Yves here. This is the sort of largely orthodox post that readers hopefully will enjoy picking apart. I am not as far down the curve with respect to the current state of the US-China threat display as I am with events in Ukraine and the Middle East, so I will benefit from the input of the commentariat and hope all of you enjoy debating these issues.
But even on a first pass, this article flogs the long-standing US position that regional powers protecting and advancing their security interests are threat that must be contested aggressively, without admitting the blatant hypocrisy give our Monroe Doctrine. The post flogs the lame justification that the US needs to preserve its discredited rules based order. And China is no mere regional power but a superpower.
That is not to say that great powers are nice. But China is currently dependent on ocean routes for its economic prosperity. The US is more than enough of a sea power to harass sea transport. And the example of the Houthis shows it does not take all that much to make commercial carriers shun risky destinations.
The article (following the headline) makes the questionable claim that the US position in the region has strengthened. Open and increased Russian cooperation with North Korea, Mongolia defying the US (and UN) by not arresting Putin pursuant to an ICC warrant during a recent visit, and Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar applying to join BRICS all counter this US-biased account.
By Alfred McCoy. Originally published at TomDispatch
While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for America’s national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China’s increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained U.S. military build-up in the region have strengthened Washington’s position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture America’s Asia-Pacific alliance relatively soon.
Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian “Ocean-24” exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”
“China is not a future threat,” the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”
Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.
Building a Pacific Bastion
For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.
Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.
For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.
After the Cold War
Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the U.S. Navy declined from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the U.S. would enjoy what the Pentagon called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”
After the September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started building bases in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are rife, and expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful American Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.
In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama proclaimed a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the American military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some U.S. forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House deployed a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five Philippine bases near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at Jeju Island on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon planned to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.
Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific region. After proclaiming “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”
Responding to such pressure, the Trump administration added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon budget, which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Still, setting aside support ships, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s largest navy with 234 “warships,” while the U.S. deployed 219 — with Chinese combat capacity, according to American Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”
Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.
Military Cooperation with the Philippines
After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars, and the Cold War, American relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991 when that country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the U.S. 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.
After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to ground a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington, allowing the U.S. military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.
Although Manila won a unanimous ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “without lawful effect,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from America and a strategic tilt toward China, which that country rewarded with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was operating anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers, and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.
Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, U.S. Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest military maneuvers ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the U.S. deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range Missile Launcher capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter complaint from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”
Manila has matched its new commitment to the U.S. alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to purchase five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos cruise missiles from India under a $375 million contract, and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will result in 10 new naval vessels. After the government announced a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean suppliers to procure 40 modern jet fighters — a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational jets.
Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation maneuvers in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations — Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States.
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed U.S. relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., first launched in 2007, has now extended American military power into the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 ASEAN summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump decided to revive the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour governments cozied up to China).
Just last month, President Biden hosted a “Quad Summit” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly said: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry replied: “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”
Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar (India) naval exercise into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India announced that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it, the Quad is “here to stay.”
AUKUS Alliance
While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. (part of what Michael Klare has called the “Anglo-Saxonization” of American foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders announced that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”
Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France called the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately recalled its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”
To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Now, through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the United States and will gain access to British submarine designs and top-secret U.S. nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.
Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.
Stand-Off Along the Pacific Littoral
Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the U.S. rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines, making them once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for American global power in the Pacific.
Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the United States, China’s advantage in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, America’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)
Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America’s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits hundreds of times monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever America’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.
As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-American nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current Labour Party government has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the United States, Republican populism, whether Donald Trump’s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia-Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan, or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.
And that, of course, might be the good news (so to speak), given the possibility that a growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and leading to the possibility of a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably dangerous and destructive.
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Judging by the title of his book, “To Govern the World,” it seems that Mr. McCoy believes the manifest destiny of America is to lead the world to Western, or perhaps, neo-liberal, enlightenment.
In my opinion, we’ve just had 30+ years of a US led uni-polar world and the sordid outcome of that leadership lies about us in taters: accelerating wealth concentration to astronomical levels, war and conflict everywhere and a looming, global environmental catastrophe. And Mr. McCoy wants more of the same.
The US could have used its power to improve the quality of life for everyone. Instead, it succumbed to greed and hubris and adopted the neocon ideology of “me first, me only.” In this the US aptly demonstrates the truth of the adage, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The US had its chance, the world in its hands, and simply blew it. Now we see that “Western enlightenment” may have finally reached its high water mark. After all, the full power of “Western enlightenment” cannot stop and is actually aligned with genocide. This is what Western rule has amounted to.
Jeez, talk about being blinded by one’s own perspective and interests. He would have us believe that the US “cashed in it’s peace dividend” to (nobly) defend the “garden” of the Western world from the barbarian hordes of the “jungle”. This is no longer just “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)” but “Western Derangement Syndrome (WDS).” Seriously. He needs to lay off mainstream media.
I’m surprised to see this defense of US power projection in the Pacific published by TomDispatch. We’ve had quite a few excellent posts from Nick Turse via TomDispatch over the years, who is vehemently antiwar and has written admirably about the horrors war inflicts on everyone it touches. I think you’re right about the WDS.
My initial reaction to the article is that it contains a deep and pervasive assumption that world peace requires US military supremacy, and that any other country achieving enough military might to challenge that supremacy must inevitably lead to war.
While that is probably an accurate description of the principles underlying US defense policy, it’s also quite disturbing to contemplate at a time when US world geopolitical dominance via military might is looking increasingly shaky.
The US invaded North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, occupies several colonies (one of them called a state) in the Pacific, maintains troops in South Korea, Vietnam and several other countries in the region. It destabilized Indonesia, propped up unpopular fascist regimes in the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan – oh, yes, and helped overthrow the Australian government. Next to all this, Chinese “aggression” looks very small potatoes indeed.
It is also impressive to see the support which the US is harvesting. The Philippines is on board! Some of the Pacific islands have joined the Coalition of the Swilling! And, of course, the Australian government is eager to take part in the next Gallipoli (well, not personally, but they’ll send the finest cobbers and cobberettes off to be slaughtered for the Stars and Stripes). Doesn’t really amount to much, does it?
Rather less impressive is the acknowledgement that China has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US and is shoving high-tech armed boats into the water as fast as they can make space for them. I don’t see that situation being reversed in a hurry; on the contrary, the easiest way to roll back the consequences of US sanctions against China is surely military Keynesianism, putting potentially disgruntled ex-peasants into boots and khaki for the greater glory of Chung Kuo and Kung Fu’tze.
Meanwhile, just what is the US game plan? Are they hoping that by militarizing China they will bankrupt it? Are they hoping to scare Beijing into surrendering and installing a Mandarin Yeltsin in power? Or are they just thrashing around in what was once their unquestioned dominion, fantasizing about the days when the Old China Hands ruled the roost?
“Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines.” Who moved Britain to the Asia Pacific region or is he talking about HSBC? Why not include Macron’s merry men while he is at it? Indonesia and the rest of ASEAN will try to remain neutral at all cost so Australian ships will have to travel the long way around the Indonesian archipelago in order to reach the South China Sea. Japan and South Korea are greying fast, and once hostilities commenced, the North Koreans are going to fire so many rockets south of the DMZ, K-Pop as we know it will cease to exist. The Philippines? You’ve got to be kidding me, hopefully someone there will have enough brains to ask the most pertinent question as in what happens if the US were to lose? Would they be required to cede a bunch of islands to China as a matter of reparation?
Britain is in the Pacific (Pitcairn Islands).
A key flyspeck, best known for Mutiny on the Bounty….
“Who moved Britain to the Asia Pacific region…”
If it had ever been in their power to do so, I think Ireland would have been first in line to give Perfidious Albion a shove in that direction.
I see the main problem the inability for the US to ‘declare victory’, take yes for an answer, and move on. After winning the Cold War, it proved irresistible to keep expanding until provoking Russia to respond militarily. And an impoverished China once was run by the ‘Red Chinese’ Maoists. Its rapid adoption of marked based capitalism and its development into a middle income country could have been celebrated as a ‘victory’ of US engagement and a victory of its security policy.
Nuclear weapons have made traditional great power security competition obsolete. Every current event is labeled “the most important thing ever.” Every possible security threat is another Munich, and more important than the original event.
The idea of mixing it up with China and ‘winning’ is inconceivable. We passed on this in 1950. And made a deal 20 years later. Re-opening traditional security competition is absurd. Where would we even fight it out? How would we field a large military?
AUKUS is a truly asinine pact, born of Biden’s anxiety to resuscitate the US-Australian relationship, Morrison’s venture into culture wars and the associated ‘cultural cringe’ and Johnson’s desperation to find some sort of empire substitute following demission from the EU. The UK is a trace element in all this. I suspect AUKUS will prove to be about as worthwhile as SEATO, which is to say, not at all. The essence of the arrangement is the US leveraging or free riding on Australia’s very substantial armed forces and high military spending.
The most astute and and painful criticisms came from Keating, as might be expected. For him, AUKUS not only risked offending Australia’s best customer (China) but was a species of nostalgia diplomacy and, thus, deeply reactionary. Moreover, the experience of 1941 and the implementation of the 1967 defence review demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt the basic inutility of any Anglo-Australian defence arrangement, and that the British can always be guaranteed to let the Australians down, for the simple reason that Britain lacks the resources to project power in any meaningful way into the Indo-Pacific region (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ending-east-of-suez-9780199580361?cc=us&lang=en&#). Much of the identity of the ALP has been defined *against* the Anglo-Australian relationship, and this has most especially been the case since Whitlam. The late Bill Hayden was quite candid about Australia becoming an Asian society, rather than a remote adjunct of Europe. Hawke, Keating, Hayden, Gareth Evans, etc., made this point repeatedly when in office in 1983-96, to the extent that it sunk into Australia’s strategic marrow.
However, even if the ALP might express contempt for the UK and periodic antipathy for the US, its sense of anxiety (and guilt?) at being a relatively isolated offshoot of the West has made it wish to cling to the US nurse, as if in fear of something worse. In this respect there is therefore considerable continuity between Curtin and Evatt in 1941, and Albanese and Wong today.
Within a decade of drafting the celebrated ‘long telegram’, Kennan had concluded that containment was no longer a viable policy, and that the burden not only risked subverting US finances, but creating special interests within the political economy of the US which would undermine the republic. Yet the containment of a very poor China and a relatively poor Soviet bloc was vastly less expensive then than the containment of a vastly wealthier Sino-Russian bloc would be now. In the 1950s and 1960s US overseas outlays rapidly transformed a massive current account surplus into deficits, undermining the Bretton Woods System in which the US had also invested much strategic capital. In order to contain contemporary China and Russia adequately, US investment in containment would now have to be an order of magnitude larger than it was in the post-war period. Given the present domestic political economy of the US and the faltering economies of Europe, how is that even remotely feasible? The greater risk is that the US will be tempted become much less coy about deploying the nuclear threat in order to effect containment on the cheap in preference to revising its own internal political economy (by raising taxes on corporations and on the donor class, which would be altogether more difficult politically): https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/revolution-that-failed/FEA339C3F57E1C55D2E196EF30D512D3.
“Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade”
True or not true? there are only about 26 million people in Australia.
assuming this is in Australian currency (45B each and not US $ this is $30 billion each in US$ or about twice the cost of an Aircraft Carrier built in the US.
How does a country with 26 million people afford this entire program of $9 million per citizen?
360 billion/26 million = $13,850.
“Within a decade of drafting the celebrated ‘long telegram’, Kennan had concluded that containment was no longer a viable policy, and that the burden not only risked subverting US finances, but creating special interests within the political economy of the US which would undermine the republic…”
Exceptional comment.
Many thanks, again! Kennan may well have disowned some of the views expressed in 1946-47 as a result of his fruitful exchanges with Walter Lippmann, who felt that continued engagement with the Soviets was essential, and by 1948 he largely accepted that the USSR was not bent on expansion for its own sake. As the 1950s progressed, he became ever more antipathetic towards containment, especially in Asia, which he also felt distracted the US from what he considered to be its key role in Europe (almost the precise opposite of the ‘realists’ who would today prioritise China over Europe), although it seems that this may have been at least in part a function of his racial prejudice. Indeed, as early as 1955 he was predicting the decline of the West (‘Background of the Present World Situation’, 19 April 1955). More generally, he felt that the militarisation of US policy was disastrous, and he gave full vent to these views in the celebrated Senate (Fulbright) hearings in 1966 and 1967. This did not necessarily mean a complete withdrawal from Indo-China, but a reduction to “the minimum necessary to assure the security of our forces and to maintain our presence there until we can achieve a satisfactory peaceful resolution of the conflict” (an approach similar to that of James Gavin), but this did not mean he ended up supporting Vietnamization; on the contrary, he was just as critical of Nixon as he was of Johnson.
This book has surpassed the authorised Gaddis biography, I feel, especially chapter 9: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691165400/kennan?srsltid=AfmBOor9dlU5zaqgd6RvOwJujp6bCIfw2LHTS-KAGtxtWz9PsJinmTiL. However, Kennan’s influence in Washington had subsided by the late 1940s, and had largely evaporated only a few years thereafter, whilst his final decades seem to have been spent very much in a ‘lion in winter’ posture. I therefore have little doubt that his views about present US policy would have been withering: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/27/mr-x-would-not-approve-of-china-containment/
Thanks as always.
It does bother me though that we have moved so off-base that Cold Warrior Kennan has become a new “beacon” of reason. Just like one has to put up with “revisionist” views claiming that Reagan´s lot all of a sudden was “reasonable” (compared to Sullivan and Co.)
btw: Any idea how Kennan reacted to Molotov´s proposal for USSR to join NATO?
re: McCoy – same problem from the other side. I learned to know McCoy as the great truth-teller about drug-trafficking by the CIA (“The Politics of Heroin” ) even before Gary Webb. It´s what made him famous. But when it comes to true scholarly analysis of empire as such he fails to see the obvious.
It´s is striking how deep McCoy´s scholarly trust is entrenched into this closed, circular line of thinking. Cause and effect both brought about by Washington. It has NOTHING to do with China. projections built upon projections.
And yes Kennan did say this in a preface I believe:
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
This he would apply to China today. Despite McCoy´s advantage in historical knowledge of how the Cold War #1 played out into Cold War #2 he lacks that far-sightedness. I just don´t see why.
The Nature.com Index of high-quality science research publishing for the latest 12 months is just out. The Index shows 4 of the top 5 publishing institutions are Chinese, 7 of the top 10 institutions are Chinese, and 11 of the top 15.
Harvard is at number 2. German institutions are at numbers 7 and 13. A French institution is number 10.
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all
The Nature Index
1 July 2023 – 30 June 2024 *
Rank Institution ( Count) ( Share)
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 8422) ( 2544)
2 Harvard University ( 3616) ( 1078)
3 University of Science and Technology of China ( 2206) ( 729)
4 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 3567) ( 706)
5 Zhejiang University ( 1852) ( 705)
6 Peking University ( 2708) ( 704)
7 Max Planck Society ( 2716) ( 688)
8 Nanjing University ( 1658) ( 684)
9 Tsinghua University ( 2242) ( 652)
10 French National Centre for Scientific Research ( 4450) ( 608)
11 Shanghai Jiao Tong University ( 1690) ( 593)
12 Sun Yat-sen University ( 1499) ( 590)
13 Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres ( 2903) ( 568)
14 Fudan University ( 1562) ( 557)
15 Sichuan University ( 940) ( 491)
* Tables highlight the most prolific institutions and countries in high-quality research publishing for the year
But all in English. The real sign of change will be when Chinese takes over from English (as English did from German).
“the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”
Only if you omit wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and large scale anti-communist massacres in Malaya and Indonesia. Probably there are others that I’ve forgotten, as Mr McCoy has.
Depends on how you define Indo-Pacific but East Timor and the Indo-Pakistani War (Bangladesh War of Independence) come to mind.
I’m a huge fan of UK based Aaron Bastani and Novara Media (especially Ash Sarkar). I found this piece most informative. Ms Cheung seems to have a very firm grip on her information. They don’t delve much into global power relations but understanding Xi, it seems to me, would be a good place to start in understanding China. Understanding the US neocons and their drive for full spectrum dominance is another matter.
EVERYTHING You Need to Know About China & Xi Jinping | Aaron Bastani meets Olivia Cheung
Thank you for Aaron Bastani meets Olivia Cheung. Here is a review of the book that preceded the recording:
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/article/political-thought-xi-jinping-steve-tsang-olivia-cheung-review-600rqsn60
February 10, 2024
The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung review — what does the Chinese leader believe?
Xi Jinping has loudspeakers broadcasting his speeches across 300,000 villages in China. But is this more than just an ideological vanity project?
By Yuan Yi Zhu
I did not enjoy reading this book. To be clear, this is in no way the fault of Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, who are leading scholars of China’s impossibly opaque political system and write with great authority. But to try to make a book about the political thought of Xi Jinping — or in official lingo, Xi Jinping Thought — pleasurable to read would probably stretch the English language to breaking point, and the authors wisely do not attempt the feat.
Nevertheless, this is an important analysis of an important subject that anyone seriously interested in China’s political trajectory should at least pretend to have perused. This is because since his accession to power in 2012, Xi has not only consolidated power to an extent not seen since the Mao era, but has sought to develop a self-named systematic ideology that he hopes will equal and eventually supplant Mao Zedong Thought as “the contemporary rendition of Marxism-Leninism in China” (note here that everyone has thoughts, but only successful communist dictators have Thoughts)…
Wow. It’s hard to believe this is the author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia all those years ago. That book gave us an indispensable look at an important and almost completely hidden element of our dirty war in Southeast Asia. He had to battle the CIA and censorship to get it published. This article could have easily been written by some “public diplomacy” hack from the State Department.
McCoy is another in a very long line of liberal academics who succumbed to Trump derangement and the whole Russiagate scenario. But even so, the complete one-sidedness of this justification for the US “defense” of the world is startling. Even his recent book In the Shadows of the American Century (2017), seen by some as his magnum opus, was mainly about the many overt, covert, tragic, and downright evil mechanisms of US hegemony. Perhaps I missed something, but I see no sign of the author of that book at all here.
Yet one more example of our increasingly bizarro political world and the discourse that supports it these days.
What happened to Tom’s Dispatch? This reads like something that belongs in “The National Review.”
I guess we’re all neocons now.
You took the words right out of my mouth. McCoy’s books about the Southeast Asian drug trade facilitated by the CIA, an analysis he later extended to Afghanistan, was my first encounter with this author. Perhaps that’s why TomDispatch gives him a platform? Perhaps the justification is something along the lines that his earlier works has given him anti-US Imperialism street cred? Nevertheless, when contrasting his earlier works with the above article, it’s certainly a disappointment.
Yes. But the more I think about this the stranger it gets for me. As McCoy’s career progressed and he became a widely-recognized historian, I did sometimes see the type of “limited hangout” coverage on some issues that almost always occurs with elite academics whose reputations depend on their not going *too* far on certain controversial topics. But that said, his work was still good, especially relative to much acceptable academic history. However, in my admittedly biased view, the ridiculously one-sided justifications for an aggressive US “defense” policy in this article actually requires that McCoy deny much of his own life’s work. What the hell?
pjay plus others
I have not read much of McCoy other than his writing on the early 20th century state terror organized by the US in the Philippines, and that it would eventually be brought home to the US. An example would be the elimination of “Occupy”, among many other reductions in free association. I also read a little of his work on the drug trade in Southeast Asia, its financiers and benefactors.
But we must be aware of Yves’ preamble, that some pieces are being put out for discussion. The same can apply to Tom Dispatch. We’re not being told to agree; we’re being asked to consider and think.
I didn’t read this as a justification of US defense of the Pacific. But an accounting of all the effort we have gone to to position ourselves for some emergency. The same thing almost. But more like deterrence. I don’t think it is sane for us to encroach on Chinas oil interests in the South China Sea but the facts he exposed are telling us that this is entirely possible. And then we immediately reflect on just what our purposes are when it comes to Iran. Because Iran is Chinas major supplier. So far in terms of pushing China to take the first step against us we can now see how massive that confrontation could be because China has more than matched our defense buildup. And Xi isn’t Mao but who can forget that Mao actually wanted a war and said it would solve the overpopulation problem. War getting out of control and depopulating the entire planet is clearly possible today and that’s why our tactics now include opposing parties signaling when, where, what and how they are going to attack. I’d certainly like to hear more about what he referred to as quantum sensors which we supply our partners with. it would be good to define “defense” with a lot more clarity. Horse trading should replace war but unfortunately it’s not scary enough to deter violence.
Here as everywhere the sticking point is the insistence that the US must continue to”rule” the world. The unipolar moment is over. It was only a moment. A moment used to grab with both hands while chanting “We’re #1.” To say that this stance was, is, and will continue to be a disaster is clear to any truly sentient person. When here, as elsewhere, your policy is reduced to sanctions, subversion, and military posturing, why has it been a surprise that others arm themselves against your threats. Russia made its position clear again and again. The US did not listen, hence the current state of affairs. China is not in my view expansionist in the sense. of seeking political and military control of distant lands. It does want trade and a degree of influence; relations that parallel the old tributary state system. How is that so different from what the US enjoys in its neighborhood. Were the US to stop behaving like the monkey with a fist full of plums unable to withdraw through the narrow neck of the jar lest it lose even one, most of the tensions in the world would subside. Greed for wealth or power is an often fatal disease.
Just three things. First, every US base is essentially a captive target which can be bled or destroyed at will. Second, sea power depends on the number, type and quality of the ships possessed by the US, the technology, weapons and manpower needed to protect them. Third, every US ship is essentially a semi-autonomous captive target which can be bled or destroyed at will if it is in a place it’s enemy does not wish it to be. Mackinder was right for the long haul, Spykman was right for the period of European dominition which has been drifting further and further away throughout my lifetime.
The question is, how effectively, given the now quite obvious lunacy of the dollar promise and the reducing willingness of the rest of the world to buy Treasuries to finance the US deficits at home and abroad, can the US decline gracefully and adapt to it’s new position in the world order in which, to use Jarvis Cocker’s delightful term which reminds us that our liberties and democratic rights descend from the rights of the people of the commons, it’s “common people”, if not necessarily it’s current élites, do a lot better than they are doing at the moment
You could have stopped reading at this claim and called the whole thing BS…
“even penetrating American airspace in Alaska.”
The Alaska Air Defence Identification Zone is NOT “American airspace” and large swaths are closer to Russia than Alaska. Further, the links provided do not state whether or not Russia and China failed to identify themselves when flying 320 km away from the Alaskan coast in the ADIZ.
The US routinely enters both China’s and Russia’s ADIZs and regularly conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols close to both. Does the US identify itself, or is it to light up defensive radars?
Wherever you look the potential for a Gulf of Tonkin incidents abound. Yes, it is a powder Keg and Uncle Sam is the arsonist running around with lit matches.
It seems that China Derangement Syndrome has penetrated McCoy’s brain.
Operating US CVN east of the dateline is sporty. It used to be they had to stay 400 miles off shore now with DF 21 etc it is 1000 miles!
I follow: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/running-out-of-sm-3-at-sea?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=jhab3&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Commander Salamander and his commenters are quite enlightening to this USAF veteran!
US has not won a war since 1945, why plan on taking on a regional super power in its own home waters? Our “rules” make Formosa occupied since 1949 by the Quomingtan a sacred artifact!
Other than more money for shipyards that don’t perform well.
US may not have the resources to run that part of the world.
‘Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.’
Are we expected to abandon our medicare-for-all program to produce all this military junk? Both parties want to turn Oz into some sort of arsenal of weaponry so now we have our very own Uniparty at work. And we are ‘a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China’? What is he talking about? Oz has about 25 million people and China has about 1.4 billion people. There would be more hookers in China than soldiers in Oz. Gonzalo Lira devoted a video to say that Oz was being set up by the US to be the next Ukraine in the Pacific and I think that he is right. And Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out Beijing’s expansionist goals-
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1784123161392668938
What terrific comments.
Historically, the only time the Australian military has been present to defend itself was during World War II. Otherwise, they have always acted as either British or American mercenaries.
We are once again reduced to providing dreadnoughts for the Imperial Fleet like in pre- federation days and AUKUS = ABDA from 1942. The Yanks can’t build their own subs anymore let alone provide scarce technical resources to others to do so.
The Australian economy and armed forces are both paper tigers as will be seen as soon as we are forced to sanction China and those earning flows drop off. We have some front line stuff but no capability for regeneration once the losses start and our infrastructure is spread out and indefensible. Way too many AA escorts instead of the ASW escorts like the rest of the West that we really need because we import everything important.
This all happened inside a week in 2023, we have lost the small amount of sovereignty we built up since WW2 and are now going down the wrong side of history with our fellow travellers. US needs to go into semi-isolation to regenerate itself not try impose danegeld on its shrinking empire.
Break up and privatize the health system and adopt a US-style privatized extortion racket to pay for all the weaponry? I certainly hope not, but would not put it past the uniparty politricksters
Caitlin Johnstone is one of my favorite journalists in the entire Anglosphere. A real journalist who analyzes the centers of power with no sugar-coating, excuses, or apologies. She has a talent for breaking things down to the core: just one look at the map tells a thousand words.
In the local slang here in Cali: “she kicks ass!”
She reminds me of John Pilger. -a.v.
Sorry to flog a dead horse, but we just had two Cat-5 hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in about a month. The Sea Surface Temperature of that body of water just passed a tipping point. These storms demonstrated that all of SE US could be destroyed annually.
Cannot these Ministers of Wisdom consider advocating protecting the homeland a little closer to home?
Imho, the two hurricanes in the Gulf were the October Surprise.
The cost of overseas misadventures will prove to be too costly for an impoverished nation to swallow.
Maybe our fleet of nuclear carriers could be refitted into Marine Cloud Brightening stations.
> “Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance,” [emphasis supplied]
I stopped reading at this line.
That was quick.
Perhaps by “revitalized the NATO alliance” the author meant “plainly revealed the absolute character of US domination of its European allies”.
A famous Henry Kissinger saying comes to mind, about enemies and friends.
Well it made Hungary and Turkey stronger NATO supporters. /sarc
I also loved this, speaking of the USA and the Phillipines “After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars,….” Rose-coloured glasses perhaps?
This entire article is delusional beyond even the normal standards of American exceptionalism…The US, whose military is in woeful shape already, is going to build a “bastion” of strength several thousand miles away? When a small Houthi force of drones chased our carrier out of the Red Sea?
So the Aussies are supposed to build nuclear attack submarines without any experience or infrastructure for this task. They will rely on the proven track record of American defense contractors for building weapons on time and under budget. What could go wrong? It is an easy prediction that this program will either be cancelled outright or cut back so sharply as to render the “defense” potential of the subs to be negligible. This is a prime example of U.S. extortion and looting of an ally, and the Australians will eventually awaken to the exploitative nature of the arrangement. The submarine deal does give Australia a bit of leverage against Washington, and I believe it was used to free Assange, but the growing cost of this boondoggle will kill it and dissuade other Pacific nations from pursuing similar follies.
dang if only those little yellow people had adhered to the bill clintons of the world view that we the white superior folks, rule the world because whites are superior and can do all of the worlds innovations, and those little sub human people of color would have just stuck to what they do best, take orders, and sweat in factories, we would not be where we are today!/sarc!
the bill clintons of the world say those people of color took advantage of us. we handed them all of our wealth, technology, standard of living on a silver platter so that wall street parasites could make more money, and instead they worked for themselves, the dang liars!/sarc!
Haha! Never underestimate elite American stupidity, and hubris.
I recall the NPR propaganda: “You can abandon your boring manufacturing jobs and have fulfilling careers as dog walkers and Walmart greeters!”
“I recall the NPR propaganda: “You can abandon your boring manufacturing jobs and have fulfilling careers…”
Forgive me, but I do not know what this recollection refers to or when heard:
Manufacturing employment began to decline in 1979 and continued to decline till 2010. Manufacturing employment has been slowly increasing since 2010. The employment decline was fastest during the Bush presidency, from 2001 on.
During the Bush presidency manufacturing production increased slowly while labor productivity increased relatively rapidly, so there was no need for an increase in manufacturing employment. From the Obama presidency on manufacturing production has increased very slowly while labor productivity has actually fallen.
manufacturing employment held pretty steady for decades. it was not bush the shrub that lost all of those jobs, it was the results of bill clintons polices.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/27/the-us-and-china-a-productive-path-forward/
“China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2000 after a major battle in Congress over granting the country Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR), which was necessary for its admission. Much of the opposition came from the labor movement which argued that opening trade to China would lead to a large expansion of the trade deficit, costing manufacturing jobs. Since manufacturing had historically been a source of high-paying jobs for workers without college degrees, this would put downward pressure on the pay of non-college-educated workers more generally.
The mainstream of the economic profession ridiculed the idea that expanding trade with China could lead to any substantial job loss. For example, Gary Hufbauer, a prominent trade economist with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, dismissed the “extravagant claims” from the Economic Policy Institute (my former employer) that PNTR for China could lead to a loss of 813,000 jobs.
“The Economic Policy Institute (http://www.EPI.org) has advanced the most extravagant claims about the US bilateral trade deficit with China. Based on a count of 13,000 jobs lost per billion dollars of manufactured imports, the EPI asserts that current trade with China already costs the United States 880,000 high-wage manufacturing jobs. Then, extrapolating the US ITC’s estimate of the one-time percentage import and export trade changes for 10 years, the EPI asserts another 817,000 US jobs will be eliminated through PNTR and Chinese membership in the WTO.” ”
“The explosion in the trade deficit led to a sharp drop in manufacturing employment between 2000 and 2007, before the start of the Great Recession. The country lost more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs between December of 1999 and December of 2007, the official start date of the Great Recession. (It lost another 2.3 million between December 2007 and February 2010, the employment trough of the Recession.)[3]
While manufacturing had been falling as a share of total employment since the start of the 1970s, actual levels of employment had changed little, apart from cyclical fluctuations, until the 2000s. From December of 1970 to December of 1999 the sector lost less than 30,000 jobs. This is shown in Figure 1. By contrast, the job loss associated with the rise in the trade deficit from 1999 to 2007 amounted to more than 20 percent of total employment in the sector. Autor, Dorn, and Hansen (2016) put the job loss associated with trade with China alone at 2.0 million.
The massive job loss in manufacturing had a predictable effect on wages. Many of the higher-paying union jobs were the ones that disappeared as the economy became more open to trade in manufactured goods. In other cases, workers were forced to take pay cuts to keep their jobs. The extent to which manufacturing offered higher-paying jobs for workers (mostly male workers) without college degrees, declined substantially over this period, as both the number of jobs and wage premium fell sharply.”
during bill clintons reign of terror in the 1990’s, thomas friedman, and peterson inst. shills were regulars on PBS, a free trade shill, paul saloman was a feverish believer.
NPR had gene sperling on regularly.
In the early 2000s after the 1999 WTO deal with China there was a massive move of American manufacturing to that place.
My neighbor who was in middle management of an international telecom company relayed a report that in order to take advantage of Chinese manufacturing, the trade deal was that the incoming company had to divulge all trade secrets to the Chinese to gain entry. Both my neighbor and I agreed it was nuts. Needless to say many, many American manufacturers fell for this deal and were eventually destroyed. I asked him what sort of insanity would lead to such an agreement?
He thought that the Americans believed that we would control their banking within two years.
Hahaha!
Also, I would have thought that after the experience of Monte Bello and Maralinga (where the UK has still paid no compo to South Australia or to the Pitjantjatjara people affected by the very high levels of radiation), the incendiary findings of the McClelland royal commission in 1985 (which found that the Menzies government neglected to consult with the Australian scientific community about the environmental or other impacts of the tests), and given the botched clean-up in the 1990s, no Australian government would ever want to have anything to do with any kind of nuclear weaponry ever again: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Maralinga/yHjtCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Some really good comments here. I’ll add a couple more small points.
The author suggests that the US was defending itself in the Pacific, when in fact it was creating an overseas military empire before and after the so-called Spanish-American War. The US took over Hawai’i by force in 1893, putting Queen Lili’uokalani in prison. The US govt. even acknowledged some of the wrongdoings (but of course it is just symbolic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_Resolution
Unprovoked attack? Earlier in 1941, the US had seized Japanese assets and imposed economic siege warfare on Japan. (In current NewSpeak: “sanctions”) Many see this as a flagrant act of war and provocation. So, despite the war propaganda and FDR speech, the attack on Pearl Harbor was indeed provoked. Not to say that Japan did not have its own ruthless imperialist designs, but we need to be careful and include all the relevant facts. Omitting important context does not serve the reader nor the author.
On another note:The late John Pilger produced a documentary film in 2016 that is still largely relevant and may have been ahead of its time.
The Coming War on China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V42KtSeo3uI&t=16s
if you visit San Francisco take a good look at City Hall. The dome tops out higher than the US capitol. The interior is unlike city halls anywhere in the country. This was by design as San Francisco was envisioned to be the capitol of a far flung Pacific empire. This pre-dated WWII by many decades. Imperial ambitions were part of the United States from Day 1.
Thank you for these points, and it is especially important to note that the US not only developed a formal ‘insular’ empire in the Pacific (and Caribbean) but also an ‘informal’ one through the ‘open door’ policy in China, and its participation in the treaty port system (though the US had two such outposts in its own name, its rights in the very important port of Shanghai – the ‘international settlement’ shared with the UK – were of major significance). As Antony Hopkins has noted, the US effectively ‘redacted’ the story of its imperialism after it was concluded by about 1930 that its colonies were unprofitable and costly, and it was only really during the New Deal that the US once more became embarrassed about having colonies: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196879/american-empire?srsltid=AfmBOorat0X5sqVgFAN8pNSF7bz0HGwzN-kVxWLg4vY_o1paUh17OM9N and https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/433190/how-to-hide-an-empire-by-daniel-immerwahr/9781784703912.
More good points, thanks for the reply and link. Also, to further support your comment, US Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler’s War Is A Racket explores the issues from a slightly different angle.
https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/butler_racket.pdf
Excelente, gracias!
Remember also, that Japan invaded China in September 1931 and proceeded to rampage across the country from then. The war by Japan on China was especially cruel. I have considered the beginning of the World War to be September 1931.
Yes, that’s true. I have a copy of The Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) by Iris Chang that illustrates the horrific crimes of the Japanese occupation and provides primary documentaion. The occupations of Korea and other places by Japan were also horrific. The case of “comfort women” is another uncomfortable topic, even to this day, the Japanese govt. refuses to apologize and is hostile to any mention of it.
(Of course, this is no excuse for the US use of nukes on Japanese civilians.)
Although perhaps not as brutal, the US bases in Korea, Philipines etc. encouraged prostitution and brothels to serve the US military.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/10/31/the-u-s-militarys-long-uncomfortable-history-with-prostitution-gets-new-attention/
“The occupations of Korea and other places by Japan were also horrific…”
Thank you.
That the Japanese government has never openly reflected and apologized, leaves a lack of “reasonable understanding.”
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/14/reviews/971214.14schellt.html
December 14, 1997
Bearing Witness
The granddaughter of survivors of the Japanese massacre of Chinese in Nanjing chronicles the horrors.
By ORVILLE SCHELL
THE RAPE OF NANKING
The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
By Iris Chang.
and japan fire bombed a major chinese city and terror bombed for years.
https://www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/camp/pac/china/air/cjia-jrc.html
“The Japanese used their air superiority not only to attack the military targets in Manchurian but to indiscriminately attack cities there as well. This was the beginning of Japanese terror bombing of China.
This was nothing like the precision attacks at Pearl Harbor. Rather the Japanese basically just conducting area bombing attacks, simply dumping bombs on cities. The Japanese like to consider themselves victims of World war II and point to their devastated cities. Unmentioned in the fact that before Japanese cities were attacked in any significant way, the Japanese had been attacking virtually undefended Chinese cities for nearly 15 years. The Chinese had no anti-aircraft defenses or organized civil defense systems. The result was extensive civilian casualties. The air attacks were limited to Manchuria and adjacent areas of Northern China.
The major exception was Shanghai. While Chang did not resist the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, students and other Chinese were incensed with the Japanese. Demonstrations and boycotts ensued. And Japanese nationals including officials and police were attacked. The Japannese began bombing Shanghai to punish the Chinese.”
——-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
1929 Sino-Soviet war
Main article: Sino-Soviet conflict (1929)
“The July–November 1929 conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) further increased the tensions in the Northeast that led to the Mukden Incident and eventually the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Soviet Red Army victory over Xueliang’s forces not only reasserted Soviet control over the CER in Manchuria but revealed Chinese military weaknesses that Japanese Kwantung Army officers were quick to note.[58]
The Soviet Red Army performance also stunned the Japanese. Manchuria was central to Japan’s East Asia policy. Both the 1921 and 1927 Imperial Eastern Region Conferences reconfirmed Japan’s commitment to be the dominant power in the Northeast. The 1929 Red Army victory shook that policy to the core and reopened the Manchurian problem. By 1930, the Kwantung Army realized they faced a Red Army that was only growing stronger. The time to act was drawing near and Japanese plans to conquer the Northeast were accelerated.[59] ”
“To overcome Chinese resistance, Japanese forces frequently deployed poison gas and committed atrocities against civilians, such as a “mini-Nanjing Massacre” in the city of Jiujiang upon its capture.[82]: 39 [83] After four months of intense combat, the Nationalists were forced to abandon Wuhan by October, and its government and armies retreated to Chongqing.[61]: 72 Both sides had suffered tremendous casualties in the battle, with the Chinese losing up to 500,000 soldiers killed or wounded,[82]: 42 and the Japanese up to 200,000.[84]”
“With Japanese casualties and costs mounting, the Imperial General Headquarters attempted to break Chinese resistance by ordering the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and Imperial Japanese Army Air Service to launch the war’s first massive air raids on civilian targets. Japanese raiders hit the Kuomintang’s newly established provisional capital of Chongqing and most other major cities in unoccupied China, leaving many people either dead, injured, or homeless.”
“By 1943, Guangdong had experienced famine. As the situation worsened, New York Chinese compatriots received a letter stating that 600,000 people were killed in Siyi by starvation.[95]”
“The United States strongly supported China starting in 1937 and warned Japan to get out.[97] However, the United States continued to sell Japan petroleum and scrap metal exports until the Japanese invasion of French Indochina when the U.S. imposed a scrap metal and oil embargo against Japan (and froze all Japanese assets) in the summer of 1941.[98] As the Soviets prepared for war against Nazi Germany in June 1941, and all new Soviet combat aircraft was needed in the west, Chiang Kai-shek sought American support through the Lend-Lease Act that was promised in March 1941.”
“According to Walter E. Grunden, history professor at Bowling Green State University, Japan permitted the use of chemical weapons in China because the Japanese concluded that Chinese forces did not possess the capacity to retaliate in kind.[220] The Japanese incorporated gas warfare into many aspects of their army, which includes special gas troops, infantry, artillery, engineers and air force; the Japanese were aware of basic gas tactics of other armies, and deployed multifarious gas warfare tactics in China.[221] The Japanese were very dependent on gas weapons when they were engaged in chemical warfare.[222]
Japan used poison gas at Hankow during the Battle of Wuhan to break fierce Chinese resistance after conventional Japanese assaults were repelled by Chinese defenders. Rana Mitter writes,
Under General Xue Yue, some 100,000 Chinese troops pushed back Japanese forces at Huangmei. At the fortress of Tianjiazhen, thousands of men fought until the end of September, with Japanese victory assured only with the use of poison gas.[223]”
———————
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Chongqing
“The bombing of Chongqing (simplified Chinese: 重庆大轰炸; traditional Chinese: 重慶大轟炸, Japanese: 重慶爆撃), from 18 February 1938 to 19 December 1944, was a series of massive terror bombing operations authorized by the Empire of Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters and conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service (IJAAF) and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service (IJNAF).”
“30,000+ civilian casualties including 10,000+ deaths, over 30,000 buildings and much of the city center destroyed; property losses amounting to 10 billion francs”
“”The Japanese bombers appeared over Chungking on moon-lit nights when they could easily see the major landmarks… from time to time, on command of their formation leader, all the bombers would open up a defensive barrage of fire in direction most likely of attack by fighters. The performance was effective. It was like a gigantic broom of fire sweeping the starry sky.”
— K. Kokkinaki, Soviet pilot, witnessing the spectacle of night-time air-raids over Chongqing in 1939″
“On 5 June 1941, in midst of the increased brutality of the new Operation 102 bombing campaign to force the Chinese to capitulate in their war of resistance, the Japanese flew more than 20 sorties, bombing the city for three hours. About 4,000 residents who hid in a tunnel were asphyxiated.[28] ”
“Three thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the city from 1939 to 1942.[28] According to photographer Carl Mydans, the spring 1941 bombings were at the time “the most destructive shelling ever made on a city”,[32] although terror bombing grew rapidly during the Second World War: by comparison 2,300 tons of bombs were dropped by Allied bombers on Berlin in a single night during the Battle of Berlin.[33] A total of 268 air raids were conducted against Chongqing.[citation needed]”
If you read Marat Khairullin on South Korea this week they are none to loved either. S Korean troops massacred civilians in Korea and in Vietnam – and as the third largest group after U.S. snd U.K. in Iraq gained an unsavoury reputation for civilian deaths and torture as Zaytun Division.
So it appears US has its attack dog assisting Ukraine and arming Poland just as the Ukraine- Taiwan connection brokered by U.S. in 1950s continues today
There is a special historical betrayal in the United States choosing to use Japan to “contain” China. I do not understand this American unwillingness to reflect on history.
I know this is important, but I do not understand.
Importantly, individual Japanese have in the last months come to China to personally make amends. Also, American families of fighters who assisted China during the war repeatedly come to China to memorialize the struggle. President Xi, personally responds to such remembrances.
you have to remember, japan had its eyes on siberia before it was forced into heading south. if the soviets had lost, japan would have gained much of siberia and mongolia, it would have kept them very busy.
once it was apparent japan was heading south after the defeat, anyone with any sense would have started preparations for the onslaught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border_conflicts
More “Jokes”.
USA foreign policy is about BUSINESS!
Banking as a weapon. Drugs, arms and vehicles etc. War destroys resistance and production facilities. Bribes allow covert business. Corruption wins always. “British Gold”.
Divide and Extort.
USA is controlled by criminal gangs.
Test leaders and Blobs for drugs and take over tax ‘avoidance’ centres. A lot of the war talk will disappear.
The Reification of the ‘USA’ must end.
Who makes the decisions? REALLY?
Skull and Bones types?
Limited hangouts, peeps?
Reading this post, I did not spot much that might require refutation. There is little gain from refuting the ravings of the insane or the ‘captured’. “To Govern the Globe”? This book title is more than enough to make me wonder how these ravings found legs in the blogosphere. The u.s. was never asked, appointed, or deemed competent by God to “Govern the Globe”. The u.s has more than proven a disastrous failure at governing and caring for the u.s. At least some countries in the Globe must have become aware of this.
Instead of spending so much anguish over threats to the hundreds of u.s. military bases scattered around the globe and the concentration of military bases around China and in peculiar shifts of attention mourning the decline in the numbers of u.s. Navy ships and island bases … McCoy might have mourned the decline of u.s. shipbuilding ability. Doing so, might have lead to discoveries about the decline of the u.s. steel industry and to indications that many of the cost overruns and delays in completing navy vessels resulted from the many ‘revisions’ to the plans, often made after those areas modified, had already been completed … in heavy welded sheet steel as specified in the original plans. [I have no link to support this claim but trust others in the commentariat might].
The MIC appears to have a rotation of funding lines between the services. The Army wasted its billions on the Future Combat Systems (FCS), making the Air Force and Navy due for their turns. The Air Force used its billions to build F-35 aircraft leaving the Navy in line to its billions for building ships, or whatever NRL might have cooked up waiting for the Army and Air Force to finish their turns at the DoD teat. I cried when Obama was elected. I cried and cried, and still cry after I saw what he did to accomplish “Change we can believe in” and his “Pivot to the East”. Obama’s justifications for expenditures of money in military spending lines thoroughly poisons the provenance of military expenditures attributed to national defense.
I believe the u.s. could “Govern the Globe”. Humankind faces multiple existential threats to its future. I believe the majority of people are very aware of these threats. A country willing, able, and wise enough could govern the globe for the benefit of all of Humankind. I believe the Populace of the u.s.–the “People”– would willingly support actions to help the world meet the threats that afflict all of Humankind. This does not mean that the u.s. tells other countries what to do … it means the u.s. works with other countries that they might plan and act in concert to mitigate and adapt to the changes coming. It means the u.s. acts not in the “u.s. national interest” or in the “interests of Big Money” [and what is the difference?] but acts in the best interest of Humankind. The u.s. must learn that governing is a responsibility NOT a license to exploit.
I am very pessimistic that the the u.s. can ‘learn’ anything. If characters like McCoy enjoy any ear in the halls of power, my pessimism grows.
I ackowledge your sincerity in arguing for what you feel is the best. But as a citizen of a small, insignificant country (thankfully) on the periphery, I do not believe the U.S. has the capability to govern itself, let alone the globe. I’m sorry to have to say this, but please, just leave the rest of us alone. Seriously, it is the only way you can help.
Might have been good to include Plan Red and Plan Orange and why US pressured Britain not to renew Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty in 1920. That alone caused major problems by isolating Japan from its long-term ally Britain.
Added to which Treaty of Washington 1930 and agreements regarding N Borneo and Philippines. US was in imperialism business in Japan’s backyard.
Japan sank US Panay in 1937 and US did nothing which showed Chamberlain in London there was no help coming from USA.
US created the mess with Japan and deliberately. It was just as it provokes China now. US cannot accept peer group competition and seeks hegemony. The price is rising.
WW2 was largely caused by U.S. – firstly by Woodrow Wilson seeking influence in Europe through late entry into a stale war to keep it running – and then his 14 Points which did not apply to Germany – then US failing to enforce what it had imposed at Versailles
War with Japan was provoked. War with Russia snd China is being provoked. N Korea has blown up rail and road links to south indicating S Korea will not be accessing new rail links from
Korea to Europe carrying freight.
US will be at war and it will not end until US is destroyed as a unified entity and fragments into regional statelets
Many thanks indeed for this! What I also feel needs to be emphasised is that the Anglo-Japanese alliance (which had suffered from considerable, if understated, friction during the 1910s) was abandoned under severe pressure from the US. Harding and Charles Evans Hughes were themselves under pressure from Western Republicans, like Hiram Johnson who were determined that ‘white’ supremacy in the Pacific be secured (though ‘progressive’, Johnson was a committed racist who had approved exclusionary legislation in California in 1913). Whitehall faced a second front in the form of Canada (Meighen, then Mackenzie King [who had been a proponent of exclusionary legislation as an official and minister under Laurier]), Australia (William Morris [Billy] Hughes, who was especially bigoted) and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand (Massey). Like the US, these three dominions were firmly committed to racist policies regardless of party. Charles Evans Hughes effectively joined forces with Meighen and Billy Hughes to force the British to let the Japanese alliance lapse. There was also a less well-known third front against the alliance, which was a largely unwitting combination of Lancashire textile manufacturers and their equivalents in India who (though usually enemies) found common cause against Japanese import penetration into India. Naturally, the painful lapse of the alliance caused a measure of dismay in Tokyo, but also an aggressive re-calibration of Japanese policy. Curzon felt that it was important that Japan be permitted greater discretion in the Far East to offset the lapse of the alliance and the institution of anti-Japanese tariffs, so that Japan not be forced towards zero sum game aggression, but he failed. This was the time of the Chanak crisis, when the dominions were able to flex their muscles (bringing down Lloyd George with the connivance of disaffected Tories in the process).
The lapse of the alliance also coincided with the Washington Naval Conference, which demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt the acute weakness of the heavily indebted and overstretched British. Geddes was then wielding his axe and Norman was wanting Whitehall to prioritise the restoration of the pre-war dollar parity. Defence spending had to be sacrificed. The 5:5:3 ratio was intended to save the desperate British amour-propre, give a decisive advantage to the US over time, and permit Japan the bare minimum (this was to become the 10:10:7 ratio with the London treaty of 1930).
So the US and the white dominions on the Pacific littoral made common cause against the UK in order to keep the ‘yellow’ races down, to keep their demographics as white as possible, and as prosperous as possible on the backs of other races. The US ‘open door’ policy in China also made common cause with European imperial interests (and, tacitly, Japan) to keep China in a state of perennial disintegration and economic subjection, as a mere vent for US goods at a time when European tariff barriers remained high, Britain looked ever more likely to abandon free trade, and certain US domestic markets faced saturation in the face of over-production. In other words, they wanted to have their cake and eat it, and were ‘shocked’ by Japanese revanchism. Unlike Curzon, US and dominion policymakers seemed to have little notion of cause and effect.
What the Washington agreement did do was to permit the dominions to switch from their free ride on the British taxpayer bearing the cost of Pacific defence to a free ride on the American taxpayer bearing the cost of Pacific defence (the extent of this free ride became swiftly evident from 1941). Perhaps Biden’s push for greater Australian commitment in the cause of defending US interests in the Indo-Pacific is an inadvertent form of payback for the long-term Australian free ride on the British, then US, defence shield.
Roger Louis undertook a masterful examination of the travails of British policy in its wider strategic context in ‘British Strategy in the Far East, 1919-1939’ (1971), and this went hand in glove with the seminal work of Stephen Roskill, in the first volume of ‘British Naval Policy between the Wars: the Period of Anglo-American Antagonism, 1919-1929’ (1968). The late Ian Nish, the foremost student of Anglo-Japanese relations, discussed the lapse of the alliance in many works (two of which were devoted exclusively to the alliance itself), specifically with ‘Alliance in Decline: a Study of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1908-1922’ (1972). These works have yet to be surpassed.