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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/13/the-drums-of-war-with-china-are-beating-much-louder-now/

The Drums Of War With China Are Beating Much Louder Now

Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.

Beijing comments on US encirclement

The Chinese government has finally broken from its usual restrained commentary on the way the empire has been aggressively encircling the PRC with war machinery in ways that Washington would never permit itself to be encircled and waging economic warfare that it itself would never tolerate.

“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.

China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.

“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”

One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.

These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.

Committing to war with China over Taiwan

The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.

Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.

“In this particular case, I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is based on the president’s comments,” Haines said.

US officials are talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion

There’s been a marked spike in rhetoric from US officials about war with China being something that’s inevitably going to happen, or even something that is already underway.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn expressed concern that difficulties in replenishing weapons stocks from the proxy war in Ukraine indicate that the US may not yet be “ready” to fight a “shooting war in Asia.”

“I think the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the weakness of our industrial base when it comes to replenishing the weapons that we are supplying to the Ukrainians,” said Cornyn. “In World War Two we became the Arsenal of Democracy and saved Britain and Europe, but if we got involved in a shooting war in Asia, we would not be ready.”

“I know what war looks like — we’re at war,” Congressman Tony Gonzales said at a House Homeland Security hearing on Thursday.

“I mean, this is a war, maybe a Cold War. But this is a war with China,” Gonzales added, citing things like Chinese aircraft intercepting US aircraft on China’s border and China “invading Taiwan via their cyberspace” as evidence that the US is “at war” with the PRC.

A direct war between nuclear powers

The US war machine is making it more and more explicit that its position on Taiwan is very different from its position on Ukraine, in that it will directly commit American troops to fighting a hot war with China over Taiwan. This is especially concerning because US military encirclement and provocations with Taiwan are making that war more and more likely, in the same way western provocations made the war in Ukraine more likely.

“Sending more weapons to Taiwan isn’t ‘deterrence,’ it’s a provocation,” tweeted Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp, who’s been documenting US provocations in Taiwan more thoroughly than anyone else I know of. “It’s clear now that increasing US military support for Taiwan will make a Chinese attack more likely. Anyone who is telling you otherwise is wrong or is purposely deceiving you.”

Indeed, University College Cork professor Geoffrey Roberts has argued that Putin chose to wage a “preventative war” on Ukraine with the calculation that the way the west was turning it into a major military power meant it needed to be confronted early before it became a major threat. The exact same thing could easily be happening with Taiwan.

“China is the big one,” DeCamp also tweeted recently. “Both sides are talking as if war is inevitable. Not a proxy war, a direct war between two nuclear powers. It can’t happen. The US needs to change course and stop its military buildup in the Asia Pacific, or we’re doomed.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself. This must be opposed, and opposed forcefully. Now more than ever, humanity appears to be on track toward the unfolding of a chain of events that leads to the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Some sanity from the mainstream media

To close with some good news, the imperial media are apparently not fully aligned with the war-with-China agenda (at least not yet). All the insane hawkishness mentioned above appears to have scared some sense into some influential voices in the mainstream media, with surprisingly anti-war arguments emerging in the last few days.

In an article titled “Who Benefits From Confrontation With China?“, none other than the New York Times editorial board taps the brakes with a wildly US-biased but still-welcome argument that “America’s increasingly confrontational posture toward China is a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy that warrants greater scrutiny and debate.”

“Americans’ interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided,” NYT argues.

In a Washington Post article titled “Democrats and Republicans agree on China. That’s a problem.“, Max Boot (yes, that Max Boot!) argues that the bipartisan foreign policy consensus on escalations against Beijing are a sign that something dangerously ill-advised is in the works.

“The problem today isn’t that Americans are insufficiently concerned about the rise of China. The problem is that they are prey to hysteria and alarmism that could lead the United States into a needless nuclear war,” Boot writes.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoes Boot’s criticism of the Washington foreign policy orthodoxy, saying that “Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.”

A new Financial Times piece titled “China is right about US containment” acknowledges that Xi Jinping’s aforementioned comments about encirclement and suppression are “not technically wrong,” and says that betting on China’s submission in the new cold war “is not a strategy.”

In a Daily Beast article titled “What the U.S. National Security Community Is Getting Wrong About China,” David Rothkopf argues that “We have passed the crossroads and we are already, unfortunately, dangerously, well on our way down the wrong path” with US-China relations.

It remains to be seen if these sentiments will be sustained in the mainstream media. Even if they are, they may just be the liberal media counterpart to the way some right wingers in the mainstream media like Tucker Carlson are permitted to object to US foreign policy toward Russia as long as they continue to support brinkmanship with China (all the outlets I just mentioned have been enthusiastic supporters of US proxy warfare in Ukraine, after all). This may be yet another instance of the way the empire gets the mainstream herd arguing over how imperial agendas of global domination should be enacted, rather than if they should.

Time will tell whether any sanity erupts from the muck of the empire regarding the possibility of igniting the most horrific war imaginable. As always with such things, I remain cautiously pessimistic.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/mike-whitney-interviews-paul-craig-roberts-about-rising-tensions-china/5811524

Rising Tensions with China

Mike Whitney Interviews Paul Craig Roberts  

Mike Whitney: The Biden administration is determined to provoke China on the issue of Taiwan. The White House now believes that they must take a more aggressive approach to China in order to contain their development and preserve America’s role as regional hegemon. The irony of Washington’s approach, however, is the fact that tens of thousands of US corporations have fled the US over the last 3 decades to take advantage of China’s low-paid work force. In fact—according to Registration China—there are now more than 1 million foreign-owned companies registered on Mainland China, many of which are owned by Americans. These corporations are largely responsible for China’s meteoric economic rise over the same period of time. So my question to you is this: Why is China being blamed and targeted for the explosive growth for which US corporations are mainly responsible? Or do you disagree with my analysis?

Paul Craig Roberts: Your question is really several. Your question itself identifies the main or over-riding reason for Washington’s back-tracking on the one-China policy that has been in effect since 1972—China’s threat to US hegemony. The neoconservatives who dominate US foreign policy, the principal purpose of which, in their words, is to prevent the rise of other countries with sufficient power to constrain US unilateralism, now face both China and Russia as threats to US hegemony. Russia’s punishment is conflict in Ukraine, sanctions, missiles on their border, and blown up Nord Stream pipelines. The goal is to isolate Russia from Europe and to present the Kremlin with sufficient problems to keep Moscow out of Washington’s way.

Just as the US broke its agreement with Russia not to expand NATO and has withdrawn from the agreements made during the Cold War that served to reduce tensions, Washington is now moving toward repudiating the one-China policy as it no longer serves Washington’s interest.

In 1972 with the Cold War and Vietnam war, easing tensions with China made strategic sense. The Soviet Union’s existence precluded any notion of US hegemony. The neoconservatives got their idea of US hegemony two decades later when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. At that time the opinion was that Yeltsin’s Russia was no problem for US dominance and it would be decades before China would be strong enough to get in Washington’s way. But, as you point out in your question, the offshoring of US manufacturing to China quickly turned China into an economic powerhouse, while greatly diminishing the economic prowess of the US. It wasn’t so much that US corporations left on their own seeking higher profits from lower labor costs as it was that they were pushed by Wall Street, which threatened to finance takeovers in order to take advantage of the lower cost opportunity. In short, China’s rapid rise was the result of Wall Street and corporate greed, for which China does not bear responsibility.

American neoliberal economists explained the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs as the workings of free trade from which America would benefit. It was two billionaire businessmen, one American and one English, US textile magnate Roger Milliken and British financier Sir James Goldsmith, who challenged the neoliberal justification for giving away manufacturing. They certainly got me thinking about it, and once I did it was obvious that offshoring of manufacturing jobs had nothing to do with free trade. Economists are as difficult to dislodge from their brainwashing as believers in the 9/11 narrative, the mRNA “vaccine,” and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. I debated the leading proponents of offshoring who claimed it was a free trade bonanza, with the Wall Street Journal prominently featuring my debate with Jagdish Bhagwati, University Professor of Economics, Law, and International Relations at Columbia University. A decade ago my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, proved conclusively that the relocation of US manufacturing abroad was hugely detrimental to the US economy, but it was all to no effect. I concluded that US economists were all bought by Wall Street as “advisors” or were living on research grants from offshoring corporations and producing justifications for the offshoring policy. In short, America lost manufacturing, because of Wall Street and neoliberal economists.

President Donald Trump understood that America was hurt by the loss of manufacturing. It was Trump who began blaming China. Having no competent advisors, Trump associated America’s large Chinese trade deficit with unfair Chinese practices, and not with the fact that half of the US trade deficit (last time I looked) was accounted for by offshore production of US corporations marketed in the US. The goods enter the US as imports. Trump’s inclination to blame China instead of Wall Street and American economists was reinforced by Russiagate charges portraying Trump as working in Russia’s interest. Being tough on China was a way of showing Trump was defending America’s interest.

To summarize, China’s punishment for displacing the US as Asian hegemon is trouble with Taiwan. Trump opened the door for his neoconservative enemies by blaming China for what Wall Street and neoliberal economists are responsible.

I regard Washington’s threat to the one-China fact as insane–even more insane than the provocations of Russia. The Chinese mainland and Taiwan are undergoing economic integration. There is no way the US can stop this. Moreover, there is no prospect whatsoever of China allowing Taiwan to become a US military base any more than Russia would give up Crimea.

Mike Whitney: Journalist Ben Norton suggests that the big US banks and Wall Street might be the cause of Washington making Taiwan an issue. The Chinese financial system is largely socialized and is used to finance the real economy instead of speculation in financial assets. American banks want to bring the gambling casino to China and can’t. Do you think Washington could be using Taiwan to pressure China to let in Wall Street?

Paul Craig Roberts: Without any doubt the main cause of dangerously rising tensions between Washington and Russia and China and also Iran is the success the neoconservatives have had in imposing hegemony as the over-riding goal of US foreign policy. Of course, for the neoconservative ideology to have traction, it must serve powerful economic interests. Tensions with Russia and China clearly serve the material interests of the military/security complex. Hegemony along with the dollar’s reserve currency role also serve the dominance of American banks. But US foreign policy would not raise tensions with China solely for US banks. Indeed, tensions with China are dangerous for the many US corporations whose production is based in China. These firms could easily be nationalized or refused export licenses. If the US can disobey international law, so can China. Tensions with China are also dangerous to the Treasury bond market and to the exchange value of the US dollar. If China were to dump its holdings of US debt on the bond market, the Federal Reserve would have to print money with which to redeem the bonds so that the price doesn’t collapse. But if China then dumped the dollars from bond redemptions in the currency market, the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies with which to purchase the dollars, and the dollar’s exchange value would fall, raising the price of imports made necessary by the offshoring of US manufacturing and food imports, thus worsening US inflation and lowering US living standards.

The neoconservatives’ hostility toward Russia and China is definitely not in America’s interest. In the Chinese case, it is American corporations and the US dollar that this hostility makes vulnerable, not China. In the Russian case, it is Europe that is suffering from the hostility, not Russia. What the neoconservatives are achieving is the opposite of their aims. Their policy is imposing costs on Europeans, not on Russia, and the Europeans are going to resent the suffering imposed on them. Although all European governments along with European journalists receive, as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs told me years ago, bags full of money for representing Washington’s interests (which seldom in my experience have anything to do with Americans’ interests), sooner or later European peoples will come to the realization that “their” governments represent Washington, not them. People will suffer a lot before hardship becomes intolerable. At that point, unless people have been killed off with “vaccines” and released pathogens or in nuclear war, the guillotine arrives and governments fall.

Mike Whitney: America’s critical infrastructure is going to the dogs. The roads are full of potholes, the airports are a disgrace and over a thousand trains derail every year. Meanwhile, a bigger and bigger share of the nation’s net income continues to go to billionaires who already have more yachts and vacation homes than they can count. Would you be opposed to the Biden administration extending an olive branch to Beijing by joining China’s multi trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative, so we can work collaboratively with a foreign government to do major overhaul of the county’s roads, bridges, ports and especially high-speed rail? Clearly, the Chinese know what they’re doing and—I would imagine—the project would represent tens of thousands of jobs for American construction workers. Would you support a joint-collaboration like that or do you think we should go-it-alone?

Paul Craig Roberts: Mike, as you know, I regard you as one of the most perceptive persons of our age, but this question is naive beyond belief. First of all, it makes no difference whatsoever what I would support, or you would support, or the American people would support. We neither control nor influence the decisions. This is why in the end it comes to enserfment or revolution. The American people elected Trump twice. The first time the elite would not permit him to govern. The second time they stole the election from him and prevented any examination of the theft. Because of the power of money in campaign contributions from vested interests, now legitimized by the US Supreme Court, it is impossible in the US to elect a government that serves the people’s interest and if happens the elite disposes of the people’s choice using the media it owns.

Second, any American who proposes to cooperate with China in any way will be labeled a “Chinese Dupe/Agent.” We have already experienced this with Russia. The President of the United States was harassed by his own Department of Justice (sic) as a Russian agent simply because he wanted to “normalize relations with Russia.” I was branded a Putin Agent/Dupe by a website given prominence by the Washington Post, funded by we don’t know who, because I provided a truthful, correct account of the neoconservatives’ responsibility for the conflict in Ukraine.

Thirdly, according to Modern Monetary Theory, the creation of money by governments to finance infrastructure projects that lead to greater productivity or reduce costs to business is non-inflationary. Instead it drops production costs and makes a country’s businesses more productive and more successful in international competition. Refurbishing US infrastructure is a goal we can easily accomplish ourselves.

There is no need whatsoever for the US to participate in infrastructure projects such as Belt and Road. What Washington should be doing is removing gratuitous tensions with the two rising powers. Accept them and integrate with their success. This would benefit all and remove the danger of nuclear war.

But where are any American or Western leaders of vision?

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/12/imperial-narrative-managers-always-try-to-make-peace-seem-unnatural/

Imperial Narrative Managers Always Try To Make Peace Seem Unnatural

I’ve been ranting all week about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really really can’t say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.

One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five “experts” (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:

“Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.”

Do you see what they’re doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange “aberration”, and war as the status quo norm. They’re saying Australians require a “psychological shift” and a “mobilisation of mindset” from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.

Which is of course ass-backwards and shit-eating insane. Every normal, healthy person regards peace as the default position and violence as a rare and alarming aberration which must be avoided whenever possible.

We know this is true from our normal human experience of our own personal lives. None of us spend the majority of our time getting into fist fights, for example; anyone who spends most of their waking life physically assaulting people has probably been locked up a long time ago. If you have ever been in a fist fight you will recall that it was experienced as a rare and alarming occurrence, and everything in your body was screaming at you that this was a freakish and unnatural thing which must end as quickly as possible the entire time. In healthy people violence is experienced as abnormal, and its absence is experienced as normal.

This normal, baseline position is what imperial narrative managers spend their time trying to “psychologically shift” everyone away from, propagandizing us instead into accepting continuous conflict and danger as the norm. Such a shift is beneficial to the empire, to war profiteers, and to professional war propagandists, and is entirely destructive to everyone else. It causes us to accept material conditions which directly harm our own interests, and it makes us crazy and neurotic as a civilization.

You see it all the time though, like whenever there’s a push to withdraw imperial troops from some part of the Middle East they’ve been in for years, or the slightest discussion of maybe not raising the military budget this year, or skepticism that pouring weapons into a violence-ravaged part of the world is the wisest and most helpful thing to do.

Any time we see the slightest beginnings of the tiniest movement toward stepping away from the path of nonstop warmongering and militarism, pundits and politicians begin bleating words like “isolationism” and “appeasement” in an attempt to make calls for de-escalation, demilitarization, diplomacy and detente look freakish and abnormal in contrast to the sane, responsible status quo of hurtling toward nuclear armageddon at full tilt.

Their job is to abnormalize peace and normalize war, which means our job as healthy human beings is to do the exact opposite. We must help everyone understand the horrors of war and the unfathomable nightmares that can be unleashed by reckless brinkmanship, and help people to understand that peace is what’s healthy and to imagine a future where it is the norm.

The bad news is that we are pushing against a narrative-manufacturing apparatus that is backed by the might of a globe-spanning empire. The good news is that our vision is the one that’s based on truth, and deep down everyone can sense it. All we need to do to get people viewing peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind people of what they already know inside.