, liberal interventionists like Kagan, and even neoconservatives like Max Boot, seem reasoned. But the "old hands" and sober thinkers are, in many ways, just as deluded as the Trump bomb throwers.
A case in point is a recent article by the Brookings Institution's Kagan entitled "Backing Into World War III," in which he argues the U.S. must challenge Russia and China "before it is too late," and warns that "accepting spheres of influence is a recipe for disaster."
Kagan has generally been lumped in with neo-cons like Boot, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle -- the latter three of whom helped design the invasion of Iraq -- but he calls himself a liberal interventionist and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election. Clinton is a leading interventionist, along with former UN representative Samantha Power and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
"China and Russia are classic revisionist powers," Kagan posits. "Although both have never enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today -- Russia from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional enemy in the east -- they are dissatisfied with the current global configuration of power. Both seek to restore hegemonic dominance they once enjoyed in their respective regions."
Those "regions" include Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia for Russia, and essentially everything west of the Hawaiian Islands for China.
For Kagan this is less about real estate than "the mere existence of democracies on their borders, the global free flow of information they cannot control, [and] the dangerous connection between free market capitalism and political freedom." All of these things, he says, "pose a threat to rulers who depend on keeping restive forces in their own countries in check."
An Alternate Universe
There are times when one wonders what world people like Kagan live in.
As Anatol Lieven, a foreign policy researcher, journalist, and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, points out concerning Russia, "A child with a map can look at where the strategic border was in 1988 and where it is today, and work out which side has advanced in which direction."
The 1999 Yugoslav War served as an excuse for President Bill Clinton to break a decade-old agreement with the then Soviet Union not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact into NATO. In the war's aftermath, the western coalition signed up Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
For the first time in modern history, Russia had a hostile military alliance on its borders, including American soldiers. Exactly how this gives Russia "greater security" from her enemies in the West isn't clear.
Of course, in a way, Kagan has a dog in this fight. His wife, former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, cheer-led the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Prior to the coup, Nuland was caught on tape using a vulgar term to dismiss peace efforts by the European Union and discussing who would replace Yanukovych. Nuland also admitted that the U.S. had spent $5 billion trying to influence Ukraine's political development.
As Lieven argues, "Russia's intervention in Ukraine is about Ukraine, a country of supreme historical, ethnic, cultural, strategic, and economic importance to Russia. It implies nothing for the rest of Eastern Europe."
Kagan gives no evidence of Russia's designs on Central Asia, although one assumes he is talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Since that trade and security grouping includes China, India, and Pakistan, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan -- Iran has also applied for membership -- exactly how Russia would "dominate" those countries is not clear.
Kagan's argument that "accommodation" with Russia only encourages further aggression is, according to Lieven, a "view based upon self-deception on the part of western elites who are interested in maintaining confrontation with Russia as a distraction from more important, painful problems at home, like migration, industrial decline, and anger over globalization."
As for "free market capitalism," the fallout from the ravages that American-style capital has wrought on its own people is one of the major reasons Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office.
Picking Poisons
Meanwhile, according to Kagan, who offers no evidence, U.S. allies in Asia are "wondering how reliable" the U.S. is given its "mostly rhetorical" pivot to Asia, its "inadequate" defense spending," its "premature" and "unnecessary" withdrawal from Iraq, and its "accommodating agreement with Iran on its nuclear program."
Again, one wonders through what looking glass the Brookings Institution views the world.
The U.S. has more than 400 military bases in Asia, has turned Guam into a fortress, deployed Marines and nuclear-capable aircraft in Australia, and sent six of its 10 aircraft carriers to the region. It spends more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined. The illegal invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, and Iran has given up its nuclear enrichment program and its stockpile of enhanced uranium.
But in a world of "alternative facts," the only thing that counts is that the U.S. no longer dominates the world as it did in the decades after World War II. "Only the United States has the capacity and unique geographical advantages to provide global security and relative stability," writes Kagan. "There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States."
The fact that the "security" and "stability" that Kagan yearns for has generated dozens of wars, a frightening nuclear arms race, growing economic inequality, and decades of support for dictators and monarchs on five continents never seems to figure into the equation.
Where the politics of Trump fits into all this is by no means clear.
If the president goes with Bannon's paranoid hatred of Islam -- and given conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Frank Gaffney has also advised the president, that is not a bad bet -- then things will go sharply south in the Middle East. If he pushes China and follows Bannon's prediction that there will be a war between the two powers, maybe it's time to look at real estate in New Zealand, like a number of billionaires -- 40 percent of whom are Americans -- are already doing.
An Old Nightmare
But no matter which foreign policy current one talks about, the "indispensable nation" concept -- born out of the Indian and Spanish-American wars "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," as Karl Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire.
A century and a half ago on a snowy Wyoming ridge, a company of the 18th Infantry Regiment discovered that not everyone wanted that "shining city on a hill." From out of a shallow creek bed and the surrounding cottonwoods and box elders, the people whose land the U.S. was in the process of stealing struck back.
The battle of Lodge Pine Ridge didn't last long, and none of the regiment survived. It was a stunning blow in the only war against the U.S. that Native Americans won. Within less than two years, the Army would admit defeat and retreat.
In the end, though, the Indians were no match for the numbers, technology, and firepower of the United States. Within a little more than three decades they were "civilized" into sterile, poverty-ridden reservations where the only "exceptionalism" they experience is the lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group in the United States.
The view that America's institutions and its organization of capital are superior is a dangerous delusion and increasingly unacceptable -- and unenforceable -- in a multi-polar world. The tragedy is how widespread and deep these sentiments are.
The world isn't envious of that shining "city on a hill." Indeed, with Trump in the White House, "aghast" would probably be a better sentiment than envy.
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Groups Demand Arrest of 'War Mastermind' Kissinger at Nobel Peace Prize Forum
Nobel Peace Prize committee honors Kissinger a second time with speaking engagement at new forum on world peace
Dec 07, 2016
The Nobel Peace Prize committee last month stunned many observers by choosing Henry Kissinger--the former secretary of state behind the secret American bombing of Cambodia and who supported Argentina's "dirty wars," among other things--to speak at a forum on "The United States and World Peace after the Presidential Election."
In response, on Tuesday the progressive groups RootsAction and Nobel Peace Prize Watch issued a petition demanding that Norwegian officials arrest Kissinger.
"The Nobel Committee has arranged for well-known war mastermind Henry Kissinger to speak as an honored guest at a forum that is part of the Nobel Peace Prize events," the petition states. "Several of Kissinger's crimes come under treaties that make it mandatory for Norway to prosecute. Kissinger is complicit or a main actor in many violations of the Genocide Convention and of the Geneva Conventions."
Nobel Peace Prize Watch lays out Kissinger's actions (pdf) in great detail, making the case that Norway is obligated under international law to arrest the former secretary of state.
Kissinger was infamously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his role in the Vietnam war--a decision that comedian Tom Lehrer said "made political satire obsolete."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter, is also scheduled to speak at the Oslo forum, which will take place on December 11. Jan Oberg of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research condemned the Nobel committee's decision to honor the two former U.S. officials:
These two experts on warfare and interventionism will--Orwellian style--speak about "The United States and World Peace after the Presidential Election."
This is the country that, since 1980, has intervened violently in Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosova/Serbia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, i.e. 14 Muslim countries. It has some 630 base facilities in 130+ countries. It has its U.S. Special Forces (SOF) in 133 countries.
It has used nuclear weapons without apology and owns the second largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. stands for about 40 percent of the world's military expenditures, is the world's leading arms exporter and has killed more people than anybody else since 1945. It's the master of (imprecise) drone strikes. It presently supports Saudi Arabia's bestial war on Yemen and conducts a military build-up in Asia and the Pacific planning, as it seems, for what looks like a future confrontation with China. And not with terribly positive results in its Middle East policies since 1945.
So with all these credentials, please tell us about world peace!
And Nobel Peace Prize Watch further argues: "Millions of people, victims and survivors, will question or be seriously offended if Norway goes through with praise and honors to a person in the top ranks of the history of callous international state criminality. The suffering ordered or managed by Kissinger has led to increasing insecurity and violence for which all citizens of the world pay a high price."
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