Asia Pacific

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares109 Views

      in World Politics

      Can China Duplicate the US Military-Industrial Complex?

      by

      With the 2020 US election approaching, the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear to have decided that there are only two issues worth pursuing. The first,  which they hope the American public will swallow, would be the visibly diminished cognitive capacity of Democratic nominee Joe Biden that has, they claim, turned him into a Marxist and Bernie Sanders’ poodle.

      The second issue is more likely to stir up the jingoistic emotions of the electorate. It consists of portraying China as an evil empire and perpetrator of pandemics. Pompeo has been trotting the globe, raising the rhetorical tone to make sure everyone understands how deserving China is of any punishment Trump may decide to inflict on it in between now and the first week of November.

      China certainly merits everyone’s attention, simply because it’s there, it’s imposing, it’s growing in influence and it has already clearly shifted the global geopolitical balance in parallel with America’s ongoing hegemonic decline. It’s a theme that resonates with the working class. From a purely electoral point of view, countering the evident rise of China seems like the most obvious theme for Trump to push. After all, his stance of getting tough with China played a big role in the 2016 election.

      The Brain Malfunction Affecting the US and Its Respectable Media

      READ MORE

      Irrespective of elections, every pundit involved in evaluating geopolitical game plans has been homing in on the faceoff between the US and China. Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks, writing for Foreign Affairs, have produced a fascinating piece of tendentious ideological reasoning in an article with a provocative title, “Can China’s Military Win the Tech War?” It has the merit of focusing on what is truly the most crucial point of rivalry between the US and the Middle Kingdom: technological prowess in the coming decades.

      Alas, their article reads like an exercise in fuzzy neoliberal logic, adorned with an orgy of Silicon Valley venture capital jargon, imbued with romanticized entrepreneurial idealism. Its trendy vocabulary tells us more about a new culture shared between Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, than it does about the geopolitical theme it purports to clarify. The authors assail the reader with these bold concepts: “innovative startups” “collaborative disruption,” “agile and innovative,” “critical innovation,” “emerging technologies,” a “sense of urgency” linked to “today’s competitive … environment,” and “incentives for innovators.”

      China’s rise as a supplier of technology poses a major problem because, in today’s world, technology and defense have become one and the same thing. We learn that “as China’s defense capabilities have grown, some Western policymakers have started to wonder whether the United States needs to adopt its own version of civil-military fusion, embracing a top-down approach to developing cutting-edge technologies with military applications.”

      And here is the crux of the problem: “Chinese President Xi Jinping formalized the concept of civil-military fusion as part of the extensive military reforms laid out in his 2016 five-year plan.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Civil-military fusion:

      The name given to the Chinese version of the seven-decades-old system developed in the US christened by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 as the military-industrial complex

      Contextual Note

      Manuel and Hicks start their discussion in this introductory sentence: “As the Chinese government has set out to harness the growing strength of the Chinese technology sector to bolster its military, policymakers in the United States have reacted with mounting alarm.” Thinkers in the West are now wondering whether the Chinese top-down, authoritarian model of decision-making might not be superior to the point of constituting a model the US needs to emulate. The authors set out to prove the contrary.

      The article highlights President Xi Jinping’s Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development whose “goal is to promote the development of dual-use technology and integrate existing civilian technologies into the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).” Manuel and Hicks seem to have missed the most obvious point — that Xi has simply taken the American system and stood it on its head. Since World War II, the US has traditionally followed the pattern of developing military technology, which is then made available to private companies to exploit commercially as civilian technology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The article also fails to notice how the Chinese have profited from the American system. The US uses its commercial marketplace to validate the types of civilian technology that prove successful. The Chinese can then either copy or reverse engineer the same technology for their civilian market before adapting it to military use. This means the Chinese are getting the best of both worlds. They let the marketplace in the West filter out the civilian applications that work, sparing themselves the research.

      Sensing a possible weakness, the authors, undaunted, turn to the catechism of their neoliberal ideology. It contains an article of faith based on the unfounded (and clearly mistaken) belief that private enterprises will always be paragons of efficiency as opposed to governments that will always function as fountains of inefficiency. “China’s bureaucratic and authoritarian approach to civil-military fusion is likely to waste considerable time and money. By trying to control innovation, Beijing is more likely to delay and even stifle it,” Manuel and Hicks write. We are safe. The liberal economy of the US owns a monopoly on innovation.

      The authors conclude that the US should not seek to emulate the Chinese model. They do, however, concede that “Washington does need a strategy to strengthen its national security technology and industrial base.” That sounds like encouragement of government inefficiency, but Silicon Valley jargon comes to the rescue. The US needs a strategy “centered on collaborative disruption that generates the right incentives for innovators, scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, and others,” they add. The following sentence offers more jargon in lieu of logic, but especially wishful thinking. The authors call for “forward-looking changes in the Defense Department and smart investments across government.”

      Curiously, Manuel and Hicks seem to recognize the obstacle. They see a “risk not because of China but because of a lack of agility and creativity among U.S. planners and policymakers.” This is the ultimate expression of neoliberal ideology. Entrepreneurs are agile and creative. Government planners and policymakers are useless bureaucrats, a fact they reaffirm with this remark: “The Defense Department’s long lead times and slow decision-making remain significant obstacles to innovation.”

      Perhaps even more astonishingly naive is their plea to push the already existing logic of revolving door corruption. As a solution to US inertia, they recommend “more opportunities to hire people directly from industry or research institutions into the senior civilian government or even the military ranks,” as well as wishing to expand “the number of temporary fellowships for private-sector experts to spend a year or two in government.” Those are permanent features of the military-industrial complex that have contributed massively to its corruption.

      Historical Note

      Insisting that if China wants to catch up, it should emulate the United States, Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks offer a potted history of the development of America’s military-industrial complex. They cite the founding of labs in the 1930s to develop supercomputing, the military’s post-war collaboration with Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor to develop microprocessors and the creation in 1958 of the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which helped develop GPS and the Internet.” They then proudly cite the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit, founded in 2015, which “has helped innovative startups gain a foothold at the Pentagon.”

      The authors recommend little more than the logic that has prevailed for the past 70 years. They maintain that “partnering effectively with the private sector can save taxpayer dollars.” In reality, it means companies will continue to see their R&D funded by taxpayers, with no risk and, of course, the opportunity to reap profits from future business in civilian technology. That translates as no benefit to taxpayers but colossal rewards for shareholders.

      Manuel and Hicks insist on the necessity of “collaborative disruption,” which “will require upfront investments and streamlined approaches for getting the best commercial technology into the Department of Defense.” This language is designed to appeal to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It may also appeal to the same political class that has profited personally and politically from the growth of the military-industrial-financial complex. In other words, it is more of the same, but with updated vocabulary. Whether, as the authors hope, the US can by these means “secure the advantage in defense capabilities on its own terms” over China remains to be seen.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      Was the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Mother of All War Crimes?

      by

      This year marks the 75th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is reason enough to mull over its meaning and its implications. In a recent article for Fair Observer, Peter Isackson has made a strong case that the annihilation of the two Japanese cities by American bombers represents the “mother of all war crimes.” Given the long history of atrocities committed during times of war, I find this a rather bold statement that should not go unchallenged.

      The Mother of All War Crimes

      READ MORE

      The case for the defense rests on two claims. First, the demonstration of American nuclear capabilities heralded in a period of stability, which quite likely saved Western Europe’s nations from being overrun and conquered by the Soviet Union and subjected to its rule. Second, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are far from exceptional as war crimes go, if indeed the bombing of the two cities was a war crime at all.

      Balance of Terror

      In my younger years, in a very different world, I served for a couple of years in the German air force. I never flew a plane. I spent most of my time on duty in a tower close to the border to what at the time was the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic (CSSR), a member of the Warsaw Pact and a satellite of the Soviet Union. We did electronic surveyance of the CSSR airspace, following Czech and Slovakian fighter planes as they performed their exercises as best as they could (more often than not they couldn’t, lacking basic motivation). It was a tedious job, boring as hell, particularly when the weather was bad and the pilots were grounded.

      Excitement, however, surged once a month, when we waited for the arrival of Russian long-range bombers. They took off from Minsk in what at the time was the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their mission: attack the towers along the West German border with the CSSR and the German Democratic Republic. We saw them coming, small dots on our radar screens. When they were in front of our tower, there was a small red blip, a fleeting flicker, and we knew if this had been der Ernstfall — an actual real-life attack — we would all be dead, gone up in smoke in a small nuclear mushroom.

      At the time, we did not think much of what had just happened. It was part of a game, along the lines of MAD magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” — inane, a waste of time, and somehow not very real. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the regime in Prague and the unraveling of the Soviet empire that we learned that the game had been much more serious and potentially deadly than what we suspected. There were plans on the other side of the border to overrun West Germany, conquer Western Europe and subject it to Soviet rule. Among the scenarios was a nuclear attack on Bonn, West Germany’s sleepy capital, designed to decapitate West Germany’s political elite.

      What prevented the Soviets and their toadies from carrying out their plans was not human compassion but a realist assessment of the distribution of military forces and the resolve of the Western allies to use them. At the time, this was called MAD — mutually assured destruction. It was grounded in the notion that any attack on the part of the Soviets would immediately trigger a full response of Western nuclear forces, resulting in the complete annihilation of the Soviet Union. The leadership in Moscow was fully aware of this logic. They did not like this “balance of terror,” but they ultimately submitted to its logic. Others, by the way, did not.

      Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s long-term foreign minister, claims in his memoirs that at one time, Chinese leader Mao Zedong tried to get the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, arguing that “his country could survive a nuclear war, even if it lost 300 million people, and finish off the capitalists with conventional weapons,” thus guaranteeing the triumph of communism. Unsurprisingly, the Soviets were not convinced and increasingly distanced themselves from Beijing.

      The logic of mutually assured destruction fundamentally altered the behavior of great powers, at least with respect to each other. It is to be hoped that the logic of the “balance of terror” is going to be enough to keep the US and China level-headed in the future, despite rapidly growing tensions between the two.

      The Breakdown of Civilization

      Unfortunately enough, war crimes are the norm rather than the exception when it comes to armed conflict. The claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ontologically different rests on a technological assumption. For some reason, nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from conventional ones. I am not sure what constitutes the basis of this assumption. Take the firebombings of the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg during the Second World War, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary people — women, children, the elderly. Take the massacre of Babi Yar, in Ukraine, where in two days nearly 34,000 Jews were killed by German Einstazgruppen. Or, going back further in history, take the death toll during the Thirty Years War, which cost the lives of half of the population of what is today Germany.

      Massacres of the most atrocious form are hardly an invention of the 20th century, as Goya’s renditions of the barbarities visited on his fellow countrymen during the war against the French between 1808 and 1814, depicted in most horrifying detail. This was a war against an enemy that invaded the country in the name of the Enlightenment and revolutionary fervor. Or, as the Germans would say, Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag ich dir den Schädel ein — If you don’t want to be my brother, I will smash your skull.

      For the victims of war crimes — more often than not civilians — it probably does not really matter how they were killed and why they were killed. It is quite understandable — human all too human, as Nietzsche would say — that horrendous deeds provoke retribution. The firebombing of German cities, the rape of German women caught be advancing Soviet armies — both are understandable given the atrocities committed by Germans during the war, in the name of Hitler and the Third Reich. Most Germans, or so most recent research suggests, were more than comfortable supporting a regime that guaranteed them a modicum of prosperity. Few asked where it came from.

      For that, Germans were punished in the most horrendous fashion. Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne and many other towns and cities went up in flames, leaving behind a landscape hardly different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombing of Hamburg was named Operation Gomorrah, after the Biblical city destroyed by “sulfur and fire” for its sins, and, according to historian Keith Lowe, was on completely different level than the German raids on Coventry and London, “comparable with what happened in Nagasaki.” It was a just retribution for the crimes committed in their name, a retribution for the tens of millions of victims who paid with their lives for Hitler’s ambitions to conquer the world.

      Embed from Getty Images

      I would suggest that the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the retribution for the crimes committed by Japanese forces, in the name of racial superiority hardly different from Nazi ideology, against the peoples subjugated during the war. I have grave doubts that the victims of the Nanjing massacre or of the hundreds of young Asian “comfort women” pressed into sexual slavery by Japanese forces would consider the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime, but rather than an act of just retribution for Japanese atrocities committed during the war.

      Whether or not the United States was justified in meting out redistribution is a different question. After all, given America’s self-declared status as a leading Christian nation, it should perhaps have heeded the words of the Bible exhorting believers not to take revenge, “but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). But then, Americans have a tendency to pay lip service to the scripture while doing the opposite in real life.

      The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of these turning points in history that define a whole epoch. It demonstrated, once and for all, humanity’s ability to destroy itself. Had Hitler been in a position to get hold of “the bomb,” he surely would have used it to obliterate London, Moscow, perhaps even New York. The same goes for Stalin, only this time it would have been Berlin that would have gone up in a mushroom. If the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime, it was nothing more than another episode in a long history of atrocities committed in the course of wars, not more, not less — an episode which reaffirms once again the sad reality that the veneer of civilization is merely skin deep.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US health secretary praises Taiwan's Covid-19 response during rare high-level visit

      by

      The US health secretary, Alex Azar, has met with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, in the highest-level US visit in more than four decades, pledging “strong support and friendship” from president Donald Trump.The meeting in Taipei on Monday threatened to escalate worsening tensions between the Washington and Beijing, the latter of whom’s government claims Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China, taking issue with any acknowledgement of Taiwan’s status as a sovereign state.Azar, a US cabinet member, is the most senior American official to visit Taiwan since Washington broke off official ties in 1979 to grant diplomatic recognition to Beijing.Applauding Taiwan’s response to the Covid-19 crisis, he said: “Taiwan’s response to Covid-19 has been among the most successful in the world, and that is a tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan’s society and culture.”“President Tsai’s courage and vision in leading Taiwan’s vibrant democracy are an inspiration to the region and to the world,” he said.As China’s relations with the US and other Western countries have deteriorated over the past year, Taiwan has gained more support in the international community with countries supporting Tsai’s calls for his country’s inclusion in the World Health Organization.While Washington broke off official ties 40 years ago, it has maintained close relations with Taiwan and Trump has ramped up US support for Taipei with arms sales and legislation in the face ofopposition from China.Increasingly, Taiwan’s democratically elected government is also being held up as a foil to China’s ruling Chinese communist party, which critics say is growing more authoritarian under Xi Jinping. The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted further divisions as some countries blame China’s lack of transparency for the outbreak.Tsai, who has been branded by Beijing as a “separatist”, said it was “highly regrettable” that China had blocked its participation in the WHO during a pandemic.Tsai won re-election in January and has received a boost in popularity for her government’s handling of the virus, which has resulted in just seven deaths on the island.Thanking the US for its support of Taiwan’s bid to attend the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, the president said: “Political considerations should never take precedence over the right to health. The decision to bar Taiwan from participating in the World Health Assembly is a violation of the universal rights to health.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      India and China: A Time for Diplomacy, Not Confrontation

      by

      Chinese and Indian forces have pulled back from their confrontation in the Himalayas, but the tensions that set off the deadly encounter this past June — the first on the China–India border since 1975 — are not going away. Indeed, a poisonous combination of local disputes, regional antagonisms and colonial history could pose a serious danger to peace in Asia.

      In part, the problem is Britain’s colonial legacy. The “border” in dispute is an arbitrary line drawn across terrain that doesn’t lend itself to clear boundaries. The architect, Henry McMahon, drew it to maximize British control of a region that was in play during the 19th-century “Great Game” between England and Russia for control of Central Asia. Local concerns were irrelevant.

      Han and Hindu Nationalism Come Face to Face

      READ MORE

      The treaty was signed between Tibet and Britain in 1914. Although India accepts the 550-mile McMahon Line as the border between India and China, the Chinese have never recognized the boundary. Mortimer Durand, Britain’s lead colonial officer in India, drew a similar “border” in 1893 between Pakistan (India’s “Northern Territories” at the time) and Afghanistan that Kabul has never accepted, and which is still the source of friction between the two countries. Colonialism may be gone, but its effects still linger.

      Although the target for the McMahon Line was Russia, it has always been a sore spot for China, not only because Beijing’s protests were ignored, but also because the Chinese saw it as a potential security risk for its western provinces. England had already humiliated China in the two Opium Wars as well as by seizing Shanghai and Hong Kong. If it could lop off Tibet — which China sees as part of its empire — so might another country… like India.

      A Threat to China?

      Indeed, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and absorbed Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, the Chinese saw the grab as a threat to the security of Tibet and its restive western province of Xinjiang. The area in which the recent fighting took place, the Galwan Valley, is close to a road linking Tibet with Xinjiang.

      The nearby Aksai Chin, which China seized from India in the 1962 border war, not only controls the Tibet-Xinjiang highway, but also the area through which China is building an oil pipeline. The Chinese see the pipeline — which will go from the Pakistani port of Gwadar to Kashgar in Xinjiang — as a way to bypass key choke points in the Indian Ocean controlled by the US Navy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The $62-billion project is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a piece of the huge Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure and increase trade between South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and China.

      China moves 80% of its oil by sea and is increasingly nervous about a budding naval alliance between the United States and Beijing’s regional rivals, India and Japan. In the yearly Malabar exercises, the three powers’ war-game closes the Malacca Straits through which virtually all of China’s oil passes. The Pakistan-China pipeline oil will be more expensive than tanker supplied oil — one estimate is five times more — but it will be secure from the US.

      In 2019, however, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah pledged to take back Aksai Chin from China, thus exposing the pipeline to potential Indian interdiction.

      From China’s point of view the bleak landscape of rock, ice and very little oxygen is central to its strategy of securing access to energy supplies. The region is also part of what is called the world’s “third pole,” the vast snowfields and glaciers that supply the water for 11 countries in the region, including India and China. Together, these two countries make up a third of the world’s population but have access to only 10% of the globe’s water supplies. By 2030, half of India’s population — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water.

      The “pole” is the source of 10 major rivers, most of them fed by the more than 14,000 thousand glaciers that dot the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. By 2100, two-thirds of those glaciers will be gone, the victims of climate change. China largely controls the “pole.” It may be stony and cold, but it is the lifeblood to 11 countries in the region.

      Back in Time

      The recent standoff has a history. In 2017, Indian and Chinese troops faced-off in Doklam — Dongland to China — the area where Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim come together. There were fistfights and lots of pushing and shoving, but casualties consisted of black eyes and bloody noses. But the 73-day confrontation apparently shocked the Chinese. “For China, the Doklam stand-off raised fundamental questions regarding the nature of India’s threat,” says Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

      Doklam happened just as relations with the Trump administration were headed south, although tensions between Washington and Beijing date back to the 1998-99 Taiwan crisis. At that time, President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the area, one of which traversed the Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland. The incident humiliated China, which re-tooled its military and built up its navy in the aftermath.

      In 2003, President George W. Bush wooed India to join Japan, South Korea and Australia in a regional alliance aimed at “containing” China. The initiative was only partly successful, but it alarmed China. Beijing saw the Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” and the current tensions with the Trump administration as part of the same strategy. If one adds to this the US anti-missile systems in South Korea, the deployment of 1,500 Marines to Australia and the buildup of American bases in Guam and Wake, it is easy to see why the Chinese would conclude that Washington had it out for them.

      China has responded aggressively, seizing and fortifying disputed islands and reefs, and claiming virtually all of the South China Sea as home waters. It has rammed and sunk Vietnamese fishing vessels, bullied Malaysian oil rigs and routinely violated Taiwan’s airspace.

      China has also strengthened relations with neighbors that India formally dominated, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives, initiatives which India resents. In short, there are some delicate diplomatic issues in the region, ones whose solutions are ill-served by military posturing or arms races.

      The dust-up in the Galwan Valley was partly an extension of China’s growing assertiveness in Asia. But the Modi government has also been extremely provocative, particularly in its illegal seizure of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Galwan incident, the Indians were building an airfield and a bridge near the Chinese border that would have allowed Indian armor and modern aircraft to potentially threaten Chinese forces.

      Dangerous Thoughts

      There is a current in the Indian military that would like to erase the drubbing India took in its 1962 border war with China. The thinking is that the current Indian military is far stronger and better armed than it was 58 years ago, and it has more experience than the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The last time the Chinese army went to war was its ill-fated invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But that is dangerous thinking. India’s “experience” consists mainly of terrorizing Kashmiri civilians and an occasional firefight with lightly-armed insurgents. In 1962, India’s and China’s economies were similar in size. Today, China’s economy is five times larger and its military budget four times greater.

      China is clearly concerned that it might face a two-front war: India to its south, the US and its allies to the west. That is not a comfortable position, and one that presents dangers to the entire region. Pushing a nuclear-armed country into a corner is never a good idea.

      The Chinese need to accept some of the blame for the current tensions. Beijing has bullied smaller countries in the region and refused to accept the World Court’s ruling on its illegal occupation of a Philippine reef. Its heavy-handed approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and its oppressive treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, is winning it no friends, regionally and internationally.

      There is no evidence that the US, India and China want a war, one whose effect on the international economy would make COVID-19 look like a mild head cold. But since all three powers are nuclear-armed, there is always the possibility — even if remote — of things getting out of hand.

      In reality, all three countries desperately need one another if the world is to confront the existential dangers of climate change, nuclear war and pandemics. It is a time for diplomacy and cooperation, not confrontation.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Harry Truman and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki | Letters

      by

      Clifton Daniel is right about his grandfather’s bombing of Hiroshima (‘He felt he had to do it’, 4 August). “That was no decision!” Harry S Truman told me when I interviewed him in July 1963 in the presidential library in Independence, Missouri. I was a postgraduate student and had come to ask him about Hiroshima, the case study at the centre of my recently completed thesis on presidential decision-making. At a stroke, the very core of my research was undercut by the amiable old man.Truman, who had only become president a few weeks before Hiroshima upon the sudden death of Franklin D Roosevelt, told me how FDR’s advisers, notably the venerable secretary of war, Henry L Stimson, persuaded him that dropping the atomic bomb on people was the one initiative that might bring the war in the Pacific to a rapid end, without the need for a protracted invasion of the Japanese islands at the cost of a million more lives. When I asked Truman about the dangers of nuclear radiation, or whether the bomb was really used to impress or scare the Soviets, all this was dismissed as the dreamings of people who weren’t present at the time and were speculating about matters they weren’t competent to judge. “All the atomic bomb was,” said Truman, “was a big bomb to end the war. And it did end it too!”I told him I had always had visions of the US president pacing the corridors of the White House, like Lincoln during the civil war, weighed down by the pressure of the job. Truman laughed. “I never lost sleep over any decision I had to make,” he said, adding confidentially: “Your Winston was the same, you know!”As I left, Truman told me that, if I’d wanted to focus on a real decision – the biggest, most important he had had to make as president – I should have turned my attention to the US entry into Korea a few years later.Daniel SnowmanSenior research fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London• Whether the bombing of Hiroshima or the entry of the Soviet Union into the war was the crucial event in causing the Japanese surrender can never be conclusively settled (Hiroshima at 75: bitter row persists over US decision to drop the bomb, 5 August). However, very little is said about the motives for the second bomb, on Nagasaki three days later. Few argued that it was necessary to reinforce the message of Hiroshima. Rather, the military and scientific imperative was to test a different bomb design – “Fat Man”, an implosion type using plutonium, as opposed to the uranium of Hiroshima’s “Little Boy”. To my mind that, destroying a mainly civilian city for such reasons, makes it even more of a war crime, if that is possible, than the bombing of Hiroshima.Frank JacksonFormer co-chair, World Disarmament Campaign More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      With the BRI, China Still Has a Long Road Ahead

      by

      To determine whether China can deliver a better Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we must first ask whether Beijing is first of all capable of delivering a better BRI? Accusations of practicing debt-trap diplomacy and new forms of colonialism have had some impact on Beijing’s thinking, resulting in its pivot in 2018 to commit to a new, greener BRI, but the foundation of its “grand plan” for implementing the BRI basically remains similar to when it started in 2013.

      Beijing’s BRI Hubris Comes at a Price

      READ MORE

      President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CCP) have put some good-looking window dressing on the basic package, but so far, many BRI host country governments would say not all that much has changed since 2018, when Xi announced a pivot. Beijing is very good at saying one thing and doing another, as numerous governments around the world have learned. As a result, BRI host nations will inevitably believe that Beijing has had a real change of heart when they see it.

      Deaf Ear

      Part of Beijing’s problem is that it does not appear to be attuned to what the world is thinking. Perhaps it does not care. Reading Chinese media reports on the subject leaves one with the impression that the world is in unison and harmony with Beijing, its vision for the world and its performance thus far with the BRI. For example, according to  the CCP’s primary media outlet, the China Daily, a 2018 survey of 8,500 people in 17 BRI countries determined that “more than 70% agreed with the concepts of the “Chinese Dream,” the Belt and Road and “a community with a shared future for mankind.” But even this Chinese government-sponsored survey admitted that 64% of respondents believed that the BRI will confront many difficulties and challenges in the future.

      That concern was echoed by a 2019 survey by Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, which polled more than 1,000 respondents in the government sector, the business community, civil society, academia and the media from across all 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It found that fewer than 10% of respondents viewed China as “a benign and benevolent power,” 64% had little or no confidence that Beijing’s revised approach to the BRI will result in a fairer deal for their respective countries, and nearly 50% responded that they believed that Beijing possessed an intent to turn Southeast Asia into its own sphere of influence. That does not sound like a particularly inspiring foundation from which to try to turn things around.

      Beijing knows it has a long road ahead. To its credit, it has issued regulations intended to better monitor the conduct of state-owned enterprises and private Chinese businesses, mandating that they should pay more attention to environmental, social, integrity, financial and other risk factors. If a particular host nation’s laws are weak, these entities have been advised to ensure compliance with Chinese law, international treaties and conventions, and industry best practices. Reporting requirements, capital controls, and the regulation of overseas finance and investment have been tightened, which has contributed to the notable decline in new Chinese overseas loans and investments since 2017.

      Outside the Norm

      That said, Beijing has generally been reluctant to apply its laws to the activities of its entities overseas. In fact, State Council guidance requiring extensive disclosure of contracts for major construction projects expressly exempts overseas investment and foreign aid projects. Laws criminalizing the bribery of foreign officials have never been enforced. Although Chinese courts have heard cases related specifically to the BRI, unless a project contract contains explicit obligations for which performance is sought, enforcement of Chinese laws for overseas actions almost never occurs. Beijing appears to be banking on the fact that a great many of the BRI’s host governments have worse transparency and corruption ratings than China, which presumably makes their willingness to pursue Chinese entities engaged in corruption less likely in the first place.

      As long as Beijing continues to insist that only Chinese entities will provide financing for BRI projects, there is no way for external organizations to monitor transparency, corruption or adherence to international standards. That will, by itself, ensure that tension remains between Beijing, BRI host nations and the West, and signals to the world that Beijing is not in fact serious about reforming fundamental aspects of the initiative. Greater emphasis can be placed on taking some care not to blatantly violate national laws and international norms, allowing Beijing to proclaim that progress is being made, but that will continue to be on a relative scale.

      If practices were previously wholly outside the norm of internationally acceptable behavior but they are improved, they can remain outside the norm of acceptable behavior even though they have improved. More than minor tweaks are required to demonstrate that a true pivot has occurred. Beijing certainly has the ability to implement meaningful wholesale change to the BRI if it chooses to, but it has yet to do so. Based on its prior history of performance regarding its flagship initiative, such changes stand little chance of being implemented.

      *[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 213 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Think 'sanctions' will trouble China? Then you're stuck in the politics of the past | Ai Weiwei

      by

      The Trump administration has floated the idea of sanctioning Chinese officials and members of the Communist party of China. Before we ask whether this is a good idea, let’s ask how Sino-US relations got to this stage.The US cold war with the Soviet Union was over ideology, but today’s standoff with China is different. The Chinese state has no ideology, no religion, no moral agenda. It continues wearing socialist garb but only as a face-saving pretence. It has, in fact, become a state-capitalist dictatorship. What the world sees today is a contest between the US system of free-market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism. How should we read this chessboard?The post-Mao dictatorship in China has lived by the principle of “repress at home and be open to the world”. It has imported knowhow from abroad. There are an estimated 360,000 Chinese students currently enrolled who have come through America’s open door. Over 40 years, at least a million have returned to China and fed their new technical knowledge into the existing authoritarian structures that have built the dictatorship. It might be the most momentous personnel transfer in history. When I applied to study in the US in the 1980s, I filled out a questionnaire that asked if I had ever been a member of the Communist party. The point of the question was presumably to avoid ideological risks. But it is beyond doubt that the Chinese students coming in with me included many party members who were headed to some of the US’s finest schools, often with scholarships. Americans generally assumed that these students would feel the appeal of liberal values, which they would then take back to China. What happened more often, though, was that Chinese students were quick to see the cultural differences between the two countries, and to draw the very logical conclusion that American values are fine for America but would never work in the Chinese system.If those US hopes for the exportation of values had panned out, much of China would have been won over by now. But what has actually happened? Returnees are now leaders in much of Chinese business and industry, but anti-American expression in China is as strong today as it has been since the Mao era.Washington bears much of the responsibility for what has happened. In the years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, administrations of both parties touted the absurd theory that the best plan was to let China get rich and then watch as freedom and democracy evolved as byproducts of capitalist development.But did capitalist competition, that ravenous machine that can chew up anything, change China? The regime’s politics did not change a whit. What did change was the US, whose business leaders now approached the Chinese dictatorship with obsequious smiles. Here, after all, was an exciting new business partner: master of a realm in which there were virtually no labour rights or health and safety regulations, no frustrating delays because of squabbles between political parties, no criticism from free media, and no danger of judgment by independent courts. For European and US companies doing manufacture for export, it was a dream come true.Money rained down on parts of China, it is true. But the price was to mortgage the country’s future. Society fell into a moral swamp, devoid of humanity and difficult to escape. Meanwhile, the west made their adjustments. They stopped talking about liberal values and gave a pass to the dictatorship, in which Deng Xiaoping’s advice of “don’t confront” and Jiang Zemin’s of “lie low and make big bucks” made fast economic growth possible.European and American business thrived in the early stages of the China boom. They sat in a sedan chair carried up the mountain by their Chinese partners. And a fine journey it was – crisp air, bright sun – as they reached the mountain’s midpoint. But then the chair-carriers laid down their poles and began demanding a shift. They, too, sought the top position. The signal from the political centre in China changed from “don’t pick fights” to “go for it”. Now what could the western capitalists do? Walk back down the mountain? They hardly knew the way.Covid-19 has jolted the US into semi-awareness of the crisis it faces. The disease has become a political issue for its two major political parties to tussle over, but the real crisis is that the western system itself has been challenged. The US model appears to others as a bureaucratic jumble of competing interests that lacks long-term vision and historical aspiration, that omits ideals, that runs on short-term pragmatism, and that in the end is hostage to corporate capital.Are sanctions the way to go? A foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing recently remarked words to the effect that the US and China are so economically interlocked that they would amount to self-sanctions. The US, moreover, would be no match for China in its ability to endure suffering. And there he was correct: in dictatorships, sacrifices are not borne by the rulers. In the 1960s Mao said: “Cut us off? Go ahead – eight years, 10 years, China has everything.” A few years later Mao had nuclear weapons and was not afraid of anyone.The west needs to reconsider its systems, its political and cultural prospects, and rediscover its humanitarianism. These challenges are not only political, they are intellectual. It is time to abandon the old thinking and the vocabulary that controls it. Without new vocabulary, new thinking cannot be born. In the current struggle in Hong Kong, for example, the theory is simple and the faith is pure. The new political generation in Hong Kong deserves careful respect from the west, and new vocabulary to talk about it.“Sanctions” is a cold war term that names an old policy. If the US can’t think beyond them, the primacy of its position in this changing world will disappear. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in World Politics

      The Mother of All War Crimes

      by

      As Americans once again struggle with the very idea of having a history, let alone reflecting on its significance, an article in The Nation originally published in 2015 marks the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It offers its readers a reminder of an event that no one has forgotten but whose monumental significance has been consistently distorted, if not denied.

      Japan’s surrender in 1945 officially ended World War II. It marked a glorious moment in history for the United States. But most serious historians agree on one fact that everyone has insisted on forgetting. The war would have ended without the demonstration of American scientific and military prowess carried out at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives.

      Interactive: The Story of World War II

      READ MORE

      If history has any meaning, humanity should have applied to August 6, 1945, the very words President Franklin D. Roosevelt used at the beginning of America’s war with Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. More than Pearl Harbor, August 6, 1945, should be remembered as “a date which will live in infamy.” 

      In the article originally published to mark the 70th anniversary of the events that led to the end of World War II, the author, Gar Alperovitz, reminds us that almost every US military leader at the time counseled against dropping the bomb. It cites the testimony of Admiral William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief of staff; Henry “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces; Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet; and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., commander of the US Third Fleet.

      All these senior officers agreed that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment.” Even Major General Curtis LeMay, who nearly 30 years later tried to push John F. Kennedy into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, agreed that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

      General Dwight Eisenhower, the future president, also believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” But Eisenhower added this consideration of profound geopolitical importance, which directly contradicts the official pretext given by the government and repeated in the official narrative, that thousands of American soldiers would die in the final assault on Japan. “I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” he said.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      World opinion:

      The understanding people across the globe have of how a hegemonic power works for or against their interests, a phenomenon that hegemonic powers learn to ignore as soon as they become convinced of the stability and durability of their hegemony

      Contextual Note

      World War II marked a sea-change in geopolitics. It literally ushered in the era of technological rather than purely military and economic hegemony. The real point of the bomb was to provide a graphic demonstration of how technological superiority rather than mere economic and military clout would define hegemony in the decades to come. That’s why the US has been able to consistently lose wars but dominate the global economy.

      “President Truman’s closest advisers viewed the bomb as a diplomatic and not simply a military weapon,” Alperovitz writes. It wasn’t just about ending the war but modeling the future. Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, “believed that the use of atomic weapons would help the United States more strongly dominate the postwar era.” He seemed to have in mind the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower would later denounce.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Eisenhower’s prediction about world opinion in the aftermath of the nuking of Japan was apparently wrong. Polls taken in 1945 showed that only 4% of Americans said they would not have used the bomb. Relieved to see the war over, the media and governments across the globe made no attempt to mobilize world opinion against a manifest war crime.

      On the basis of the letters to the editor of The Times, one researcher nevertheless reached the conclusion that, in the UK, a majority of “civilians were outraged at the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” This probably reflects opinion across most of Europe. The Vatican roundly condemned the use of nuclear weapons, even two years before the bombing of Japan and then again after the war, but it had little impact on public opinion.

      Focused on the drama of the Nuremberg trials rather than the mass destruction in Japan, the nations of the world very quickly adjusted to the fatality of living with the continued presence of nuclear bombs. They even accepted the bomb as a stabilizing norm in what quickly became the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. After all, the idea of mutuality in the strategy of mutually assured destruction seemed to keep things in some sort of precarious balance. 

      With history effectively rewritten in a manner agreeable to the hegemony-minded governments of the US, American soft diplomacy — spearheaded to a large extent by Hollywood — did the rest. The American way of life almost immediately became a global ideal, only peripherally troubled by Godzilla and other disturbing radioactive mutants.

      Takeshi Matsuda explained in a 2008 article in the Asia-Pacific Journal: “By the end of World War II, the U.S. government had recognized how important a cultural dimension of foreign policy was to accomplishing its broad national objectives.” Those “national objectives” had clearly become nothing less than global hegemony.

      Historical Note

      Post-World War II history contains a cruel irony. An inhuman nuclear attack on Japanese civilians became perceived as the starting point of a new world order under the leadership of the nation that perpetrated that attack. The new world order has ever since been described as the “rule of law.” 

      Because the new order relied on the continued development of nuclear weapons, it might be more accurate to call it a “rule of managed terror.” It was built on the notion of fear. Over the following decades, the vaunted rule became increasingly dependent on a combination of expanding military might, mass surveillance, technological sophistication and the capacity of operational weapons to strike anywhere with great precision but without human intervention.

      In his article, Gar Alperovitz quotes a pertinent remark in 1946 of Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., who called “the first atomic bomb … an unnecessary experiment. … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” But Halsey was mistaken. The scientists didn’t drop the bombs. The politicians — especially Harry Truman, with whom the buck was destined to stop — ordered it. And bomber pilots did the dropping. But Halsey’s intuition about the rise of technology as the key to hegemony was correct.

      Whether Truman understood what was happening, or whether he was an unwitting tool of a group of American Dr. Strangeloves (the former Nazis were already being recruited), no historian has been able to determine. Fox News journalist Chris Wallace, in his book on Truman and the bomb, claims that the president “agonized over it,” as well he should have. 

      The problem that remains for those who seek to understand the significance of our global history is that once the deed was done, Truman’s and everyone else’s agonizing ended. Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously “murdered sleep,” but America’s official historians, in the years following Hiroshima, succeeded in putting the world’s moral sense to sleep.

      Humanity is still on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Some of the bellicose discourse we hear today may be bluff. But the US military has elaborated concrete plans for a nuclear war with China, and preparations for that war are already taking place. As journalist John Pilger points out, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been pushing hard to foment a war mentality among the American public, partly because it is part of Trump’s reelection strategy and partly because Pompeo is “an evangelical fanatic who believes in the ‘rapture of the End.’”

      World opinion, if our democracies knew how to consult it, would undoubtedly prefer the plain and simple annihilation of our nuclear capacity. But the dream of a democracy of humanity, in the place of competing nation-states, dwells only in an obscure political and psychological limbo, existing as something between an empty promise and wishful thinking.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More