A divided US needs an ‘enemy’ like Beijing more than it ever did   By Alex Lo

 

When something becomes too complicated, psychologists say we go for ‘rules of thumb’. In Washington today, that rule is ‘the China threat’.

America’s political elite are worried that domestic polarisation is undermining its ability to counter an “existential threat” like China, or as they prefer to call it nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party. They needn’t worry; they have got things – cause and effect – reversed.

By contrast, Beijing has steadfastly refused to publicly label the United States as a mortal threat, an enemy or a pacing challenge, even though it clearly is; there lies their fundamental political difference.

The more fractured American body politic becomes, the more it needs an enemy like China. The more stable and shared its political-social norms were – now a distant memory unlikely to return – the less America had needs for a common threat. That’s why a polarised US on the verge of civil war will be more dangerous to the world than ever. It’s analogous to the last financial meltdown in the US, beginning with its real estate market collapse, which led to the global financial crisis.

It’s perhaps not by accident that two current articles in Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs both address the same topic. Writing in Foreign Affairs, former secretary of defence Robert Gates argues that paralysis and infighting in Washington could not have come at a worse time.

As examples, he cites the just avoided government shutdown, a partisan impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden, and multiple felony charges across four criminal cases against Donald Trump, whose presidential election campaign will likely further fracture US politics. There are longer-term problems he didn’t mention: race relations, gun violence, the migration crisis, the fentanyl and other drugs crises, the rise of the basically fascist alt-right.

Arguing in a similar vein in Foreign Policy, Raja Krishnamoorthi wrote that “the US cannot afford to lose a soft-power race with China”. Krishnamoorthi is a Democratic congressman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

Note the committee’s ridiculously provocative title. These days, you don’t say China in Washington; always say the CCP. Watch the congressional hearing from last week on China’s “bullying with laser guns and water cannons” in the South China Sea; there was barely a sentence uttered without mentioning the CCP.

The state of the American Union is not well.

The more divided, confused and insecure people feel, the more having a common powerful enemy helps. Paradoxically, people retain a greater sense of certainty and control that way. That has been borne out by recent studies in social and political psychology.

By bombarding people with constantly threatening news about a powerful enemy such as al-Qaeda and now China, people’s sense of control is actually boosted as they think they understand the world around them.

The danger of misperception is obvious.

It’s hard for people to admit bad things happen for reasons too complicated to understand without serious study; far better is to train the public to blame it all on easy targets, whether they are Muslim extremists, Mexican cartels or Chinese communists.
Also, psychologists have confirmed what we all know from primary school: people are more likely to bond over a shared dislike than a common fondness of a third party. Denigrating or demonising an enemy can boost self-esteem, and a sense of common mission, by exaggerating your group’s goodness and virtue, or in America, freedom and democracy!

Meanwhile, the friend vs foe distinction is as old as Plato and Sun Tzu. When you have many formal allies, you must have many formal enemies to match. China has few formal allies and therefore prefers to have no formal enemies.

The opportunities and challenges presented by China are so multifaceted and complex they are well beyond the intellectually challenged state of US politics to handle. When things get too complicated, psychologists say we go for “rules of thumb”. Sadly in Washington today, that rule of thumb is “the China threat”.

 

First published in the South China Morning Post October 1, 2023

 

https://johnmenadue.com/a-divided-us-needs-an-enemy-like-beijing-more-than-it-ever-did/

 

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The quest for decisive U.S. military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be considered a fool’s errand, writes William D. Hartung. But it isn’t.

 

 

By William D. Hartung
TomDispatch.com

 

 

On Aug. 28, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war.

Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

 

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing.

As Hicks’ speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute:

“1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.”

Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.”

That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said:

“Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years.

But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization.

As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though. They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing the ‘China Threat’

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the years of former President Donald Trump. In fact, for the first time since the 20th century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3 percent to 5 percent above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3 percent to 5 percent real-growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern.

What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

 

Beware of Pentagon ‘Techno-Enthusiasm’

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said,

“ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that

“the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century).

China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention.

As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’ speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come. There has to be a better way.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Surge in Pentagon Spending (Brown University’s The Costs of War Project and the Center for International Policy, September 2021).

This article is from TomDispatch.com.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/04/pentagon-techno-fantasies/

 

 

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BY PEPE ESCOBAR

 

There was a whiff of Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' at the 20th Valdai annual meeting this week at a hotel over the gorgeous heights of the Krasnaya Polyana. north-west of the picturesque resort Sochi.

But instead of a deep dive into the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community in the Swiss Alps on the eve of the First World War, we immersed ourselves in powerful new ideas expressed by a community of Global Majority intellectuals on the possible eve of a psycho neocon-intended WWIII.

And then, of course, President Putin intervened, striking the plenary session like lightning.

This is an unofficial Top Ten of his address, before the Q&A which was characteristically engaging:

 

 

“I even suggested joining NATO for Russia. But no, NATO does not need such a country (…) Apparently, the problem is geopolitical interests and an arrogant attitude towards others.”

 

“We never started the so-called war in Ukraine. We are trying to end it.”

“In the international system, lawlessness reigns supreme.”

 

 

“This is not a territorial war. The issue is much broader and more fundamental: it is about the principles on which a new world order will be built.”

 

“The history of the West is a chronicle of endless expansion, and a huge financial pyramid.”

“A certain part of the West always needs an enemy. To preserve the internal control of their system.”

“Perhaps [the West] should check its hubris.”

“That era [of Western domination] is long gone. It’s never coming back.”

“Russia is a distinct civilization-state”.

“Our understanding of civilization is quite different. First, there are many civilizations. And none of them is better or worse than the other. They are equal, as expressions of the aspirations of their cultures, their traditions, their peoples. For each of us it is different.”

 

On The Road to “Asynchronous Multipolarity”

The theme of Valdai 2023 was, most appropriately, 'Fair Multipolarity'. The key axes of discussion were presented in this provocative, detailed report. It’s as if the report had prepared the stage for Putin’s address and his carefully crafted answers to the questions from the plenary.

The concept of multipolarity in the Russian space was first articulated by the late, great Yevgeny Primakov in the mid-Nineties. Now, the road to multipolarity is based on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s concept of “strategic patience”.

In a crisscrossed cornucopia of nation-states, larger blocs, security blocs and ideological historic blocs, we’re now deep into mega-alignments - even as the political West cultivates its universalist ambitions. The Eurasian “non-bloc” is in fact a mega-alignment, as much as the revitalized Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which finds its expression in the G77 (actually formed by 134 nations).

The ideal path to follow might be horizontalism - in a Deleuze-Guattari sense - where we would have 200 equal nation-states. Of course the collective West won’t allow it. Andrey Shushentov, Dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO University, proposes the notion of “asynchronous multipolarity”. Radhika Desai of Manitoba University proposes “pluripolarity” - borrowing from Hugo Chavez.

The risk, as expressed by Turkish political scientist Ilter Turan, is that by trying to build a replica of the present system via, for instance, BRICS 11, we may be racing towards a parallel system that simply cannot organize itself as the leader of a new order. So, a clearly possible outcome is a bipolar system – considering the impossible convergence of common values.

At the same time, a South-east Asian perspective, expressed by the President of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, Pham Lan Dung, points to what is really relevant for middle and small countries: everything should proceed on the basis of South-South friendships.

 

The BRICS Bank: It’s Complicated

In one of the key panels on BRICS as a prototype of a new international architecture, the star of the show was Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, who drew on his vast former experience at the IMF and as Vice-President of the NDB – the BRICS bank – for a realist presentation.

The key problem of the NDB is how to maintain unity while navigating power politics and reaching the upcoming stages of de-dollarization.

Batista outlined how a new international financial architecture may imply a future common currency. He stressed the success of implementing two practical experiments: a BRICS monetary fund (called the Contingent Reserve Agreement, CRA) and a multilateral development bank, the NDB.

Progress though “has been slow”. The monetary fund “has been frozen by the five Central Banks”, and must be expanded. Links with the IMF “must be severed”, but that incurs “fierce resistance” by the five Central Banks of BRICS members (and soon there will be 11).

Turning the NDB around will be a Sisyphean task. Disbursement of loans as well as project implementation have been “slow”. The US dollar “is the unit of account for the bank” - which in itself is counter-productive. The NDB is far from being a global bank: only three countries so far have joined. Current NDB President Dilma Rousseff has only two years to turn it around.

Batista remarked how the common currency idea first came from Russia, and was instantly embraced by Lula when he was Brazil’s President in the 2000s. The R5 concept - the currencies of all current five BRICS members start with a “R” - may endure; but now that will have to expand to R11.

The first substantial step ahead, after revamping the NDB, should be a currency from an issuing bank backed by bonds guaranteed by member countries, freely convertible, with currency swaps denominated in R5.

A healthy prospect is that Russia will appoint the next bank President starting in 2025. So the way forward substantially depends on Russia and Brazil, Batista emphasized. At the BRICS 11 summit in Kazan in south-west Russia next year, “a key decision should be made”. And during the Brazilian BRICS presidency in 2025, “the first practical steps should be announced”.

 

 

Looking For a New Universality

Almost all panels at Valdai focused on how to develop an alternative system, but the two main themes were inevitably the lack of democracy in current international institutions and the weaponization of the US dollar. Batista correctly observed how the US itself is the main enemy of the US dollar when using it as a weapon.

At the Q&A, Putin addressed the key issue of economic corridors. He noted how BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) might have different interests: “Not true. They are harmonious and complement each other”. This is reflected in how they are geared to “ensure new logistic routes and industrial chains”, and all that “complemented by the real productive sector”.

Going forward, there’s a pressing need to coin a new terminology for this emerging new “universality” - even as nations continue to behave most often by following national interests.

What’s clear is that the collective West’s "universality” is not valid anymore. A remarkable panel on 'Russian Civilization Through the Centuries' showed how the notion of “universality” actually entered Western civilization through St Paul - after his Damascus moment - whereas the Indian notion of equilibrium inbuilt in the Upanishads would be way more appropriate.

Still, we are now in hot debate over the notion of the “civilization-state”, as configured mostly by India and China, Russia and Iran.

Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of the iconic General, expanded on the French notion of universality, embodied in the much-quoted slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité” – not exactly upheld by Macronism. He made a point to stress he was the “sole representative of France” at Valdai (only a handful of European academics came to Sochi, and no diplomats).

De Gaulle reminded everyone how Saint Simon was a Russophile and how Voltaire corresponded with Catherine the Great. He alluded to the deep Franco-Russian cultural ties; a “shared community of interests”; and “the bond of Christianity”.

 

 

In contrast, crucially, “the US never accepted that Russia could develop under a different model”. And now that is illustrated by “how little today's intellectual elites in the West know about Eurasia.”

 

De Gaulle emphasized the “tragic mistake is to see Russia through Western eyes”. He invoked Dostoevsky as he lamented the current “destruction of family values” and “existential void” inbuilt in the process of manufacturing consent. He pledged to “fight for independence”, just like his grandfather, under the seal of “faith, family and honor”, and stressed “we must rethink Europe”, inviting “war profiteers to come to Russia”.

 

Top of The Hill: a Cathedral or a Fortress?

Beyond Valdai, and especially throughout the crucial year of 2024 - while Russia holds the presidency of BRICS - there will be much further discussion about “poles” of ancient civilizations. A broad coalition of states that support multipolarity actually do not support the “civilization” concept; instead, they support the notion of people sovereignty.

It was up to Dayan Jayatilleka, former Sri Lankan plenipotentiary ambassador to Russia, to come up with a brilliant formulation.

He showed how Vietnam faced a proxy war against the hegemon successfully – “using 5,000 years of Vietnamese civilization”. That was “an internationalist phenomenon”. Ho Chi Minh took his ideas from Lenin – while enjoying full support from students in the US and Europe.

Russia might therefore learn from the Vietnamese experience how to conquer young hearts and minds across the West for its quest towards multipolarity.

It was clear to the overwhelming majority of analysts at Valdai that the concept of Russian civilization is an “existential challenge” to the collective West. Especially because it includes, historically, the radical universality of the Soviet Union. Now is time for Russian thinkers to work hard on refining the internationalist aspect.

Alexander Prokhanov came up with another startling formulation. He compared the Russian dream with a cathedral on the top of a hill, whereas the Anglo-Saxon dream is a fortress on the top of the hill, engaged in constant surveillance. And if you misbehave, you “will receive some Tomahawks”.

 

The conclusion: “We will always be in conflict with the West”. So what? The future, as I discussed off the record with Grandmaster Sergey Karaganov, one of the founders of Valdai, is in the East.

And it was Karaganov who arguably posed the most challenging question to Putin. He stressed how nuclear deterrence does not work anymore. So should we lower the nuclear threshold?”

 

 

Putin replied, “I am well aware of your position. Let me remind you the Russian military doctrine has two reasons for the possible use of nuclear weapons. The first is if nuclear weapons are used against us – as retaliation. The response is absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor. Because from the moment a missile launch is detected, no matter where it comes from - anywhere in the world's oceans or from any territory - in a retaliatory strike, so many, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air that no enemy will have a chance of survival, and in several directions at once.”

 

The second reason is “a threat to the existence of the Russian state even if only conventional weapons are used.”

And then came the clincher – actually a veiled message to the characters whose dream is “victory” via a first strike: “Do we need to change that? Why? I see no point. There’s no situation when something can threaten the existence of the Russian state. No sane person would consider the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.”

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231006/putin-and-the-magic-multipolar-mountain-a-valdai-chronicle---pepe-escobar-1113975618.html