Pushing Back Against Cold War

The U.S. Navy nuclear submarine USS Connecticut reportedly crashed in the South China Sea, Saturday.

Recently, some critical voices have emerged from inside and outside the administration, calling for a foreign policy shift away from cold war. It’s too soon to tell whether or not they will result in any significant changes. 

An op-ed in Tuesday’s Guardian by Lt. Col. (retired) Daniel L Davis, warns Biden and the military leadership not to get “drawn into a no-win war with Beijing” over Taiwan...To read the whole story, go to https://klonsky.substack.com/

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Biden's U.N. speech: A bunch of malarkey

Even while he was preparing to unleash AUKUS, the new white, Anglo-speaking front to contain and confront China with nuclear warships, Pres. Biden tried to play the pacifist in his first address to the U.N. General Assembly. 

"Today, many of our greatest concerns cannot be solved or even addressed by the force of arms,” he said. “Bombs and bullets cannot defend against COVID-19 or its future variants.”

I've got this quote stashed away for use in future blog posts. 

American nuclear sub in the South China Sea

Biden's speech was meant to distance himself from the previous guy and to prop up this country's fading global image in the wake of U.S. foreign policy disasters involving the pandemic, global warming, and budding cold war with China. 

But it failed on all counts and with the botched withdrawal (I call it, repositioning) of troops from Afghanistan -- which included the drone missile attack which killed a family of 10, including small children -- still fresh in their minds, it was met with skepticism on the part of many attendees.   

And why not? Biden wasn't about to come clean about his provocative, self-destructive, imperialist strategic shift away from the "war on terror" and towards cold war with China. 

Also fresh in the minds of many, especially those representing former colonial and neo-colonial nations, were graphic scenes from the U.S. border with border patrol horsemen whipping and rounding up Haitian refugees for mass deportation.

But Biden swore to the incredulous delegates: 

“We are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.” 

As Biden himself might say, what a bunch of malarkey!

Notably, he didn’t utter the word “China” once in his 34-minute address. He didn't have to. Everyone knows who AUKUS is aimed at. 

It was left to the straight-shooting U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to set things straight. 

"We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers,” he said, calling that “essential to address the problems of vaccination, the problems of climate change and many other global challenges that cannot be solved without constructive relations within the international community and mainly among the superpowers.” 

And then this daunting reminder. 

“We are on the edge of an abyss — and moving in the wrong direction,” Guterres said. “I’m here to sound the alarm. The world must wake up."

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Hundreds of Haitian migrants are being rounded up and deported from the US. The large-scale expulsion involves several daily flights and a show of force at the border, while Haiti faces economic and political crises.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

"We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers,” he said, calling that “essential to address the problems of vaccination, the problems of climate change and many other global challenges that cannot be solved without constructive relations within the international community and mainly among the superpowers.” -- AP

@RichLowry

BREAKING: An enormous gathering of journalists in Washington, DC today was orderly and peaceful, and a few Justice for J6  protestors showed up.

 Aaron Schneider

As a result, the US continues its embargo, causes unnecessary suffering to the Cuban people, fails to produce change, and turns the US (not Cuba) into an international pariah in conflict with its own allies. -- Aljazeera 

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti

Rich countries worry about booster shots. They should be worried about Africa. -- New York Times

Biden's strategic shift towards China brings us ever closer to war

V.P. Kamala Harris was sent to South China Sea last month to try and push Singapore and Vietnam into an anti-China front. But her offer was rejected by both. 

The new Cold War with China, begun under Trump and now escalating under Biden, once again pushes us closer to the nuclear abyss. How close are we? So close that according to a new book “Peril,” by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so consumed with fear that former President Donald Trump might launch “rogue” conventional or nuclear strikes against China, he acted twice to prevent it. 

Trump's defeat brought hope to many around the world that Biden and the Democrats would break from Trump's anti-China saber-rattling, trade-war policies and shift towards repairing the breach and lowering the temperature. These hopes have grown more desperate during the global pandemic as the growing cold war now includes vaccine wars. 

Instead, Biden has doubled down on Trump's policies and seems bent on provoking a military confrontation in the South China Sea. 

Here are a few of the repercussions...

North and South Korea are once again firing ballistic missiles hours apart from each other instead of negotiating towards unity as they were doing only a couple of months ago without U.S. involvement. This while South Korea and China were meeting to discuss de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula. You get the picture. 

Then there's this...

In what appears to those in the region to be a white united front against China the US, UK, and Australia are creating a trilateral security partnership which will include helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. 

The initiative, called Aukus, was announced jointly by President Joe Biden and prime ministers Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, following US briefings which described the agreement as binding the three English-speaking countries together.

Is anyone in these "English-speaking countries" feeling any safer from all this? Me neither. 

Remember, it was Biden who previously referred to Johnson as, "a physical and emotional clone'" of Trump. 

It's all occurring in the wake of Biden's strategic military shift away from the Middle East and towards Cold War. It follows his helter-skelter withdraw and re-positioning of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Biden's main cold-warrior strategist and regime-change specialist, Sec. Anthony Blinken is under the gun here at home, facing withering attacks from left and right over the "chaotic" Afghan retreat.

I'm still wondering though. Has there ever been a smooth withdrawal by an invading army after a major military defeat? Wish we could ask Napoleon or Gen. Creighton Abrams who was sending Nixon upbeat reports on the progress of the war in Vietnam right up 'til the very end. 

The lessons of war are hard to learn. Let's pull the reins in on the warmakers. 

Trying to wrap my head around: Fascists vs. top U.S. general over 'Critical Race Theory'

Tucker Carlson: Critical race theory will lead to the genocide of white Americans.

Hard to wrap my head around this one...A battle royale between MAGA white supremacists and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over Critical Race Theory. No, I'm not kidding. And it's no joke. 

Gen. Milley: 

“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read...and it is important that we train and we understand,” Milley said. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Milley said during the hearing. “That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country from which we are here to defend?”

 Tucker Carlson:

He's not just a pig, he's stupid. So, Mark Milley reads Mao to understand Maoism. He reads communists to understand communism. But it's interesting that he doesn't read white supremacists to understand white supremacy. Why not? Go to the source.

Former POTUS:

Trump, who bypassed other top military officials to promote Milley to the top uniformed military post in 2019. “I watched the statements of some others, your head of the Navy, it was pathetic. “They didn’t talk that way when I was around, I can tell you. They didn’t talk that way or I would have gotten rid of them in two minutes.” 

Contrast this with the way they MAGAs destroyed Colin Kaepernick's football career after he took a knee against racism. They claimed he was "disrespecting our men and women in uniform."

Physician, heal thyself... Conservative cold-warriors of both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump variety, posing as oracles of democracy (everywhere but here) need to take a hard look in the mirror. Here's anti-Trump conservative, Jay Nordlinger writing in National Review, 

For decades, I heard from the Left that Fidel Castro was popular with “his people.” For many years now, I have heard the same about Vladimir Putin and Russia — from the Right, usually. The answer in both cases: If that’s true, why doesn’t he allow free and fair elections, to prove it? 

The question he should be asking is, why don't we? 

Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.

WaPo reports at least 250 new restrictive voting laws have now been proposed in 43 states. It's impossible for former colonial powers to credibly call for "democracy" in other countries when white supremacy and fascism are growing trends at home. 

No, not in Xinjiang... but in Canada where for decades, Indigenous children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and prohibited from speaking their languages. Thousands vanished altogether. Now, the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly indiginous children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of another former Indian boarding school.

Fearful of confronting their own colonial and imperial histories, the new Cold Warriors are arrogantly targeting China once again. They are bankrolling and encouraging secessionist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and sending warships into the South China Sea. That's how cold war turns to hot war. 

R.I.P. ~ One of my favorite singer/slide guitarists from back in the day, Ellen McIlwane who played alongside the great ones, but never got the credit she deserved. 

“The guys all had their girlfriends along, and I was relegated to being one of the girlfriends until we got onstage,” she told the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer.

Biden's Cold War mentality detracts from his progressive initiatives

We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. -- Pres. Biden's address to Congress last night 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Pres. Eisenhower, 1953

That last quote is from Eisenhower's Chance For Peace speech in 1953.  It took the former 4-Star General to warn us against the country's exploding post-war military budget. But as the Cold War deepened during his administration, political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of the military-industrial complex in his farewell address.

I was reminded of Ike's warning last night, listening to Pres. Biden couch all of his ambitious (but not adequate) $6-trillion post-pandemic infrastructure rebuilding and jobs programs in jingoist, America First,  anti-China, Cold War rhetoric. 

Biden called on Congress to invest in infrastructure, education, child care, civil rights, and science calling them programs that will allow the U.S. to win a competition with China. Like Trump, Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy rooted in fears of American decline.

Yes, those investments are exactly what we need. But not for the sake of winning some mythical and dangerous global race to the top. Remember, that was Arne Duncan's rationale for pushing testing madness and school privatization when he was Obama's ed secretary. My 4-year-old granddaughter doesn't need to be prepared in pre-school to compete with 4-year-olds in China or Switzerland for global hegemony, thank you. 

It's this kind of thinking that has led to the global vaccine wars when international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic could have saved millions of lives and prevented the current catastrophe in India. 

It has also led Biden to push for a bloated Pentagon budget that's even larger than Trump's. The rationale behind the push has to do with illusory U.S. imperial ambitions to impose its will on other countries and engage in regime change when it can. These ambitions leave me even more skeptical about his planned withdrawal of the remaining troops in Afghanistan. Are they really being brought home or simply being redeployed for continuing conflict in the region? Does a redeployment mean a new buildup of American military power to confront China and Iran?

Yes, according to a report in today's NYT:

The Pentagon is looking to place troops near Afghanistan to track and attack militant groups if they threaten the United States. Possibilities in the region include Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but those countries are under the sway of Russia to one degree or another, Attack planes aboard aircraft carriers and long-range bombers flying from land bases along the Persian Gulf and even in the United States could strike insurgent fighters spotted by armed surveillance drones. 

Or is the China yellow-peril ("they're closing in on us") fearmongering simply being used as a way to appeal to resistant Trump Party members in a vain attempt to build "bipartisan" support for his new initiatives? If it is, it's a pipe dream. 

Biden recounted:

I also told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo—Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe – not to start conflict – but to prevent conflict." 

He failed to explain how putting U.S. warships in the South China Sea would prevent conflict rather than inevitably provoke a new one.  

China and other countries are closing in fast," warned Biden. "We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, and clean energy."

 Other countries "closing in" on us? What a myopic, paranoid, us-against-them view of the world.

Winning the 21st Century? What the hell does that even mean? Is the 21st Century a game? How do you know if you've won or lost? Who won the 20th?

Biden's guns-and-butter strategy is bound to bump heads with his progressive initiatives. That's too bad. They're worthwhile initiatives.