by Oui
Sat Jan 29th, 2022 at 08:17:13 PM EST
Simplistic reasoning became the basis theorem of Pax Americana, America's 21st Century ... what a failure it has become.
Contain Al Qaeda .. became contain terror in Bush's War On Terror (WOT) ... the Neocons established their warmongering policy throughout the military, intelligence, think tanks, USIP, State Department ... and the failures and abuse of basic human rights mounted early on, as did the dead bodies in U.S. interventions. Diplomacy became bullying, multilateralism was throw out the window, John Bolton was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations ... a wrecking ball to diminish its power and influence ... turning the U.S. share of funding off.
Risk of rendition to detention in The Netherlands and brought before the ICC in The Hague?
The moral of a just war, what about using crippling sanctions to punish a sovereign state for its policy.
Why Are Economic Sanctions a Form of War?
Sanctions as War: Anti-imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy offers the first comprehensive account of economic sanctions as a tool for exercising American power on the global stage. Since the 1980s, the US has steadily increased its reliance on economic sanctions, or the imposition of extensive financial penalties for violation of given rules, to fight its foreign policy battles. Perceived as a less costly and damaging alternative to kinetic military engagement, economic sanctions have been levied against over 25 other countries. In the process, sanctions have destroyed thousands of innocent lives and wreaked inestimable damages to civil society.
To understand how sanctions function as a war-making strategy, this collection offers chapters that address the theory and history of economic sanctions as well as chapter-length case studies of sanctions exercised against the civilian populations of Iraq, Venezuela, and other nations.
Chapter 1 Introduction
The United States has maintained unrivalled global economic, political, cultural, and military hegemony for 70 years since the end of the Second World War in 1945 and reinforced with the fall of the Soviet Union and for 25 years since the end of the Cold War in 1991. However, by the 2010s, American dominance in each of these four spheres has come under renewed contestation on a global basis. Most notable are China's rise as an engine of economic development and growth in East Asia and beyond and the resurgence of the Russian Federation as a formidable regional military competitor in Europe and the Middle East.
The shape of the emergent rivalry in 2020 is distinctive, as the US retains dominance in all four spheres but the incipient threats to its absolute domination has given rise to a new repertoire to defend and advance its imperialist advantages. At the peak of US power, the two decades from 1990 to 2010, the US controlled the global stage through rewarding and punishing regional challenges to its supreme neoliberal economic order through a global military alliance to overwhelm countries that challenged its dominance in every sphere. Thus, the era was denoted by expanding American-dominated global defense pacts, conquering nations that did not conform to neoliberalism, and opening up new lands and spaces for the accumulation of capitalist profits. In each case, the US has exploited its economic, political, cultural and military dominance to guarantee its world hegemony.
Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense--Issues for Congress (Updated Dec. 21, 2021)
World War II -- US Marines land in North Africa | LIFE magazine |
There have been many unwanted U.S. Marines beach landings ever since to plant Old Glory on foreign soil ...
'Encirclement' and 'containment' effectively have become America's default foreign policy
By Alastair Crooke
The key to China's security riposte to the U.S. is linked to two words that go unstated in U.S. formal policy documents, but whose silent presence nevertheless suffuses and colour-washes the text of the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act.
The term `containment' never appears, neither does the word `encirclement'. Yet, as Professor Michael T. Klare writes, the Act "provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country's military inside its own territory; and potentially to cripple its economy in any future crisis".
What the earlier patchwork of U.S. China measures lacked, until now, has been an overarching plan for curbing China's rise, and so ensuring America's permanent supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region: "The authors of this year's NDAA" however, "were remarkably focused on this deficiency, and several provisions of the bill are designed to provide just such a master plan".
These include a series of measures intended to incorporate Taiwan into the U.S. defence system surrounding China. And a requirement for the drafting of a comprehensive "grand strategy" for containing China "on every front".
Biden Tightens the Noose Around China | Consortium News |
The term "containment" never comes up, writes Michael T. Klare. But nonetheless, here is the new 21st century Cold War on a planet desperately in need of something else.
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. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country's military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis. For China's leaders, who surely can't tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it's an open invitation to... well, there's no point in not being blunt... fight their way out of confinement.
Like every "defense" bill before it, the $768 billion 2022 NDAA is replete with all-too-generous handouts to military contractors for favored Pentagon weaponry. That would include F-35 jet fighters, Virginia-class submarines, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and a wide assortment of guided missiles. But as the Senate Armed Services Committee noted in a summary of the bill, it also incorporates an array of targeted appropriations and policy initiatives aimed at encircling, containing, and someday potentially overpowering China. Among these are an extra $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, or PDI, a program initiated last year with the aim of bolstering U.S. and allied forces in the Pacific.
Nor are these just isolated items in that 2,186-page bill. The authorization act includes a "sense of Congress" measure focused on "defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific Region," providing a conceptual blueprint for such an encirclement strategy. Under it, the secretary of defense is enjoined to "strengthen United States defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region so as to further the comparative advantage of the United States in strategic competition with the People's Republic of China," or PRC.
The Enduring Lure of Encirclement
May 2, 2001: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, center, hosts a working lunch with, from left, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney, in Washington, D.C. (National Archives, Helene C. Stikkel)
An Oral History of the Bush White House | Vanity Fair |
The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history--distilled from scores of interviews--offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.
The notion of surrounding China with a chain of hostile powers was, in fact, first promoted as official policy in the early months of President George W. Bush's administration. At that time, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice went to work establishing an anti-China alliance system in Asia, following guidelines laid out by Rice in a January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs.
There, she warned of Beijing's efforts to "alter Asia's balance of power in its own favor" -- a drive the U.S. must respond to by deepening "its cooperation with Japan and South Korea" and by "maintain[ing] its commitment to a robust military presence in the region." It should, she further indicated, "pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance."
Afghan Transfer of Power to Taliban | Aug. 15, 2021 |
Doomed to fail - next step to bottle up the Russian Federation ...
Anti-war protesters gather in front of the White House to demonstrate against escalating tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine on January 27, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Progressives Must Demand Peace in Ukraine
As corporate media provides a parade of pro-war politicians and pundits from both the Democratic and Republican parties, grassroots movements must demand peace and diplomacy, now, before the outbreak of war.
My previous diary ...
US Ups Tension with Russia
