60. WAR
WATCH WEDNESDAYS, February 9, 2022
Conversion
Movement from war to peace:
Mandy Smithberger, Shifting
tax dollars from fear and militarization to hope and human needs.
Michael Klare, Stopping the encirclement of China and Russia.
“US should shift military spending to pandemic and climate change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (11-26-21).
The COVID-19 pandemic vividly illuminated the
many ways in which the American approach to national security has been
fundamentally focused on the wrong threats, writes Mandy
Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project
On Government Oversight. Read more.
Michael
Klare, Welcome to the New Cold War in Asia.
JANUARY
13, 2022 https://tomdispatch.com/none-dare-call-it-encirclement/
For a
moment, imagine an upside-down military world. Instead of U.S.
guided-missile destroyers and other ships regularly carrying out “freedom of
navigation operations” near Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea and
such destroyers no less regularly passing through the Strait of Taiwan between
that disputed island and the People’s Republic of China, consider how any
administration would react if Chinese naval vessels were ever more
provocatively patrolling off the coast of California. You know that official
Washington would quite literally go nuts and we’d find ourselves at the edge of
war almost instantly.
Or, in
a similar fashion, imagine that Russia had moved nuclear weapons close
to the southern Mexican border, was selling advanced weaponry and
offering other military aid to
Mexico, and acting as we’ve been doing in relation to Ukraine. Washington would
be up in arms, again all too literally. Don’t misunderstand me: I hold no torch
for either Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
(And I suspect, by the way, that if Putin were foolish enough to invade Ukraine
he might find himself involved in an updated version of the Soviet Union’s
disastrous Afghan War of the 1980s in a far more explosive part of the world.)
I’m merely pointing out that the American urge to be militarily anywhere it
wants to be on this planet in any fashion it chooses might not be quite what’s
needed these days. A new Cold War on an ever hotter and more pandemic
planet? Just what we really (don’t) need.
And by
the way, as TomDispatch regular Michael
Klare, author most recently of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change,
points out, one of the other wonders of our moment is that, in a country where
Republicans and Democrats can essentially agree on nothing — certainly not on
spending money on the American people — the subject never in question is what’s
still called “defense” policy. Unfortunately, globally speaking, such spending
of your tax dollars couldn’t be more offensive in every sense of the word. In
this, fierce as the Biden administration has proved in Cold War terms, Klare
makes it clear today that Congress is proving even fiercer. . . . Tom
MICHAEL KLARE. None Dare Call It
“Encirclement”:
Washington Tightens the Noose around China.
The
word “encirclement” does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA), signed into law by
President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration
statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold
War era term “containment” ever come up. Still, America’s top leaders have
reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great
power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to
full superpower status.
The gigantic 2022
defense bill — passed with
overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for
surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases,
military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. MORE https://tomdispatch.com/none-dare-call-it-encirclement/
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