By Caitlin Johnstone
October 30, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Mainstream punditry
in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing
that the US needs to vastly increase military
spending because a world war is about to erupt,
and they always frame it as though this would be
something that happens to
the US, as though its own actions would have
nothing to do with it. As though it would not be
the direct result of the US-centralized empire
continually accelerating towards that horrific
event while refusing every possible diplomatic
off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its
goal of total unipolar planetary domination.
The latest example of this trend is an
article titled “Could
America Win a New World War? — What It Would
Take to Defeat Both China and Russia”
published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is
owned and operated by the
supremely influential think tank Council on
Foreign Relations.
“The United States and its allies must plan
for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and
Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may
seem,” writes the article’s author Thomas G
Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United
States and its allies will have an advantage in
any simultaneous war” in those two continents.
But Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against
Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he
also argues that in order to win such a war the
US will need to — you guessed it — drastically
increase its military spending.
“The United States clearly needs
to increase its defense manufacturing capacity
and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term,
that involves adding shifts to existing
factories. With more time, it involves expanding
factories and opening new production lines. To
do both, Congress will have to act now to
allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”
But exploding US weapons spending is still
inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the
United States should work with its allies to
increase their military production and the size
of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as
well.
Mahnken says this world war could be sparked
“if China initiated a military operation to
take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its
allies to respond,” as though there would be no
other options on the table besides launching
into nuclear age World War Three to defend an
island next to the Chinese mainland that calls
itself the Republic of China. He writes that
“Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the
United States bogged down in the western
Pacific, it could get away with invading more of
Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s
cat western propaganda paradox that Putin is
always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and
humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of
waging hot war with NATO.
Again, this is just the latest in an
increasingly common genre of mainstream western
punditry.
In “The
skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both
China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s
Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who
think aggressions against Russia should be
prioritized and Republicans who think that
military and financial attention should be
devoted to China, arguing porque no los dos?
In “Could
The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The
Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley
answers in the affirmative, writing that “the
immense fighting power of the US armed forces
would not be inordinately strained by the need
to wage war in both theaters” and concluding
that “the United States can fight both Russia
and China at once… for a while, and with the
help of some friends.”
In “Can
the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at
Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that
it would be very difficult and recommends
escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling
Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step
ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.
In “International
Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is
Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew
Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global
democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is
coming “with the United States and its status
quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan,
South Korea, and Australia on one side and the
revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and
Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign
policy experts should adjust their expectations
accordingly.
When they’re not arguing that World War Three
is coming and we must all prepare to fight it
and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict
is already upon us and we must begin acting like
it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What
if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War
with Russia?”
These Beltway swamp monster pontifications
are directed not just at the general public but
at government policymakers and strategists as
well, and it should disturb us all that their
audiences are being encouraged to view a global
conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some
kind of natural disaster that people don’t have
any control over.
Every measure should be taken to avoid a
world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like
that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to
ramp up weapons production and create entire
industries dedicated to making it happen, the
answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.
These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar
world as something that must inevitably be
accompanied by an explosion of violence and
human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind
up there as a result of decisions that were made
by thinking human beings on both sides.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no
omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we
must live in a world where governments brandish
armageddon weapons at each other and humanity
must either submit to Washington or resign
itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary
consequence. We could just have a world where
the peoples of all nations get along with each
other and work together toward the common good
rather than working to dominate and subjugate
each other.
As Jeffrey Sachs recently
put it, “The single biggest mistake of
president Biden was to say ‘the greatest
struggle of the world is between democracies and
autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is
to live together and overcome our common crises
of environment and inequality.”
We could have a world where our energy and
resources go toward increasing human thriving
and learning to collaborate with this fragile
biosphere we evolved in. Where all our
scientific innovation is directed toward making
this planet a better place to live instead of
channeling it into getting rich and finding new
ways to explode human bodies. Where our old
models of competition and exploitation give way
to systems of collaboration and care. Where
poverty, toil and misery gradually move from
accepted norms of human existence to dimly
remembered historical record.
Instead we’re getting a world where we’re
being hammered harder and harder with propaganda
encouraging us to accept global conflict as an
unavoidable reality, where politicians who
voice even the mildest support for diplomacy
are shouted down and demonized until they bow to
the gods of war, where
nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and
de-escalation is branded as reckless
endangerment.
We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t
have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and
armageddon to the beat of manipulative
sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us
than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole
lot more at stake here than they do.
We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got
to want it badly enough. They work so hard to
manufacture our consent because, ultimately,
they absolutely do require it.
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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