To an Empire everything looks like a potential national security catastrophe
War with China over a straw is inevitable
To a hammer everything looks like a nail.
To an Empire, including the American variety, everything looks like a potential national security threat that must be preemptively crushed as a putative not-yet-guilty foreign aggressor.
The United States is safer from foreign aggression than any other nation in the history of the world. We confront no existential threats. Every other nation does. Not a single person in the United States goes to sleep at night worrying about a foreign invasion. Our lavished funded armed forces are superior in their ability to defend the United States and to deter would-be aggressors than any other rival forces.
We ink defense pacts with other nations not to bolster our defenses but theirs.
But Empires are blind and stupid like the Cyclops easily tricked by Odysseus in The Odyssey. They conquer and vanquish for the sake of fighting and the hormonal gratification of domination to distract from philosophical emptiness.
The United States is engaged in conflicts in one form or another in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan (sans boots on the ground) clueless as to what we are fighting for. Surely not democracy. If the latter were true, Saudi Arabia and MBS would be in our cross-hairs for its truculent, implacable suppression or extermination of every democratic, human rights murmur. But we court the religiously bigoted theocracy like a teenager who has fallen head over heels in love with a rock star.
None of our ongoing conflicts are with countries that have ever invaded or threatened to invade the United States. They may, like a hornet’s nest, be afflicted with internal turmoil. But if you leave a hornet’s nest alone, the bees will not sting you.
The American Empire is now engaged in a pointless, non-shooting war with China over sparsely populated Pacific Islands thousands of miles from the continental United States. A feature article in today’s Washington Post chronicles our jousting with China over the Marshall islands, Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Solomon Islands absurdly insinuating that our national security pivots on keeping them outside China’s orbit. A United States Air Force General, Michael Minihan, recently alerted his officers to prepare for war against China in 2025.
Every nation seeks to assert a sphere of influence as a matter of amour propre. Take the United States in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines fell under the sovereignty or quasi-sovereignty of the United States. We then conducted military interventions in Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic until the withdrawal of troops from Haiti in 1934 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After the hiatus of World War II, we invaded Cuba in the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Dominican Republic in 1965, overthrew Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973, invaded Grenada in 1983, and invaded Panama in 1989. We are currently saber rattling against Venezuela.
But Empires airbrush history to justify war for the sake of war. We have come to believe we are God’s new chosen people brimming with angelic DNA to bring all things nice to the rest of the world at the end of a bayonet. When a nation turns the page to Empire, judgment flees to brutish beasts and men and women lose their reason.
If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. The fuse to World War I was lit when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The concatenation of events that culminates in World War III is likely to begin with an American conflict with China over a straw in the Pacific Islands.
I persist in flagging our approaching belligerency with China because only an aroused public opinion can stop it, as happened in 2013 when President Barack Obama sought a congressional declaration of war against Syria.
If you see a train wreck about to happen, isn’t there a duty to do or say something to prevent the calamity.
"If you see a train wreck about to happen, isn’t there a duty to do or say something to prevent the calamity."
Particularly when the train needs massive maintenance, repairs, and committed competent professional staff to get back on the track of actual defense (i.e., resisting attack)?
https://www.pogo.org/issue/championing-responsible-national-security-policy
Nice