By
Caitlin Johnstone
August 27, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Forbes has published two back-to-back
articles about the analysis of retired Navy captain
and political scientist Bradford Dismukes titled “To
Defeat China In War, Strangle Its Economy” and “If
Russia Invades Europe, NATO Could Sweep The Seas Of
Russian Merchant Ships“.
The articles were
authored by a man named David Axe, who is my new
favorite small-time war propagandist because he’s so
desperate to be recognized for his imperialist
stenography that he often approaches his spin jobs
in an informatively unskillful and ham-fisted way.
The best one I’ve found so far is
this 2013 piece about the time he spent with the
“rebels” of Syria, who he takes great pains to
assure us are not
terrorists or extremists but brave freedom
fighters who’d successfully “liberated” large
swathes of Syrian territory.
Each of the two Dismukes articles focus on how
the same military strategy can be employed against
the first- and second-most powerful nations which
have resisted absorption into the US-centralized
power alliance, namely China and Russia
respectively. They explain how “a coordinated effort
by the whole of the U.S. government and its closest
allies” can be used to “strangle” those nations
economically via blockades which cut them off from
trade and resources should the time come for an
aggressive confrontation, thus minimizing the need
for direct military combat.
“Cutting off China from its trading partners and
sources of oil, natural gas and other resources
could be the best, and least costly, way for the
United States to defeat China in a major war,” Axe
explains.
“In wartime, the U.S. and allied fleets
could blockade Russian sea trade, putting a
choke-hold on the Russian economy that could force
Moscow to end the war on terms favorable to
Washington and its friends,” he
writes.
Unspoken by Axe and Dismukes is the fact that
both Russia and China are nuclear-armed nations, so
direct hot warfare is something the US power
alliance would want to avoid anyway.
Indeed, the articles present a vision for
confrontation with Russia and China that is not just
realistic but probable, and not just probable but
currently underway. This is exactly the reason the
empire-like network of allies loosely centralized
around the United States has been so forceful about
controlling crucial resources like oil on the world
stage; it’s not so that the US can use the oil
itself, it’s so it can control who will have access
to it. It’s also why they’ve been working to
surround both
China and
Russia militarily via military bases and NATO
expansionism.
These are the chess pieces that have been put in
place during the
slow-motion third world war between the
US-centralized empire and the governments which
haven’t yet been absorbed into it. In order to avoid
nuclear conflict the imperialists know they’ve got
to be patient and strategic, which they’ve learned
can lead them to victory from past experience in the
previous cold war against the Soviet Union. The fact
that they’re imperiling the life of every organism
on our planet in the meantime is for them mostly a
non-issue.
This is how the US-centralized empire prefers to
kill now. Not like a tiger, pouncing on its prey
with old-school ground invasions and ripping out the
jugular, but more like a python: slow, patient
strangulation and suffocation.
That’s what you’re seeing with the
murderous starvation sanctions that have been
placed on Iran and Venezuela. With Yemen, where in
addition to deadly blockades the Saudis have been deliberate
targeting farms, fishing boats, marketplaces,
food storage sites and cholera
treatment centers with US-assisted airstrikes.
With North Korea, where boats
full of dead people have been washing up on Japan’s
shores because fishermen get stuck out at sea
trying to catch food since they can’t afford enough
fuel to get back to shore, which former Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson attributed
to US sanctions. With Gaza, where people are
being deprived
of an adequate amount of nutrients due to an
Israeli blockade designed to “put the Palestinians
on a diet”.
It’s a slow, suffocating strategy which only
works if you’re the side in power, the side with all
the resources and all the time in the world, the
side which knows it can just relax and wait for the
other side to starve to death. Not with the “shock
and awe” invasions of the Bush era, but with
sanctions, blockades, coups, psyops, CIA-backed
uprisings and the arming of opposition forces like
David Axe’s “rebel” friends.
This is one of many reasons you can be dismissive
of any Trump supporter who defends their president
by arguing that he “hasn’t started any new wars”.
What they mean is he hasn’t launched any tiger-style
old school ground invasions. He’s still
attacking and killing with python-style
sanctions and blockades and imperiling the world
with dangerous new cold war escalations. He’s still
continuing the slow-motion third world war. And we
may be certain that if Biden wins he will do the
same.
This is important to be aware of, because it
changes what it means to be anti-war. We don’t have
to just oppose direct hot war conflicts like the one
we were afraid earlier this year might erupt between
the US and Iran (which could still happen); we also
need to aggressively fight the new
strangulation-style warfare that is being
increasingly favored by the US-centralized empire.
When it first rose to power with the Bush
administration the neoconservative ideology of doing
whatever it takes to ensure continued US unipolar
hegemony was widely criticized. Now it’s the
bipartisan beltway consensus, and if you question it
you’re smeared as freakish and suspicious. You never
even hear the word neoconservative or neocon anymore
in mainstream US discourse, not because it went away
but because it became the normalized default
mainstream worldview.
And while all these imperialist psychopaths are
waving literal armageddon weapons around in the name
of an imaginary god named unipolarism, we’re also
hurtling toward ecosystemic collapse and any number
of other potential armageddon-level events. We’ve
got to turn away from this trajectory as a species
and begin collaborating with each other and with our
ecosystem if we are to turn this disaster around.
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