Another Troubling Appointment

To me, foreign policy realism requires an understanding that the power of any given country has its limits—no global hegemony is ultimately possible. Anglo-Zionism fundamentally rejects that basic understanding and is committed to destroying any regional centers of power and influence by warfare—be it kinetic or economic or some combination of the two. The one division of opinion among Anglo-Zionists has to do with whether they are able to wage war on all regional powers simultaneously or must wage war in serial fashion. Within the latter school, there is a further division of opinion on a tactical level. While both groups regard China as the main enemy, one group favors dealing with—i.e., subjugating—Russia first, while the other group favors immediate confrontation with China.

Will Schryver @imetatronink

[Elbridge] Colby is inexplicably in thrall to the fallacious notion that fighting a war against China has better prospects than the one currently being lost against Russia.

The Ontological Incoherence of American Imperial Exceptionalism

For a more extended presentation of the above, please refer to our earlier substack:

Thinking About China

which begins:

Simplicius the Thinker has a new essay out—shorter than his SitReps—that examines an article by Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. The article purports to rethink Anglo-Zionist foreign policy in terms of how the world actually is:

A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy

I think Simplicius gets this basically right. This is about the Anglo-Zionists getting smacked upside the head by reality. On the other hand, the fact that perhaps a few Anglo-Zionists recognize that America’s control over the world is more limited than they heretofore thought doesn’t mean that their fundamental attitudes have changed. Nor does it mean that this dawning realization is a majority view among Anglo-Zionists. The article is actually, in major part, an exercise in blame shifting. I’ll try to get to that a bit later. For purposes of this post, suffice it to say that there are no signs of any fundamental rethinking of Anglo-Zionist policy towards China.

The Anglo-Zionist policy towards China remains predicated on the notion that China is an expansionist military threat to the Anglo-Zionist empire—a hostile military threat, not just an economic threat to Anglo-Zionist hegemony. That notion is probably more in the nature of a rhetorical justification for the dominant Anglo-Zionist policy prescription, which is always war. If China were presented as having attained economic ascendancy by having out competed the US, thanks in no small part to the stupid policies of the Anglo-Zionists themselves, the American people would be likely to recoil at the proposed solution to our economic difficulties: War.

As it is, the Anglo-Zionists—led by Janet Yellen, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan (who has been associated with Ben Rhodes)—adopted an openly confrontational attitude toward China from the get go. That has persisted and been exacerbated by high US military officials openly predicting war with China by 2025 or turning the Taiwan Straits into a “hellscape” for China, should China deploy troops to its island province. Xi Jinping appears to understand what’s going on. He is reported to have said recently that he sees the US as attempting to sucker him into a first move towards Taiwan. Inconveniently for the Anglo-Zionists, neither China nor the residents of Taiwan have much inclination to participate in turning the island into a “hellscape.”

To illustrate what continues to pass for strategic thinking in DC—not least among GOPers—I’ll paste in several longish tweets which were sparked by a tweet by a former Trump defense official, Elbridge Colby (seriously, who names their kid Elbridge?). Colby’s tweet approved a very hawkish view expressed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall with regard to China. Colby’s views are of interest because he could return to a new Trump administration. Interestingly, he was also close to the Jeb! campaign, but was nixed by Neocons for the usual reasons:

…

This past week Colby did, in fact, return to the new Trump regime, having been appointed to a top policy position at DoD. Will Schryver, a longtime critic of Colby’s China obsession, immediately launched:

Will Schryver @imetatronink

 Donald Trump continues to pack his foreign policy team with #EmpireAtAllCosts cult disciples.

A short selection of my criticisms of Elbridge Colby follows in the replies to this post.

Elbridge Colby @ElbridgeColby

I am profoundly honored by and grateful to President @realdonaldtrump for nominating me to serve as his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. If confirmed by the Senate, it would be an exceptional privilege to work with @petehegseth and his team to implement President Trump’s vitally necessary agenda. As the President has rightly made so clear, it is vital to focus our defense policy on restoring peace through strength and always putting America first.

From last year:

Elbridge Colby @ElbridgeColby

The US has a very strong interest in not allowing China to subordinate Taiwan. The US thus should be willing to fight to defend Taiwan.

The key is to make sure we can do it successfully and at a tolerable cost. That’s why we need to laser focus. 1/

Presumably a “tolerable cost” involves Colby remaining alive to pursue “policy” while others die.

Will Schryver @imetatronink

 Unobtainium

Colby essentially acknowledges the reality that, among many options, the US can choose one — and ONLY ONE — overseas war to fight.

However, he blinds himself to the reality that in order to prosecute this "ONE WAR", it would be necessary for the US to effectively vacate every major American military base on the planet — there would be no other way to generate a force sufficient to even attempt war against Russia, China, or Iran.

And even though it would take at least a year to concentrate such a force in any of those putative theaters of battle, the US strategy will necessarily depend upon quick victory, which they cannot obtain.

And they simply cannot sustain a protracted high-intensity campaign against ANY of their adversary choices.

Defeat lurks behind every door in this game. And afterwards, the US will be effectively disarmed in terms of expeditionary warfare for at least a generation.

This is the cold hard reality of the situation at present, and I defy Colby or any of his fellow #EmpireAtAllCosts disciples to counter the many arguments I have made to that effect.

I will link to my latest in the reply to this post.

6:29 PM · Jun 28, 2024

[Today]

That only works when you fight an adversary [Panama] that lacks the capacity for high-intensity industrial-scale warfare.

US arms production is essentially a high-end fashion boutique — it can't scale, and its products are unsuitable for protracted heavy use.

This is how empires end.

Unfortunately, the Colby appointment appears to be linked to Trump’s threats against Panama—the argument is that Panama, along with most of Latin America, is too closely linked to China. That’s in a purely economic sense. The Chinese go places and make friends, which is intolerable for the Anglo-Zionists. So, from an Anglo-Zionist perspective the obvious response is to threaten military action against, ultimately, an entire continent +.

Now, Will Schryver has an interesting exchange here. A commenter makes the point that China operates the ports at each end of the Panama Canal, and that in the event of a US - China war China could shut down this “choke point”—presumably to prevent the US Navy from utilizing that waterway. But … Will achieves checkmate:

The Panama Canal cannot be transited by the largest commercial ships.

When was the last time a US aircraft carrier transited the Panama Canal?

What meaningful advantage, above and beyond the current arrangement, would derive from seizing the canal?

All I can say about the Panama Canal is that its future prospects as an important trade node are almost certain to be enhanced by Chinese investment and development, and conversely almost certain to be degraded by current generation American investment and development.

And this is sadly true. You will notice that carrier deployments to the Far East depart from Norfolk through Suez or from San Diego—but there is no traffic from East Coast to West Coast. Say what you will about the wisdom of returning the canal to Panamanian control, but the US totally dropped the ball with regard to maintaining and enhancing the waterway. So now the solution is to threaten and alienate an entire continent for the benefit, perhaps, of some polling points among jingoists at home?

Philip Pilkington makes a sensible observation and links to an Australian academic who critiques US China Hawk obsessions:

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

It really is up to Trump himself whether he wants to engage with China. There is no institutional appetite for doing so. But those who push for “containment” really have no idea what they’re doing or how much it might damage the US. 

Quote

Warwick Powell | 鲍韶山 @baoshaoshan 10h

“The question that now animates us is whether Trump can rise above the historical institutional-cultural milieu, or will the new administration be just another episode of America’s ambitions to contain, change or conquer China.” More: My Way or the Highway

5:51 AM · Dec 24, 2024

In the linked article Powell reviews the history of US - China policy, all the back to the famous Who Lost China? debate—as if China was somehow “ours” to lose. He then reviews American efforts to move the immovable object of China by “changing” it through “engagement”:

… the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process.” For them, China had defied American expectations.

This view was confirmed by Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in an address in February 2024 in which he lamented the failure of decades of American efforts to “shape or change China.” Engagement was one set of tactical approaches to a wider set of strategic ambitions to do that. Engagement should not be understood in any other way — certainly not as a path toward the peaceful coexistence of equals.

America’s ambitions to shape China in ways that suited American interests and aspirations go back decades, clearly. Engagement has been the most recent manifestation of how such aspirations were pursued, in the hope that entanglement with the American global order — the putatively named “rules-based order” underpinned by the economics of the Washington Consensus — would ultimately catalyze political and cultural change in China.

As with Russia, the Anglo-Zionist order refuses to deal with China as having legitimate security interests in its own region. China having been “lost”, the goal is to “regain” China—for Anglo-Zionist purposes, regardless of Chinese wishes.

Others are pushing even harder. In May/June 2024, Matt Pottinger [a long serving Trump NS adviser] and Mike Gallagher argued in a piece in Foreign Policy that the Biden administration was excessively focused on short-term tactical questions revolving around the notion of “managed competition” when, in fact, the necessity was complete victory over China.

That China refused to yield should have been an object lesson about the need for what Heer described as “reciprocal compromise.” But Washington was never about compromise. Its millenarian zealotry and reanimated spiritual war forbid that.

The reference to “reciprocal compromise” is to an article by Paul Heer at National Interest: The Diminishing Prospects for U.S.-China Détente.

I recently attended a small private conference that addressed the strategy the United States and its allies should pursue in the Indo-Pacific to deal with the challenge from China. I found myself isolated in advocating sustained diplomacy with Beijing aimed at some form of mutual accommodation that could facilitate peaceful coexistence. ... Even China’s minimalist goals were deemed by many conference participants to be both immutable and irreconcilable with U.S. and allied interests. ...

I argued (without much effect) that this approach is based, first and foremost, on an inaccurate and exaggerated assessment of China’s strategic intentions. The prevailing view is that Beijing seeks to establish exclusive hegemony in East Asia, supplant the United States as the leading global power, and export its ideology and illiberal values to the rest of the world. Beijing, of course, consistently denies all of this, but these denials are just as consistently dismissed in the West as disingenuous or dishonest.

Accordingly, I have scored few points over the years offering evidence and logic pointing out that China is focused on maximizing its wealth, power, and influence in a multipolar world rather than on making a bid for global supremacy and legitimizing its governance and development model rather than expecting other countries to adopt it. Chinese leaders almost certainly recognize that pursuing exclusive global hegemony would be destabilizing and potentially counterproductive to Chinese interests and security. It would risk alienating many other countries whose hearts and minds China is seeking to cultivate. Even if hegemony were achievable, it would be unsustainable.

Yet the prevailing—or at least dominant—view at the conference was that China is not seriously interested in peaceful coexistence with the United States. ... Why is it difficult to acknowledge the probability that Beijing knows that it could not successfully or sustainably do any of these things? Chinese leaders recognize that there are limits to China’s global power and leverage. They cannot realistically hope to subordinate the United States and the rest of the world to their will within a Sino-centric global order. ...

However, the notion that Beijing has excluded the possibility (or the viability) of peaceful coexistence raises the question of how receptive Washington itself is to the idea. ...

...

The pursuit of peaceful coexistence will also require accepting that U.S. global primacy is a thing of the past. In the CSIS report, Brands presumes that Washington’s goal is “a world order in which the United States, its allies and partners, and its democratic values remain predominant.” But Shirk says that the idea of “complete primacy is an outdated holdover from an exceptional period of U.S. unipolarity” at the end of the Cold War and that emphasizing it now “smacks of a playground fight, not a principled aspiration for peace and order.” ...

In a very real sense one could argue that the Anglo-Zionist perspective on China is largely an exercise in mirror gazing. The Anglo-Zionists, obsessed with domination, cannot imagine that any other outlook on world affairs is even possible. To deny one’s desire to dominate then becomes dissimulation and deviousness—a confirmation of the threat that The Other poses. It’s a zero sum world for the Anglo-Zionists who drive us to endless war. The question is, where is Trump in all this? One can hardly blame the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians for harboring deep suspicions when they look at Trump’s troubling appointments and listen to his troublingly bellicose rhetoric.