Next War China?
Two days ago Sen. Josh Hawley gave a speech in which he made some good points about our terribly flawed foreign policy. You can read the entirety of his speech here:
Hawley Delivers National Security Speech ‘China and Ukraine: A Time for Truth’
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation in a speech entitled, “China and Ukraine: A Time for Truth.” The discussion focused on developing a defense policy that prioritizes our biggest threat, China; challenges to the consensus on Ukraine; and safeguards for Americans at home.
Unfortunately, this speech—which I take to be part of an exploration into a presidential or vice presidential bid—is fundamentally wrong headed. Probably in order to appeal to baser instincts on the part of the people he wants to appeal to.
The basic idea is, we’re wasting our resources by waging war against Russia in Ukraine. What we should be doing is preparing to wage war against China, because Hong Kong and Taiwan. When the Cold War ended, he says, we were sold “a bill of goods” by the Uniparty—that America could police the world forever. Not true, he says. We can’t police the whole world—we can’t even police just Russia and China—and so we should police China because it’s the biggest threat.
The idea behind that “police the world” delusion was based on a flawed conceptual structure, says Hawley. Basically, but not in so many words, he suggests that the Uniparty decided to offshore jobs so that the rest of the world would be sending us cheap “stuff”, while we took over the world cop role:
Our current foreign policy isn’t working.
It is not working for the American people. It’s cost many of them their jobs, their towns, their communities—all thanks to the bad trade deals that we were promised would make us all richer.
That didn’t work out so well for the people of my state. Or for anyone who witnessed their manufacturing job shipped overseas.
But our current foreign policy isn’t even working according to its own standards. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the Uniparty doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries.
None of that is enough. Because we’re simply overcommitted, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire.
It’s not that simple, of course. Taking on the role of world cop was never the noble enterprise the Neocons pretended it would be. It was always imperialistic at heart—although it was sold to the public back home in somewhat different terms. But that public was never going to be able to hold the masters of the empire to account. Nor was the offshoring of our manufacturing sector simply a way to finance our noble imperial adventures. It was about enriching the financial sector, of subjecting the entire country to Wall St.
Here’s how Hawley puts it:
We hear a lot these days about something called the, “rules-based international order.” Politicians, and so-called experts, invoke it whenever they want us to send another few billion dollars overseas.
Now, the “rules-based international order” isn’t some kingdom of heaven. It is a kind of American liberal empire. It’s founded on the assumption that, if we set up the economic rules of the game just so, the people at the top get a lot richer, and maybe that’ll trickle down to everybody else. So it goes.
And as an added bonus, we’ll eventually make the world over in the image of New York and Silicon Valley. Free minds and free markets, or something like that.
Once upon a time, this sounded good. But it was a bad plan from the start.
What made this a bad plan, according to Hawley, is that the Chinese are bad actors bent on world domination. We were never going to be able to make them be like us—the real good people. Instead, China got rich at our expense, says Hawley (in reality, not true—China is not a rich country). The proof that the Chinese are bad actors is that they want historically Chinese places like Hong Kong and Taiwan to be subject to Chinese control and Chinese interests, rather than continuing as outposts of Western colonial empires.
And so we see Hawley in fundamental opposition to his party leader in the Senate. Whereas the Turtle says fighting Russia in Ukraine is our top national priority, Hawley says preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is our top national priority.
… deterring China from seizing Taiwan should be America’s top priority.
We have to make some hard choices, he says:
As a result, we cannot meet Ukrainian, Taiwanese, and our own military requirements all at the same time, for the foreseeable future.
Nowhere does Hawley hint that maybe, just maybe, as part of renouncing our role as world cop, we should acknowledge (as Douglas Macgregor maintains) that China actually does have legitimate security interests in Taiwan and other areas in its backyard. Instead, he wants us to believe that China’s strategy amounts to: First Taiwan, then the world.
As if China is the nation that has launched regime change wars around the globe:
If China conquers Taiwan, ...
And Americans will confront a new, terrifying reality.
Every American will feel it. The price hikes and disruptions we’ve seen in recent years will pale in comparison.
Product shortages will be commonplace—shortages of everything from basic medicine to consumer electronics. ...
But the economic consequences are just the start.
If China takes Taiwan, it will be able to station its own military forces there. It can then use its position as a springboard for further conquest and intimidation—against Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands, like Guam and the Northern Marianas.
Our grandparents fought and bled to liberate those islands during the Second World War. Now they’re under threat again, from a new imperially-minded power.
As Asia’s new reigning power, China could restrict U.S. trade in the region—perhaps block it altogether.
Not that America leveraged its gains from WW2 by becoming an imperially minded power:
In contrast to the world in the map above, Hawley conjures up a very different world, to work off anti-China feeling in America:
Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline. A world where the People’s Liberation Army has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
How likely is this scenario? In my view: Not very. China is a country that, for all the progress it has made still faces enormous internal problems, problems that are increasing, starting with demographics. The spectre of China muscling us out of the Gulf of Mexico, stalking the California coastline? Please. This is obvious scare talk with a purpose.
In essence, Hawley—for all his admission that we can’t do it all—appears to be arguing for the American Empire to remain the world cop around most of the world. To wage a war of containment against China. No notion of finding some sort of modus vivendi.
Hawley acknowledges that containing China is a pretty big job, perhaps beyond our military capabilities in some respects.
Nor does he appear to envision Russia backing up China if the US gets even more aggressive. And here he slips into outright delusion:
What we need is a new burden-sharing arrangement within NATO. Our NATO allies should lead in arming Ukraine. And they should also take responsibility for defending Europe itself, relying on the U.S. only for extended nuclear deterrence and a few other capabilities.
This will free up American resources for deterring China. It’ll also ensure that NATO allies can deter Russia or defend themselves with limited U.S. support if our forces are drawn to a crisis or conflict in the Pacific.
…
We should begin reducing U.S. force levels in Europe. And we should keep cutting, until we’re supporting NATO’s defenses with only those capabilities we don’t need to deter China, and with our nuclear arsenal. Our European allies can make up the difference. They must take the lead in Europe’s conventional defense.
That’s not the real world and, contrary to what Hawley suggests at the top, he’s not telling us the truth. The truth is that “our NATO allies”—our erstwhile vassals—are not going to maintain the current aggressive posture against Russia, are not going to continue our war against Russia, if the US reduces its forces in Europe. Why should they? And what’s that about “extended nuclear deterrence” for defending Europe? Who thinks getting into a nuclear war over Europe is in our best interests—much less in Europe’s. Here Hawley is simply trying to have it both ways—pivoting to China while still using scare talk to suggest that Russia has a military capable of projecting power outside its borders. Or that Russia would even desire to do so, rather than simply growing rich by doing business.
The truth is that the world order is changing and we need to find creative ways of coming to terms with that changing world order, rather than scrambling to maintain a shaky status quo. Likely that will involve a serious rethinking of what our legitimate security needs actually are.
So, why do I bring this up? Because Hawley is playing off foreign policy when the real home truths he should be speaking to the American people are left to people like Karl Denninger (highly recommended):
America needs to be taking care of business right here at home—not engaging in more foreign adventures thousands of miles away, against enemies that are largely created by our rulers to divert attention from problems at home.
https://alt-market.us/what-happens-next-in-the-ukraine-proxy-war-a-new-russian-offensive-in-spring/
Peace. Let’s talk about peace. These war mongers make me sick. In my eighty years we’ve been constantly at war. Stop it.