60. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS,#60 February 9, 2022
Conversion Movement from war to peace:
Mandy Smithberger, Shifting tax dollars from fear and militarization to hope and human needs.
Michael Klare, Stopping the encirclement of China and Russia.
jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/02/omni-war-watch-wednesdays-60-february-9.html
“US should shift military spending to pandemic and climate change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (11-26-21).
The COVID-19 pandemic vividly illuminated the many ways in which the American approach to national security has been fundamentally focused on the wrong threats, writes Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight. Read more.
Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Cold War in Asia. JANUARY 13, 2022 https://tomdispatch.com/none-dare-call-it-encirclement/
For a moment, imagine an upside-down military world. Instead of U.S. guided-missile destroyers and other ships regularly carrying out “freedom of navigation operations” near Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea and such destroyers no less regularly passing through the Strait of Taiwan between that disputed island and the People’s Republic of China, consider how any administration would react if Chinese naval vessels were ever more provocatively patrolling off the coast of California. You know that official Washington would quite literally go nuts and we’d find ourselves at the edge of war almost instantly.
Or, in a similar fashion, imagine that Russia had moved nuclear weapons close to the southern Mexican border, was selling advanced weaponry and offering other military aid to Mexico, and acting as we’ve been doing in relation to Ukraine. Washington would be up in arms, again all too literally. Don’t misunderstand me: I hold no torch for either Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin. (And I suspect, by the way, that if Putin were foolish enough to invade Ukraine he might find himself involved in an updated version of the Soviet Union’s disastrous Afghan War of the 1980s in a far more explosive part of the world.) I’m merely pointing out that the American urge to be militarily anywhere it wants to be on this planet in any fashion it chooses might not be quite what’s needed these days. A new Cold War on an ever hotter and more pandemic planet? Just what we really (don’t) need.
And by the way, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out, one of the other wonders of our moment is that, in a country where Republicans and Democrats can essentially agree on nothing — certainly not on spending money on the American people — the subject never in question is what’s still called “defense” policy. Unfortunately, globally speaking, such spending of your tax dollars couldn’t be more offensive in every sense of the word. In this, fierce as the Biden administration has proved in Cold War terms, Klare makes it clear today that Congress is proving even fiercer. . . . Tom
MICHAEL KLARE. None Dare Call It “Encirclement”:Washington Tightens the Noose around China.
The word “encirclement” does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War era term “containment” ever come up. Still, America’s top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status.
The gigantic 2022 defense bill — passed with overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. MORE https://tomdispatch.com/none-dare-call-it-encirclement/—
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