Inventing the Chinese Threat

[howardroark]

In 2008, I was too young to vote. I wouldn't have voted for either McCain or Obama, but I did have hope that Obama would have a better record on foreign policy and civil liberties than George W. Bush. And of course it turned out that Obama is worse on both of these than Bush ever was.

“Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union,” writes James Dobbins at RAND Corp., “China has become America’s default adversary, the power against which the United States measures itself militarily, at least when there is no more proximate enemy in sight.”

[...]

As Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and retired four-star general, said about the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington was remorseful that we “lost our best enemy.” The system – the “whole structure,” Powell explained, “depended on there being a Soviet Union that might attack us.” He said Michail Gorbachev sat across the table from him at the time and said apologetically “Ah, General, I’m sorry, you’ll have to find a new enemy.”

When people in Washington and their surrogates in the mass media punditry crow about our other trumped up threat, they at least have a laundry list of alleged transgressions. You know the list: they support terrorism, they want to wipe Israel off the map, they’re secretly building nuclear weapons, they killed US soldiers invading and occupying neighboring Iraq, etc. With China, there is no such list. China’s mere existence as anything other than a vassal state is the major transgression. As James Holmes has written in the National Interest, China “presents the sternest ‘anti-access’ challenge of any prospective antagonist.” In other words, they resist US interventionism and military presence. China is gaining power and influence, which ought to be solely American prerogatives, as far as Washington is concerned.

This is the reasoning behind President Obama’s strategic shift into Asia-Pacific, announced by the administration last year. This so-called ‘Asia pivot’ is an aggressive policy that involves surging American military presence throughout the region – in the Philippines, Japan, Australia, Guam, South Korea, Singapore, etc. – and backing basically all of China’s rivals.

More than that, the Pentagon is drawing up new plansto prepare for an air and sea war in Asia. “As part of the Air-Sea Battle concept,” reports Military.com, the US is refurbishing old WWII bases, looking “to disperse its air forces stationed at its handful of major bases in the western Pacific in the event of a major conflict with China.”

Chinese officials have not appreciated this unprovoked bellicosity. In May the Chinese Defense Ministry accused the Pentagon of hyping a Chinese military threat out of thin air. Others have said these Pentagon moves could start an arms race. “If the U.S. military develops Air-Sea Battle to deal with the [People’s Liberation Army], the PLA will be forced to develop anti-Air-Sea Battle,” one officer, Col. Gaoyue Fan, said last year in a debate sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Read more: http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/08/17/inventing-the-chinese-threat/

[240 is Back]

In 2008, I was too young to vote.

Oh, you're a young buck.  Sweet.  Get your education early, don't marry until at LEAST 25, no kids til 30, and start investing now.  Sleep around with a stable of higher class girls and do squats now. 

Great insight for an under-25 as well.

[howardroark]

Oh, you're a young buck.  Sweet.  Get your education early, don't marry until at LEAST 25, no kids til 30, and start investing now.  Sleep around with a stable of higher class girls and do squats now. 

Great insight for an under-25 as well.

Haha, I've been doing all of those good sir, thank you for the advice.

[240 is Back]

Haha, I've been doing all of those good sir, thank you for the advice.