By James Carden

August 27, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - On July 21, The New York Times, having demonized Russia as America’s top enemy since at least 2012—if not longer—showed something of a change of heart, and informed readers that “given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China.”

That analysis might well have come from the pen of Steven K. Bannon, who, in a surprise twist, recently teamed up with arch-neocon and noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney to re-form the Cold War–era Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in order to “educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party.”

This is the fourth go-around for the CPD, which rears its head every couple of decades in order to inflame, inflate, and then capitalize on the latest hysteria gripping Washington.

First founded in 1950 at the dawn of the McCarthy era, the CPD emerged just as the Truman administration adopted, via National Security Council directive 68, a militarized version of George Kennan’s containment policy. A little over a quarter-century later, in 1976, just as the budding neoconservative movement was turning its attention away from the hippies and “long-hairs” they viewed as defiling university campuses, CPD reformed and took US-Soviet policy as its focus. With the backing of cold warriors like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the committee agitated for the Carter administration to take a tougher line against the Soviets. As it happens, the CPD found a receptive audience in Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose hawkish anti-Soviet policies anticipated those of the succeeding administration—so much so, that President Reagan considered asking Brzezinski to stay on as national security adviser.