Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way:

That, in a nutshell, was the postwar version of U.S. exceptionalism and Washington was then planning to manage the world in such a way as to maintain that remarkably grotesque disparity. The only obstacle Kennan saw was poor people demanding a share of the wealth.

Today, as humanity confronts a looming climate catastrophe, what’s needed is a new political-economic project. Its aim would be to replace such exceptionalism and the hoarding of the earth’s resources with what’s been called “a good life for all within planetary boundaries.”

Back in 1948, few if any here were thinking about the environmental effects of the over-consumption of available resources. Yet even then, however unknown, this country’s growing wealth had a dark underside: the slow-brewing crisis of climate change. Wealth all too literally meant the intensified extraction of resources and the production of goods. As it happened, fossil fuels (and the greenhouse gases that went with their burning) were essential to every step in the process.

Today, the situation has shifted — at least a bit. With approximately 4% of the world’s population, the United States still holds about 30% of its wealth, while its commitment to over-consumption and maintaining global dominance remains remarkably unshaken. To grasp that, all you have to do is consider the Biden White House’s recent Indo-Pacific Strategy policy brief, which begins in this telling way: “The United States is an Indo-Pacific power.” Indeed.

In 2022, the relationship between wealth, emissions, and climate catastrophe has become ever clearer. In the crucial years between 1990 and 2015, the global economy expanded from $47 trillion to $108 trillion. During that same period, global annual greenhouse-gas emissions grew by more than 60%. Mind you, 1990 was the year in which atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) first surpassed what many scientists believed was the level of safety — 350 parts per million, or ppm. Yet in the 22 years since then, more CO2 and other greenhouse gases have been emitted into the atmosphere than in all of history prior to that date, as atmospheric CO2 careened past 400 ppm in 2016 with 420 ppm now fast approaching.

Inequality and emissions

Growing global wealth is closely associated with growing emissions. But the wealth and responsibility for those emissions are not shared equally among the planet’s population. On an individual level, the wealthiest people on Earth consume — and emit — far more than their poorer counterparts. The richest 10% of the world’s population, or about 630 million people, were responsible for more than half of the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions over the last quarter-century. On a national level, rich countries are, of course, home to far more people with high levels of consumption, which means that the larger and wealthier the country, the greater its emissions.

In terms of per capita income, the United States ranks 13th in the world. But the countries above it on the list are mostly tiny, including some of the Persian Gulf states, Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Switzerland. So, despite their high per-capita emissions, their overall contribution isn’t that big. As the third largest country on this planet, our soaring per-capita emissions have, on the other hand, had a devastating effect.

With a population of around 330 million, the United States today has less than a quarter of either China’s population of more than 1.4 billion or India’s, which is just under that figure. Four other countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan — fall into the population range of 200 to 300 million, but their per-capita gross domestic products (GDPs) and their per-capita emissions are far below ours. In fact, the total U.S. GDP of more than $19 trillion far exceeds that of any other country, followed by China at $12 trillion and Japan at $5 trillion.

In sum, the United States is exceptional when it comes to both its size and wealth. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn then that, until 2006, it was also by far the world’s top CO2 emitter. After that, it was surpassed by a fast-developing China (though that country’s per capita emissions remain less than half of ours) and no other country’s greenhouse gas emissions come close to either of those two.

To fully understand different countries’ responsibility, it’s necessary to go past yearly numbers and look at how much they’ve emitted over time, since the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere don’t disappear at the end of the year. Here again, one country stands out above all the others: the United States, whose cumulative emissions reached 416 billion tons by the end of 2020. China’s, which didn’t start rising rapidly until the 1980s, reached 235 billion tons in that year, while India trailed at 54 billion.

Having first hit 20 billion tons in 1910, U.S. cumulative emissions have only shot up ever since, while China’s didn’t hit that 20 billion mark until 1979. So the U.S. got a big head start and, cumulatively speaking, is still way ahead when it comes to taking down this planet.

The U.S. Climate Action Network (USCAN) argues that excessive emitters like the United States have already used up far more than their “fair share” of this planet’s carbon budget and so, in fact, owe a huge carbon debt to the rest of the world to make up for their outsized contribution to the problem of climate change over the past two centuries. Unfortunately, the 2015 Paris Agreement’s voluntary, non-enforceable, and nationally determined limits on emissions functionally let rich countries continue on their damaging ways.

In fact, nations should be held responsible for repaying their carbon debt. The world’s poorest people, who have contributed practically nothing to the problem, deserve access to a portion of the remaining budget and to the sort of aid that would enable them to develop alternative forms of energy to meet their basic needs.

Under the fair-share proposal, it’s not enough for the United States just to stop adding emissions. This country needs to repay the climate debt it’s already incurred. USCAN calculates that to pay back its fair share the United States must cut its emissions by 70% by 2030, while contributing the cash equivalent of another 125% of its current emissions every year through technical and financial support to energy-poor nations.

Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal proposal adopted the concept of the “fair share.” True leadership in the global climate fight, Sanders has argued, means recognizing that “the United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life.”

On this subject, however, his voice and others like it sadly remain far outside the all-too-right-wing mainstream. (And if you doubt that, just check Joe Manchin’s recent voting record.)

Are we making progress thanks to new technologies?

In 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on our chances of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade — the goal that the countries involved in the Paris Agreement, including the United States, accepted as their baseline for action. It concluded that, to have a 50% chance of staying below that temperature increase, our future collective emissions couldn’t exceed 480 gigatons (or 480 billion tons). That, in other words, was humanity’s remaining carbon budget.

Unfortunately, as of 2018, global emissions were exceeding 40 gigatons a year, which meant that even if they were flattened almost immediately (not exactly a likelihood), we would use up that budget in a mere dozen years or so. Worse yet, despite a Covid-induced decline in 2020, global emissions actually rebounded sharply in 2021.

Most scenarios for emission reductions, including those proposed by the IPCC, rely optimistically on new technologies to enable us to get there without making substantive changes in the global economy or in the excessive consumption of the world’s richest people and countries. Such technological advances, it’s hoped, would allow us to produce as much, or possibly more energy from renewable sources and even possibly begin removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to support the likelihood of such progress, especially in the time we have left. No matter how much new technology we develop, there seems to be no completely “clean” form of energy. All of them — nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, biomass, and perhaps others still to be developed — rely on massive industrial operations to extract finite resources from the earth; factories to process them; facilities to create, store, and transmit energy; and, in the end, some form of waste (think batteries, solar panels, old electric cars, and so on). Every form of energy will have multiple dangerous environmental impacts. Meanwhile, as the use of alternative forms of energy production increases worldwide, it hasn’t yet reduced fossil-fuel use. Instead, it’s just added to our growing energy consumption.

It’s true that the world’s wealthiest countries have achieved some gains in decoupling economic growth from rising emissions. But much of this relatively minor decoupling is attributable to a shift from the use of coal to natural gas, along with the outsourcing of particularly dirty industries. Decoupling has, as yet, made no dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and seems unlikely to accelerate or even continue at a meaningful enough pace after these first and easiest steps have been taken. So almost all climate modeling, like that of the IPCC, suggests that new technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will also be needed to counter rising emissions.

But negative emissions technologies are largely aspirational at this point. Instead of counting on what still to a significant extent remain technological fantasies, while the wealthy continue their profligacy, it’s time to shift our thinking more radically and focus, as I do in my new book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, on how to reduce extraction, production, and consumption in far more socially just ways, so that we can indeed begin to live within our planet’s means. Call it “post-growth” or “degrowth” thinking.

Make no mistake: we can’t live without energy and we desperately do need to turn to alternatives to fossil fuels. But alternative energies are only going to be truly viable if we can also greatly reduce our energy needs, which means reconfiguring the global economy. If energy is a scarce and precious resource, then ways must be found to prioritize its use to meet the urgent needs of the world’s poor, rather than endlessly expanding the luxuries of the wealthiest among us. And that’s precisely what degrowth thinking is all about: scaling back the mindless pursuit of production, consumption, and profit in favor of “human wellbeing and ecological stability.”

Abandoning Exceptionalism

In April 2021, President Biden made a dramatic announcement, setting a new goal for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to reduce them 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. Sounds pretty good, right?

But given that this country’s CO2 emissions had hit a high of 6.13 billion tons in 2005, that means by 2030 we’d still be emitting three billion tons of CO2 a year. Even if we could reach net-zero by 2050, our country alone would, by then, have used up one quarter of the entire remaining carbon budget for the planet. And right now, given the state of the American political system, there’s neither a genuine plan nor an obvious way to reach Biden’s goal. If we stay on our current path — and don’t count on that if the Republicans take Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024 — we would barely achieve a 30% reduction by 2030.

At this point, there’s no guarantee we’ll stay on that path, no matter the political party in power. After all, consider just this:

And let’s not even talk about the military-industrial-congressional complex and war. After all, the Department of Defense is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and emitter of CO2 in the world. Between its worldwide bases, promotion of the arms industry, and ongoing global wars, our military alone produces annual emissions greater than those of wealthy countries like Sweden and Denmark.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the climate-change meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in the fall of 2021, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry insisted repeatedly that the United States must work to bring China on board. Joe Biden too kept his attention focused on China. And indeed, given its greenhouse gas emissions and still-expanding use of coal, China does have a big role to play. But to the rest of the world, such an insistence on diverting attention from our own role in the climate crisis rings hollow indeed.

A 2021 study shows that almost all of the world’s remaining coal, not to speak of most of its gas and oil reserves, will need to stay in the ground if global warming is to be kept below 1.5 degrees centigrade. Back in 2018, another study found that even to meet a 2-degree centigrade goal, which it’s now all too clear would be catastrophic in climate-change terms, humanity would have to halt all new fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and immediately start decommissioning fossil-fuel-burning plants. Instead, such new facilities continue to be built in a relentless fashion globally. Unless the United States, which bears by far the greatest responsibility for our climate emergency, is ready to radically change course, how can it demand that others do so?

But to change course would mean to abandon exceptionalism.

Degrowth scholars argue that, rather than risking all of our futures on as-yet-unproven technologies in order to cling to economic growth, we should seek social and political solutions that would involve redistributing the planet’s wealth, its scarce resources, and its carbon budget in ways that prioritize basic needs and social wellbeing globally.

That, however, would require the United States to acknowledge the dark side of its exceptionalism and agree to relinquish it, something that, in March 2022, still seems highly unlikely.

Aviva Chomsky writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her latest book, Is Science Enough?  Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice, is just about to be published.

Copyright ©2022 Aviva Chomsky — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 March 2022
Word Count: 2,482
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A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world.

Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it’s important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, the Biden administration’s proposed Pentagon budget (as well as related work like nuclear-warhead development at the Department of Energy) was already guaranteed to soar even higher than that, perhaps to $800 billion or more for 2023.

Here’s the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that’s anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis.

Some supporters of higher Pentagon spending have, in fact, been promoting figures as awe inspiring as they are absurd. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, is advocating a trillion-dollar military budget, while Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council called for the United States to prepare to win simultaneous wars against Russia and China. He even suggested that Congress “could go so far as to double its defense spending” without straining our resources. That would translate into a proposed annual defense budget of perhaps $1.6 trillion. Neither of those astronomical figures is likely to be implemented soon, but that they’re being talked about at all is indicative of where the Washington debate on Pentagon spending is heading in the wake of the Ukraine disaster.

Ex-government officials are pressing for similarly staggering military budgets. As former Reagan-era State Department official and Iran-Contra operative Elliott Abrams argued in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled “The New Cold War”: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] will need to be spent on defense.” Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that “we need a larger, more advanced military in every branch, taking full advantage of new technologies to fight in new ways.” No matter that the U.S. already outspends China by a three-to-one margin and Russia by 10-to-one.

Truth be told, current levels of Pentagon spending could easily accommodate even a robust program of arming Ukraine as well as a shift of yet more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe. However, as hawkish voices exploit the Russian invasion to justify higher military budgets, don’t expect that sort of information to get much traction. At least for now, cries for more are going to drown out realistic views on the subject.

Beyond the danger of breaking the budget and siphoning off resources urgently needed to address pressing challenges like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice, a new Cold War could have devastating consequences. Under such a rubric, the U.S. would undoubtedly launch yet more military initiatives, while embracing unsavory allies in the name of fending off Russian and Chinese influence.

The first Cold War, of course, reached far beyond Europe, as Washington promoted right-wing authoritarian regimes and insurgencies globally at the cost of millions of lives. Such brutal military misadventures included Washington’s role in coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the war in Vietnam; and support for repressive governments and proxy forces in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America, and Indonesia. All of those were justified by exaggerated — even at times fabricated — charges of Soviet involvement in such countries and the supposed need to defend “the free world,” a Cold War term President Biden all-too-ominously revived in his recent State of the Union address (assumedly, yet another sign of things to come).

Indeed, his framing of the current global struggle as one between “democracies and autocracies” has a distinctly Cold War ring to it and, like the term “free world,” it’s riddled with contradictions. After all, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines, all too many autocracies and repressive regimes already receive ample amounts of U.S. weaponry and military training — no matter that they continue to pursue reckless wars or systematically violate the human rights of their own people. Washington’s support is always premised on the role such regimes supposedly play in fighting against or containing the threats of the moment, whether Iran, China, Russia, or some other country.

Count on one thing: the heightened rhetoric about Russia and China seeking to undermine American influence will only reinforce Washington’s support for repressive regimes. The consequences of that could, in turn, prove to be potentially disastrous.

Before Washington embarks on a new Cold War, it’s time to remind ourselves of the global consequences of the last one.

Cold War I: The coups Dwight D. Eisenhower is often praised as the president who ended the Korean War and spoke out against the military-industrial complex. However, he also sowed the seeds of instability and repression globally by overseeing the launching of coups against nations allegedly moving towards communism or even simply building closer relations with the Soviet Union.

In 1953, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA instigated a coup that led to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeqh. In a now-declassified document, the CIA cited the Cold War and the risks of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression” as rationales for their actions. The coup installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, initiating 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for the 1979 Iranian revolution that would bring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz. His “crime”: attempting to redistribute to poor peasants some of the lands owned by major landlords, including the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Arbenz’s internal reforms were falsely labeled communism-in-the-making and a case of Soviet influence creeping into the Western Hemisphere. Of course, no one in the Eisenhower administration made mention of the close ties between the United Fruit Company and both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Such U.S. intervention in Guatemala would prove devastating with the four decades that followed consumed by a brutal civil war in which up to 200,000 people died.

In 1973, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger followed Eisenhower’s playbook by fomenting a coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, installing the vicious dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. That coup was accomplished in part through economic warfare — “making the economy scream,” as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it — and partly thanks to CIA-backed bribes and assassinations meant to bolster right-wing factions there.  Kissinger would justify the coup, which led to the torture, imprisonment, and death of tens of thousands of Chileans, this way: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Vietnam and its legacy The most devastating Cold War example of a war justified on anti-communist grounds was certainly the disastrous U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It would lead to the deployment there of more than half a million American troops, the dropping of a greater tonnage of bombs than the U.S. used in World War II, the defoliation of large parts of the Vietnamese countryside, the massacre of villagers in My Lai and numerous other villages, the deaths of 58,000 U.S. troops and up to 2 million Vietnamese civilians — all while Washington systematically lied to the American public about the war’s “progress.”

U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in earnest during the administrations of Presidents Harry Truman and Eisenhower, when Washington bankrolled the French colonial effort there to subdue an independence movement. After a catastrophic French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. took over the fight, first with covert operations and then counterinsurgency efforts championed by the administration of John F. Kennedy. Finally, under President Lyndon Johnson Washington launched an all-out invasion and bombing campaign.

In addition to being an international crime writ large, in what became a Cold War tradition for Washington, the conflict in Vietnam would prove to be profoundly anti-democratic. There’s no question that independence leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the nationwide election called for by the 1954 Geneva Accords that followed the French defeat. Instead, the Eisenhower administration, gripped by what was then called the “domino theory” — the idea that the victory of communism anywhere would lead other countries to fall like so many dominos to the influence of the Soviet Union — sustained an undemocratic right-wing regime in South Vietnam.

That distant war would, in fact, spark a growing antiwar movement in this country and lead to what became known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a public resistance to military intervention globally. While that meant an ever greater reliance on the CIA, it also helped keep the U.S. out of full-scale boots-on-the-ground conflicts until the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Instead, the post-Vietnam “way of war” would be marked by a series of U.S.-backed proxy conflicts abroad and the widespread arming of repressive regimes.

The defeat in Vietnam helped spawn what was called the Nixon Doctrine, which eschewed large-scale intervention in favor of the arming of American surrogates like the Shah of Iran and the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Those two autocrats typically repressed their own citizens, while trying to extinguish people’s movements in their regions. In the case of Indonesia, Suharto oversaw a brutal war in East Timor, greenlighted and supported financially and with weaponry by the Nixon administration.

“Freedom fighters” Once Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981, his administration began to push support for groups he infamously called “freedom fighters.” Those ranged from extremist mujahideen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan to Jonas Savimbi’s forces in Angola to the Nicaraguan Contras. The U.S. funding and arming of such groups would have devastating consequences in those countries, setting the stage for the rise of a new generation of corrupt regimes, while arming and training individuals who would become members of al-Qaeda.

The Contras were an armed right-wing rebel movement cobbled together, funded, and supplied by the CIA. Americas Watch accused them of rape, torture, and the execution of civilians. In 1984, Congress prohibited the Reagan administration from funding them, thanks to the Boland amendment (named for Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Boland). In response, administration officials sought a work-around. In the end, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Marine and member of the National Security Council, would devise a scheme to supply arms to Iran, while funneling excess profits from the sales of that weaponry to the Contras. The episode became known as the Iran-Contra scandal and demonstrated the lengths to which zealous Cold Warriors would go to support even the worst actors as long as they were on the “right side” (in every sense) of the Cold War struggle.

Chief among this country’s blunders of that previous Cold War era was its response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a policy that still haunts America today. Concerns about that invasion led the administration of President Jimmy Carter to step up weapons transfers through a covert arms pipeline to a loose network of oppositional fighters known as the mujahideen. President Reagan doubled down on such support, even meeting with the leaders of mujahideen groups in the Oval Office in 1983. That relationship would, of course, backfire disastrously as Afghanistan descended into a civil war after the Soviet Union withdrew. Some of those Reagan had praised as “freedom fighters” helped form al-Qaeda and later the Taliban. The U.S. by no means created the mujahideen in Afghanistan, but it does bear genuine responsibility for everything that followed in that country.

As the Biden administration moves to operationalize its policy of democracy versus autocracy, it should take a close look at the Cold War policy of attempting to expand the boundaries of the “free world.” A study by political scientists Alexander Downes and Jonathon Monten found that, of 28 cases of American regime change, only three would prove successful in building a lasting democracy. Instead, most of the Cold War policies outlined above, even though carried out under the rubric of promoting “freedom” in “the free world,” would undermine democracy in a disastrous fashion.

A new Cold War? Cold War II, if it comes to pass, is unlikely to simply follow the pattern of Cold War I either in Europe or other parts of the world.  Still, the damage done by the “good versus evil” worldview that animated Washington’s policies during the Cold War years should be a cautionary tale. The risk is high that the emerging era could be marked by persistent U.S. intervention or interference in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the name of staving off Russian and Chinese influence in a world where Washington’s disastrous war on terrorism has never quite ended.

The United States already has more than 200,000 troops stationed abroad, 750 military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, and continuing counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. The end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the dramatic scaling back of American operations in Iraq and Syria should have marked the beginning of a sharp reduction in the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Washington’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now stand in the way of just such a much-needed military retrenchment.

The “us versus them” rhetoric and global military maneuvering likely to play out in the years to come threaten to divert attention and resources from the biggest risks to humanity, including the existential threat posed by climate change. It also may divert attention from a country — ours — that is threatening to come apart at the seams.  To choose this moment to launch a new Cold War should be considered folly of the first order, not to speak of an inability to learn from history.

Nick Cleveland-Stout is a researcher at the Quincy Institute. Taylor Giorno is a researcher at the Quincy Institute. William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the author most recently of the Quincy Institute Issue Brief “Pathways to Pentagon Spending Reductions: Removing the Obstacles.” His most recent book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex. This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2022 Nick Cleveland-Stout, Taylor Giorno, William Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 March 2022
Word Count: 2,352
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Greenville, CA — Snow began falling on December 24th, big fluffy flakes that made lace on mittens before melting. Within hours it had coated the ashes, the brick chimneys that the flames had left behind, and the jagged remains of roofs strewn across my burned-out town. White mounds soon softened the look of charred cars that are everywhere, while even the scorched trees that stretch to the hilltops were coated in a forgiving winter wonder.

Any moisture would have been welcome. Over the seven months since the Dixie fire destroyed Greenville and several other rural communities in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains, the drought that led to the flaming disaster had only deepened. October brought brief, drenching rains, but November and December were dry again. Soil that should have been moist was as desiccated as the air, while the humidity hovered just above single digits. We watched bulldozers move the dilapidated walls — what had not long ago been homes — into gigantic dump trucks in a haze of grime. Even the trees that survived had a withered look. Now, it was snowing — for Christmas! We greeted it with hearts as wide as the open mouths of kids savoring falling flakes.

Greenville, my adopted town of 46 years, had been devastated by a climate-change disaster. Sparked by the negligence of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the Dixie fire scorched nearly one million acres, the distance, if you care to measure, from Philadelphia to New York City. On August 4th, a pyrocumulus cloud collapsed on the ridge above the tarnished old Gold Rush community where I worked, erupting into red-hot embers that fell over a several square-mile area. Trees were transformed into towering torches. Flames roared down the nearby mountain, racing through overcrowded forests left bone dry (after a century of ill-advised fire suppression) by a third year of drought. It took less than 45 minutes for that inferno to raze the historic 160-year-old downtown, including my journalism office on the second floor of the oldest building around. About 800 homes went up in flames. Over the next four months, we gathered in grief in twos and threes in the post offices and shops of neighboring towns, soothing one another.

Now, it was Christmas and snowing! We relaxed and rejoiced amid the ruins.

Little did we know that, driven by our overheated planet, we were about to be whiplashed from drought to deluge. Hotter days and hotter nights have corkscrewed our weather patterns into spiraling extremes, leaving entire regions around the world jerked from the hottest temperatures they’ve known to the coldest, from devastating fires to disastrous floods. This is uncharted territory and, scientists say, an all-too-grim preview of the future we’re creating for ourselves.

By the fourth day of non-stop snow our euphoria had waned. Electricity was flickering on and off. The Internet was mostly off. We shoveled our steps and then the paths to our cars, only to find them covered all over again. Driveways were challenging and roads treacherous (if open at all). Snow was piling up across the Sierra Nevada, the gigantic tilted block of granite that lies along the state line with Nevada.

At Lake Tahoe, 75 miles to the south, 18 feet of snow was dumped on luxury second homes, collapsing decks, and taxing municipal snow-removal crews gone soft after years of mild winters. Highway 80, the main route over the mountains, was closed for three days by storms that made December the third snowiest month on record and the snowiest December ever. Those storms catapulted the state’s precipitation to 258% of its average for that point in the year. California water officials were giddy with expectation, predicting that our three-year-old drought would be broken.

Then, of course, it ended. Precipitation of any kind simply stopped. January clocked in as the driest ever for some parts of the state, as well as most of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado. Last month was the driest February in 128 years, according to a multi-agency partnership monitoring drought. And here’s the truth of it: if we keep letting greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, we better get used to this sort of seesaw experience. Scientists say that, by century’s end, such abrupt transitions between wet and dry will increase by another 25% in northern California and possibly double that in southern California.

Weather whiplash While California may be a poster child for extreme weather events, they are occurring almost everywhere. Such wild swings from tinder-dry to inundation are known as climate or weather whiplash. What causes them is a matter of scientific speculation and the subject of much cutting-edge research, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some scientists cite a connection between the polar vortex, a wall of wind that circles the Arctic, and jet streams, the bands of strong winds that generally blow from west to east. As the Arctic warms — at as much as triple the average global rate — it seems to be destabilizing those jet streams and so, according to a study published in Environmental Research, provoking abnormal and extreme weather across the planet.

Swain thinks we should imagine it as a colossal tug of war involving complex atmospheric dynamics over the Pacific Ocean. Yes, he says, the world is definitely getting warmer as greenhouse-gas concentrations rise. That, in turn, means wet times will generally be wetter and dry times drier, especially in California. He’s also found emerging evidence, as he told me, of what he calls “a relatively weird” regional effect: the loss of Arctic sea ice might actually be counteracting the drying effect of the expanding subtropical zone, keeping California from becoming more arid still in a warming world.

People in my community know local weather and the land. Ranchers, loggers, and firefighters, they understand storms and seasons, soil, water, and trees in an up close and personal way. I’ve found my place among them over these years, writing about their work and their love of the landscape we share. We here in Greenville may not know anything about what the intersection of the polar vortex and jet streams or atmospheric dynamics are doing to our world, but we certainly know when our environment is off kilter. Being jerked from the drought that provoked the Dixie fire to that historic snowfall and back again has left us with little doubt: something with the weather is seriously bonkers.

The unexpected uncertainty of weather we once took for granted is spawning anxieties that add to the trauma of living through a town-destroying fire. Instead of one disaster and done, weather whiplash threatens us with disaster after disaster. Having somehow survived fire, we’ve been thrust into a deeply uncertain future. The forests we turned to for hiking, fishing, and birdsong no longer promise solace. The natural world that welcomed and kept us in this valley ringed by mountains has become unreliable. What can we trust?

A Is for Anthropocene When it comes to weather whiplash, Australia is exhibit A for Anthropocene, the current geological epoch dominated by the human impact on the environment. Storms have been pounding that island nation’s southeast coast since late February, earning the moniker “rain bombs” for their severity. In just two days, the town of Doon Doon in New South Wales received 42 inches of rain, roughly Washington, D.C.’s annual precipitation. Flooding has killed 22 people so far, prompting Prime Minister Scott Morrison to declare a national emergency. This round of extreme wet weather follows the catastrophic bushfires of 2020 that killed 28 people and more than a billion animals, while scorching an area nearly the size of Connecticut in a fashion never before seen.

Worse yet, as we in California have discovered, the recovery time for communities between such climate disasters is shrinking. Simon Bradshaw, a researcher at the Australian Climate Council, summed things up simply enough: “New South Wales was hit hard by the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and now it is in the grips of another climate-driven disaster.”

Then there’s Texas.  During the last decade that state has reeled from one of the most significant droughts since the 1950s to a series of deluges that have rivaled any period of flooding Texas has ever experienced. Rainfall in 2011 was 25 inches below average, forcing mandatory water restrictions. Meteorologist Jeff Lindner called the heat in Houston that August a 10,000-year event. Over the 2011 Labor Day weekend, vegetation primed by that drought combined with 40 mile-per-hour winds to produce the Bastrop fire, the single most devastating wildfire in that state’s history. It burned more than 35,000 acres and around 1,600 homes, while the Tricounty fire incinerated over 19,000 acres and 100 homes.

Then the weather seesawed. By the time Hurricane Harvey made landfall at Port Aransas on August 27, 2017, the area had rocketed from drought to deluge. Rainfall for the year was nearly 30 inches above the annual average. Netherland, a city on the Gulf of Mexico, recorded more than 60 inches. The devastation Harvey wreaked affected an estimated 13 million people and included at least 107 deaths, nearly 135,000 homes damaged or destroyed (one third of the total number in four counties), and up to a million wrecked cars.

Governor Greg Abbott, a veteran climate-change denier who has threatened to sue President Biden over policies addressing the crisis, conceded that something was changing dramatically. “We need to recognize that this is going to be a new normal. A new and different normal for the entire region,” he said.

Even when such weather swings don’t create disasters, they have tangible consequences. Across the American Midwest, for instance, weather whiplash is driving a decline in municipal water quality. After excessive flooding followed a drought in 2012, researchers at the University of Kansas noticed a nitrogen spike in surface waters in the area. In dry times, the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers put in their fields doesn’t go into the plants it’s intended to enrich. A 2017 study found that the nitrogen stays in the soil, which acts like a sponge, holding it in place. “But as soon as you wet it,” Amy Burgin, one of its authors, points out, “like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”

Such increasingly high nitrate levels in drinking water forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 a day to operate. As weather whiplash becomes ever more the norm, scientists expect surface-water nitrate spikes to occur throughout the agricultural Midwest.

Elsewhere, the changing patterns of various kinds of wildlife are only exacerbating the problems caused by weird weather. In eastern Oregon, for instance, widespread drought followed by deep snow has caused elk to move out of the hills to feed on the haystacks that are ranchers’ paychecks. Conflicts between wildlife and humans are already common enough, but climate scientists expect them to increase as droughts, floods, and fires push animals off their normal ranges and into agricultural areas.

Who drives the climate train? As I’ve learned all too personally, climate disasters are profoundly destabilizing. They can wrench communities from their roots and turn them upside down. They are also profoundly unjust. Those with the fewest resources and least responsible for the climate crisis are going to continue to bear the brunt of its impact.

And here’s the only good news: climate change is a problem with a solution. We humans created it, which means it’s solvable. That, however, would require societal and political will of a kind we simply haven’t seen yet. And that’s the bad news. We haven’t mustered anything close to enough determination to halt the relentless increases in temperature driving the weather that’s whiplashing us ever more violently. As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres put it, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership… that reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, put it this way: “We’re on a train going faster and faster down the tracks with perfectly functional brakes. But the drivers, for whatever reasons, are choosing not to engage the brakes.”

One of the great ironies of experiencing climate-change disaster may be that we are both its victims and its drivers. We could, at least theoretically, apply the brakes of the locomotive. In our fury over the forces of destruction beyond our control — the flames that incinerate and the floods that inundate our lives — perhaps we’ll find the political will and guts to bring meaningful change, at least on a very small scale right here in my town of Greenville.

In its charred devastation, we could now choose solar power over fossil fuels. (And if so, who would blame us for feeling smug about shunning PG&E?) We could choose community gardens over imported produce. All that, however, remains a distant future for a place with a single grocery store, a gas station, and little else. But if we must spend the rest of our lives healing, we can at least invest them in empowering one another and our community in a new way. We have so little left to lose.

Jane Braxton Little writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is an independent journalist who writes about science and natural resources for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She moved to Plumas County in 1969 for a summer that has yet to end.

Copyright ©2022 Jane Braxton Little — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 March 2022
Word Count: 2,215
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He’s our very own emperor from hell, an updated version of Nero who, in legend, burned down Rome on a whim, though ours prefers drowning Washington. Why, just the other day, Donald Trump — and you knew perfectly well who I meant — bent the ears of 250 top Republican donors for 84 minutes. Among other things, he assured those all-American (not Russian) oligarchs — and let me quote him in the Washington Post on this — that “‘the global warming hoax, it just never ends…’ He mocked the concept of sea levels rising, disputing widely held science. ‘To which I say, great, we have more waterfront property.’”

Admittedly, he’s talking about flooded property, including possibly whole cities going underwater in the decades to come, but what the hell! Yes, indeed, he was the president of the United States not so long ago and, if all goes well (for him, not us), he or some doppelganger, could win the Oval Office again in 2024, ensuring the arrival of that new, all-too-wet waterfront property. And yes, he offered up that little gem — about the 9,000th time he’s called climate change a “hoax” (sometimes blaming it on China) — just as a new scientific report came out suggesting that, if things don’t improve in fossil-fuel-burning terms, up to half of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on Earth, could be transformed into savanna. To quote the Washington Post again:

“The warming consequences of suddenly losing half the rainforest would be felt thousands of miles away and for centuries into the future, scientists warn. It would mean escalating storms and worsening wildfires, chronic food shortages and nearly a foot of sea level rise inundating coastal communities. It could trigger other tipping points, such as the melting of ice sheets or the disruption of the South American monsoon.”

Hey, Donald, what could possibly go wrong on this all-too-embattled planet of ours?

Of course, at this moment, three of the four largest greenhouse gas emitters, Russia, the U.S. (which is now allowing more drilling for oil and gas than even during Trump’s presidency), and China, are locked in what could only be thought of as a deadly embrace over Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine. And the grim war the Russian president launched seems likely to guarantee yet more fossil-fuel use on a planet that needs so much less of it, even as he also put the issue of nuclear war back on the table for the first time since the Cold War ended. How appropriate, if you’re heading into Cold War II to once again raise the possibility — forget about the next Chernobyl — of turning World War III into a nuclear one.

At this point, if you don’t mind a genuine understatement, what a strange planet we now live on.

World’s end, property of…? Once upon a time, whatever your religion, Armageddon was the property of the gods; until August 6, 1945, that is, when a lone B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay (named after its pilot’s mother), dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, essentially obliterating it.

Thought of another way, however, we humans took the power to end the world (at least as we’ve known it) out of the hands of the gods in the nineteenth century when the fossil-fuel based industrialization of Planet Earth began in earnest in Great Britain. In other words, credit our cleverness. In the space of a mere 200 or so years, we’ve developed two different ways of devastating or even ending our life on this planet. Consider that a genuine accomplishment for humanity.

As it happens, recent nuclear and climate-change news should have brought that reality to mind again. But before I even get to Vladimir Putin, the invasion of Ukraine, and the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let me mention that, more or less any week, there’s a new study (or two or three) of our climate future suggesting ever more extreme peril for us in the decades (or even months) to come: ever fiercer droughts, intensifying heat, more extreme wildfires, more melting ice, and ever rising sea levels.

Of course, like the rest of us, you already know that story, right? And of one thing you can be sure, the next scientific study, whatever it is, will only offer yet more extreme climate news (with the rarest of exceptions). In fact, I had barely begun writing notes for this piece when that IPCC study arrived on the scene with, of course, the latest round of dreadful news about where we’re heading — to a potentially “irreversible” hell in a handbasket, natch. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called it a “code red for humanity,” lamenting that the evidence it details was unlike anything he had ever seen on the subject and describing it as an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

Damning indeed on a planet where, even before the Ukrainian nightmare, it was obvious that key leaders were doing anything but greening this world fast enough for the health of humanity. And that, of course, is just the background against which all of us now operate, whether we think about it or not — and in the midst of events in Ukraine, it’s not being given much thought at all — on a planet going to… well, why insult “the dogs”?

Which brings me back to Vladimir Putin. The strange thing about that other form of planetary suicide, atomic weaponry, is that, since at least the end of the Cold War, it’s generally not been on the table (so to speak) or much in the news. Yes, in the Trump years, the president did implicitly threaten to rain nuclear hell on North Korea — he called it “fire and fury” — and, at one point, spoke of ending the Afghan War with just such a strike, but most of the time from 1990 to late last night, nuclear weapons (Iran, which didn’t have them, aside) simply weren’t part of the conversation.

Now, don’t get me wrong. In those same decades, nuclear arsenals only spread and grew. Nine countries now possess such weaponry and the three great powers on the planet — the U.S., China, and Russia — have all been hard at work. Russia has been “modernizing” its vast arsenal and China moving rapidly to build up its own.

Since Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. military-industrial complex has also been — and, yes, this is indeed the term often used — “modernizing” its already mind-boggling arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion dollars over three decades. That includes, for instance, a new intercontinental ballistic missile known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent that, it’s already estimated, will take at least 264 billion of our tax dollars over its lifetime (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin!). Keep in mind that this country already had an unmodernized arsenal all too capable of destroying this planet many times over into the distant future. With our 1,357 deployed nuclear weapons (3,750, if you count the “inactive” ones), including land-based nuclear missiles, those transported by strategic bombers, and our nuclear subs wandering the world’s waters with their own devastating nukes on board, global destruction would be a given.

With all that activity long underway to remarkably little attention, nuclear weapons — and apocalyptic possibilities — have once again hit the headlines thanks to Vladimir Putin. After all, as his troops headed into Ukraine, he suddenly and all too publicly issued a directive putting his nuclear forces on “high alert” and offered this gem to the world:

“Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”

To make his point even clearer, he promptly oversaw the test launching of four nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Since the U.S. still has plenty of tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe, consider us once again, as in the original Cold War, on edge and in a nuclear stand-off. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Russians threaten to repeat, of all things, the Chernobyl disaster by taking the nuclear plants they once set up and serviced there in a wartime blaze of horror. One has already been captured under hair-raising circumstances.

Looking back, maybe the strangest thing of all is that most Americans, maybe most people on the planet, essentially forgot about nukes. In retrospect, you have to wonder how that was ever possible, especially if you’re my age and remember ducking and covering at school in repeated nuclear test drills, while the media of that time focused on whether people should share their personal nuclear shelters with their friends and neighbors. And mind you, that was in the years when, in reality, Russian nuclear weapons couldn’t yet reach this country (though the U.S. already had the ability to devastate the communist world).

Here, then, is a strange irony: in the years when we were most truly paying attention, they couldn’t have done anything to us. Once they truly could, we essentially began forgetting those weapons. Now, however, the potential destruction of humanity is back on the table — and this time around, brilliantly enough, in two different ways.

Green what? Believe me, when you’ve been on this planet for 77 years, you feel like you’ve seen everything. And then, of course, it turns out that you haven’t. Not by a long shot. Not faintly. At 14, my grandfather, a Jew, ran away from his home in the city of Lemberg when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Between World Wars I and II, it was called Lvov and belonged to Poland. During that second great war, the Jewish population there was slaughtered by the Nazis. Since the end of that nightmarish war, it’s been known as Lviv and it’s been part of Ukraine, or rather, if Vladimir Putin has his way, the place that until recently was known as Ukraine. As a result, Lviv is again in the news, big time.

I mean, invading Ukraine at this moment? How truly mad. It’s still hard to take in what’s happening, including the million-plus children who have already fled that country. Of course, ever more people are in motion on this planet today thanks both to war and climate change. Yet, in a sense, there’s really nowhere left to go, is there?

As it turns out, our leaders have done all too good a job of providing options for ending the world. I mean, in a century when it should be hard not to know that, if the burning of fossil fuels isn’t brought under control, life as we’ve known it will cease to exist, two great powers with preening, overweening leaders thought it made far more sense to order their militaries to invade other countries based on lies. Because of that, cities were destroyed and deaths made all too plentiful. Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion and destruction of Ukraine has been denounced by much of the world led by Joe Biden’s America. Russia is now experiencing potentially devastating sanctions, while from sports to entertainment to fast food, much of the planet has been turning its back on Russia.

But here’s the odd thing: Russia invaded its neighbor, which once indeed had been part of the Soviet Union. The other great and invasive power I had in mind struck two countries thousands of miles away — Iraq (based on the lie that its autocratic ruler was developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction) and Afghanistan. And yes, as the present conflict will undoubtedly prove a catastrophe for Russia and the people of Ukraine, so those wars proved disasters for the United States but even more so for Afghans and Iraqis. Strangely enough, however, the world didn’t condemn the U.S. for its acts. No sanctions were put in place. No weaponry was sent to Afghans or Iraqis to help them defend themselves against the occupying imperial power. And stranger yet, in retrospect, the present president of the United States, then a senator, voted to invade Iraq and subsequently even developed a plan to divide that U.S.-occupied country into three different states.

And so it goes on this endangered planet of ours, while the greenhouse gasses from unending fossil-fuel burning invade our atmosphere with devastating effect, yet create next to no headlines at all.

Armageddon-makers Today, 76 years after World War II ended (I was 1 at the time), the heartland of Europe is again embroiled in war, death, and destruction. And more than three decades after the Cold War ended, the new tsar of Russia, now a rickety petro-state with an economy smaller than Italy’s, is responsible.

Confused yet? Well, you should be on this god-forsaken planet of ours.

If you look at the American experience, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan (or the Russian experience in that same country), the one thing you know is that this can’t end well, not for Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the rest of us, not on a planet that humanity insists on taking down. A tip of my hat goes to the outraged Russians who have hit the streets to protest the war in Ukraine, as Americans did (myself included), however briefly, in that spring of 2003 when the invasion of Iraq loomed.

Given our world, we should all probably be in the streets now. I mean, here we are heading into Cold War II, while facing the possibility of World War III on a planet that, thanks to the way we live and produce energy, is heading for hell. Think of climate change in its own way as perhaps the equivalent of World War IV, though somehow, while Ukraine is endlessly in the headlines, the climate emergency, no matter how horrifying the news, remains in the shadows, even as the Republicans call for yet more fossil-fuel drilling.

The peacing of Earth? Not likely. The greening of Earth? Not likely either, it seems. In our own fashion, we have indeed taken the place of ancient gods of every sort. We are now the Armageddon-makers and, sadly enough, it seems that we’re just gearing up.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2022 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 March 2022
Word Count: 2,373
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In certain quarters in this country, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has generated enthusiasm for a new cold war. At the New York Times, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been described as “children of the [old] Cold War” now involved in a “face off,” an “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation harkening back to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev contesting Berlin and Cuba in “dramatic fashion” 60 years ago. (Never mind that the “drama” over Cuba nearly led to nuclear war and the possible end of most life on Earth.) Such breathless accounts make me think of the role Slim Pickens played as Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s famed film Dr. Strangelove, giddy with resolve, even relief of a kind, now that he and his B-52 crew are finally headed for nuclear combat with the Russkies.

Whatever else one might say of the crisis in Ukraine, the new cold war dreamscape that Washington think tanks and the Pentagon helped promulgate over the last decade against Russia or China or both is here to stay. Consider that a calamity in its own right. The end of America’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disastrous results of America’s Global War on Terror launched amid a barrage of lies and self-praise, might indeed have left an opening, however slight, for a shift away from colossal military budgets and creeping militarization.

Russia’s ill-planned and immoral invasion of Ukraine marks the definitive end of that possibility, however small it might have been. Putin’s actions, whatever their motivation and justification, are being seized upon by the military-industrial-congressional complex as proof positive that Pentagon budgets, already in the stratosphere, must soar higher yet. For so many of the Putin-haters (and I’m no fan), his destructive actions supposedly demonstrate why the U.S. must be prepared to double down in kind.

That, of course, means yet more weapons production and sales globally for the country that’s already the planet’s leading purveyor of such products. It also means more bellicose rhetoric, and ultimately more militarism, because that’s all Putin and his authoritarian ilk will allegedly ever understand (as is sadly true of so many in Washington as well). Consider all this a peculiar form of American madness, akin to the idea that a guy with a gun, or better yet, lots of guys with lots of guns, the more powerful the better, are the sanest way to prevent gun violence.

Thought about a certain way, in taking such an approach, our government and, by extension, the American people are ceding our autonomy of thought and action to “bad actors” like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. For every war Putin launches, America, so we’re told, must respond with yet more weapons sales, troop deployments, debilitating sanctions, and above all, astronomically higher military spending. For every aircraft carrier the Chinese build, or any new expansion onto yet another tiny island in the South China Sea, the U.S. military must “pivot” harder toward Asia, while building yet more staggeringly expensive ships of its own. As possibilities, disengagement and détente go unmentioned. “Peace” isn’t a word American presidents favor anymore. As a result, even modest military moves by Putin and Xi are essentially guaranteed to drive the U.S. economy yet deeper into militarized debt. (As if $6 trillion already squandered on the disastrous war on terror wasn’t pricey enough.) After all, full-spectrum dominance over the global battlespace, a fantasy in the “best” of times, and a new cold war won’t come cheap, a fact that U.S. weapons manufacturers are surely banking on.

Even before the recent Russian invasion, estimates for the fiscal year 2023 Pentagon budget had risen to $770 billion or even $800 billion. With Russian tanks now rolling through (or stalled in) Ukraine, you can bet your bottom dollar that $800 billion will be the floor, not the ceiling for that future budget and the Pentagon’s 2023 demands from Congress. This country, we’re once again hearing, is to be the arsenal of democracy (to steal a phrase from the World War II era). But count on this: if you’re not careful an arsenal of democracy can easily enough devolve into little more than an arsenal. And that time, I suspect, is now.

The world is not enough Don’t misunderstand me: I condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a horror and an obvious disaster in the making. That said, Russia may have a super nuclear arsenal, but it’s not a superpower, despite all those Cold War memories of ours, nor does its attack on Ukraine, in and of itself, pose a major threat to our own national security. Indeed, experts around the world have been predicting for decades that NATO expansion, exacerbated by U.S. meddling in Ukraine, could provoke Vladimir Putin to launch just such a war. In short, Russia’s invasion was indeed predictable, even if not faintly excusable.

Nor are the Russian president’s designs on Ukraine and his quest for greater power in eastern Europe historically surprising. In fact, serious self-reflection should lead us to the obvious conclusion that the scale of Russia’s ambitions, objectionable as they might be, are also limited compared to ours.

Again, Russia remains a distinctly regional power, while the United States still fancies itself to be the last remaining superpower on planet Earth. No other country comes close to the scale of our global ambitions (and they’re higher still, if you count this country’s Trump-era Space Force with its vision that the heavens are but the next “warfighting domain” for us to dominate). In other words, in this century, when it came to our military, the world was not enough. All realms were to be under its command: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Note, in fact, that we have a military force or special military command for all of them and our leaders simply take for granted that such dominance is to be ours and no one else’s.

Think about it. Of all the countries on Earth, only the U.S. divides the entire globe into military commands run by four-star generals and admirals; only America has 750 or so military bases scattered across every continent except Antarctica; only America sees a country — I’m thinking here of Ukraine (although not so long ago it could have been Afghanistan or Iraq), roughly 5,000 miles away across a vast ocean, as its legitimate eastern flank. At the same time, only this country sees a body of water like the South China Sea as a lake for its Navy to navigate and dominate, as if it were part of our coastal waters.

Imagine, for a moment, that Russia or China had an America Command, an AMERCOM. Imagine that Russian advisors were training and equipping Canadian troops, while Chinese aircraft carrier task forces regularly sailed the Gulf of Mexico. As Americans, we, of course, can’t imagine such things and yet that’s the world we inhabit, even if in reverse.

Most of us seem to consider the imperial ambitions of this country, including the eventual expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia and the continued deployment of powerful aircraft carrier battlegroups near the coast of China, as benign, uncontroversial evidence of our military resolve. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be that hard to recognize that others on this planet might not feel quite the same way.

That America’s pursuit of global reach and global power would be seen as a challenge, indeed a provocation, by a regional power like Russia or one with full-scale imperial ambitions, even if of a largely economic sort, like China with its trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative, should surprise no one. Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, this country’s continued pursuit of full-spectrum dominance would produce a new cold war, as certain American experts predicted, and some seemed to desire.  Think of the chaotic and disturbed world we’re now living in as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, as well as a rare “triumph” of long-term strategic planning by certain elements within the national security state. What they wished for, they got. Today, it should be all too obvious that the results are anything but pleasing.

Your role as a loyal American in the new cold war My fellow Americans, in this new cold war of ours, the national security state expects both all too much and all too little of you. Let’s start with the little. It doesn’t expect you to enlist in the military if you’re rich or have “other priorities” (as former Vice President Dick Cheney said about the Vietnam War). It doesn’t expect you to pay close attention to our wars, let alone foreign policy. You don’t even have to vote. It does, however, expect you to cheer at the right times, be “patriotic,” wave the flag, gush about America, and celebrate its fabulous, militarized exceptionalism.

To enlist in this country’s cheerleading squad, which is of course God’s squad, you might choose to wear a flag lapel pin and affix a “Support Our Troops” sticker to your SUV. You should remind everyone that “freedom isn’t free” and that “God, guns, and guts” made America great. If the godly empire says Ukraine is a worthy friend, you might add a blue-and-yellow “frame” to your Facebook profile photo. If that same empire tells you to ignore ongoing U.S. drone strikes in Somalia and U.S. support for an atrocious Saudi war in Yemen, you are expected to comply. Naturally, you’ll also be expected to pay your taxes without complaint, for how else are we to buy all the weapons and wage all the wars that America needs to keep the peace?

Naturally, certain people need to be collectively despised in our very own version of George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate.” So, when Putin’s visage comes on the screen, or Xi’s, or Kim Jong-un’s, or whoever the enemy du jour is, be prepared to express your outrage. Be prepared to treat them as aliens, almost incomprehensible in their barbarity, as if, in fact, they were Klingons in the original Star Trek series. As a peaceful member of the “Federation,” dominated by the United States, you must, of course, reject those Klingon nations and their warrior vision of life, their embrace of might-makes-right, choosing instead the logic, balance, and diplomacy of America’s enlightened State Department (backed up, of course, by the world’s greatest military).

Again, little is expected of you (so far) except your obedience, which should be enthusiastic rather than reluctant. Yet whether you know it or not, much is expected of you as well. You must surrender any hopes and dreams you’ve harbored of a fairer, kinder, more equitable and just society. For example, military needs in the new cold war simply won’t allow us to “build back better.” Forget about money for childcare, a $15 federal minimum wage, affordable healthcare for all, better schools, or similar “luxuries.” Maybe in some distant future (or some parallel universe), we’ll be able to afford such things, but not when we’re faced with the equivalent of the Klingon Empire that must be stopped at any cost.

But wait! I hear some of you saying that it doesn’t have to be this way! And I agree. A better future could be imagined. A saying of John F. Kennedy’s comes to mind: “We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad.” What we’re currently doing at home is building more weapons, sinking more tax dollars into the Pentagon, and enriching more warrior-corporations at the expense of the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. Where’s the democratic future in that?

Sheer military might, our leaders seem to believe, will keep them forever riding high in the saddle. Yet you can ride too high in any saddle, making the fall that’s coming that much more precipitous and dangerous.

Americans, acting in concert, could stop that fall, but not by giving our current crop of leaders a firmer grasp of the reins. Do that and they’ll just spur this nation to greater heights of military folly. No, we must have the courage to unseat them from their saddles, strip them of their guns, and corral their war horses, before they lead us into yet another disastrously unending cold war that could threaten the very existence of humanity. We need to find another way that doesn’t prioritize weapons and war, but values compromise, compassion, and comity.

At this late date, I’m not sure we can do it. I only know that we must.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2022 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2022
Word Count: 2,080
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Just as the relentless grinding of the earth’s tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. Beneath the visible outbreak of war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Chinese naval standoff in the South China Sea, there is now an underlying shift in geopolitical power in process across the vast Eurasian landmass — the epicenter of global power on a fast-changing, overheating planet. Take a moment to step back with me to try to understand what’s now happening on this increasingly embattled globe of ours.

If geology explains the earth’s eruptions, geopolitics is the tool we need to grasp the deeper meaning of the devastating war in Ukraine and the events that led to this crisis. As I explain in my recent book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. Unlike conventional nations, whose peoples can be readily mobilized for self-defense, empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in any foreign military deployment, a surprisingly fragile form of government. To give an empire a fighting chance of survival against formidable odds requires a resilient geopolitical architecture.

For nearly 100 years, the geopolitical theories of an obscure Victorian geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, have had a profound influence on a succession of leaders who sought to build or break empires in Eurasia — including Adolf Hitler, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, most recently, Vladimir Putin. In an academic essay published in 1904, when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completing its 5,700-mile crawl from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder argued that future rails would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that, along with Africa, he dubbed the tri-continental “world island.” When that day came, Russia, in alliance with another land power like Germany — and, in our time, we might add China — could expand across Eurasia’s endless central “heartland,” allowing, he predicted, “the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight.”

As the Versailles Peace Conference opened in 1919 at the end of World War I, Mackinder turned that seminal essay into a memorable maxim about the relationship between East European regions like Ukraine, the Central Asian heartland, and global power. “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland,” he wrote. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”

At the core of recent conflicts at both ends of Eurasia is an entente between China and Russia that the world hasn’t seen since the Sino-Soviet alliance at the start of the Cold War. To grasp the import of this development, let’s freeze frame two key moments in world history — Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s Moscow meeting with the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin in December 1949 and Vladimir Putin’s summit in Beijing with Xi Jinping just last month.

To avoid facile comparisons, the historical context for each of those meetings must be kept in mind. When Mao came to Moscow just weeks after proclaiming the People’s Republic in October 1949, China had been ravaged by a nine-year war against Japan that killed 20 million people and a five-year civil war that left seven million more dead.

In contrast, having defeated Hitler, seized an empire in eastern Europe, rebuilt his socialist economy, and tested an atomic bomb, making the Soviet Union a superpower, Stalin was at the peak of his strength. In contrast to China’s army of ill-equipped infantry, the Soviet Union had a modern military with the world’s best tanks, jet fighters, and missiles. As the globe’s top communist, Stalin was “the boss” and Mao came to Moscow as essentially a supplicant.

When Mao met Stalin During his two-month trip to Moscow starting in December 1949, Mao sought desperately needed economic aid to rebuild his ravaged land and military support for the liberation of the island of Taiwan. In a seemingly euphoric telegram sent to his comrades in Beijing, Mao wrote:

But Stalin surprised Mao by refusing to give up the territorial concessions in northern China that Moscow had won at the 1945 Yalta conference, saying the issue couldn’t even be discussed until their subsequent meeting. For the next 17 days, Mao literally cooled his heels waiting during a freezing Moscow winter inside a drafty dacha where, as he later recalled, “I got so angry that I once pounded the table.”

Finally, on January 2, 1950, Mao cabled the communist leadership in Beijing:

With Russia giving up its territorial claims in exchange for assurances about demilitarizing the long border between the two countries, their leaders signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance in February 1950. It, in turn, sparked a sudden flow of Soviet aid to China whose new constitution hailed its “indestructible friendship” with the Soviet Union.

But Stalin had already planted the seeds for the Sino-Soviet split to come, embittering Mao, who later said Russians “have never had faith in the Chinese people and Stalin was among the worst.”

At first, the China alliance proved a major Cold War asset for Moscow. After all, it now had a useful Asian surrogate capable of dragging the U.S. into a costly conflict in Korea without the Soviets suffering any casualties at all. In October 1950, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into a Korean maelstrom that would drag on for three years and cost China 208,000 dead troops as well as 40% of its budget.

Following Stalin’s death in May 1953 and the Korean armistice two months later, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tried to repair relations by presiding over a massive, yet distinctly inequitable program of economic aid to China. However, he also refused to help that country build an atomic bomb. It would be a “huge waste,” he said, since China was safe under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. At the same time, he demanded the joint development of uranium mines Soviet scientists had discovered in southwest China.

Over the next four years, those initial nuclear tensions grew into an open Sino-Soviet split. In September 1959, Khrushchev visited Beijing for a disastrous seven-hour meeting with Mao. In 1962, Mao finally ended diplomatic relations entirely, blaming Moscow for failing to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. during that year’s Cuban missile crisis.

In October 1964, China’s successful test of a 22-kiloton nuclear bomb marked its arrival as a major player on the world stage. That bomb not only made it an independent world power but transformed the Sino-Soviet split from a war of words into a massive military confrontation. By 1968, the Soviet Union had 16 divisions, 1,200 jet aircraft, and 120 medium-range missiles arrayed along the Sino-Soviet border. Meanwhile, China was planning for a Soviet attack by building a nuclear-hardened “underground city” that spread for 30 square miles beneath Beijing.

Washington’s Cold War strategy More than any other event since World War II, the short-lived Sino-Soviet alliance changed the course of world history, transforming the Cold War from a regional power struggle over Eastern Europe into a volatile global conflict. Not only was China the world’s largest nation with 550 million people, or 20% of all humanity, but its new communist government was determined to reverse a half-century of imperialist exploitation and internal chaos that had crippled its international influence.

The rise of China and the conflict in Korea forced Washington to radically revise its strategy for fighting the Cold War. Instead of focusing on NATO and Europe to contain the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain, Washington now forged mutual defense pacts from Japan to Australia to secure the offshore Pacific littoral. For the past 70 years, that fortified island rim has been the fulcrum of Washington’s global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) while dominating another (Eurasia).

To tie those two axial ends of Eurasia into a strategic perimeter, Cold War Washington ringed the Eurasian continent’s southern rim with chains of steel -– including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and a string of mutual-defense pacts stretching from NATO in Europe to ANZUS in the South Pacific. It took a decade, but once Washington accepted that the Sino-Soviet split was the real thing, it belatedly began to cultivate an entente with Beijing that would leave the Soviet Union ever more geopolitically isolated, contributing to its ultimate implosion and the end of the Cold War in 1991.

That left the U.S. as the world’s dominant power. Nonetheless, even without a near-peer rival on the planet, Washington refused to cash in its “peace dividend.” Instead, it maintained its chains of steel ringing Eurasia — including those three naval fleets and hundreds of military bases, while making multiple military forays into the Middle East (some disastrous) and even recently forming a new Quadrilateral alliance with Australia, India, and Japan in the Indian Ocean. For 15 years following Beijing’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, a de facto economic alliance with China also allowed the U.S. sustained economic growth.

When Putin met Xi Last month, when Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics, it proved a stunning reversal of the Stalin-Mao moment 70 years earlier. While Russia’s post-Soviet economy remains smaller than Canada’s and overly dependent on petroleum exports, China has become the planet’s industrial powerhouse with the world’s largest economy (as measured in purchasing power) and 10 times the population of Russia. Moscow’s heavy-metal military still relies on Soviet-style tanks and its nuclear arsenal. China, on the other hand, has built the world’s largest navy, its most secure global satellite system, and its most agile missile armada, capped by cutting-edge hypersonic missiles whose 4,000 miles-per-hour speed can defeat any defense.

This time, therefore, it was the Russian leader who came to China’s capital as the supplicant. With Russian troops massing at Ukraine’s borders and U.S. economic sanctions looming, Putin desperately needed Beijing’s diplomatic backing. After years of cultivating China by offering shared petroleum and natural-gas pipelines and joint military maneuvers in the Pacific, Putin was now cashing in his political chips.

At their February 4th meeting, Putin and Xi drew on 37 prior encounters to proclaim nothing less than an ad-hoc alliance meant to shake the world. As the foundation for their new “global governance system,” they promised to “enhance transport infrastructure connectivity to keep logistics on the Eurasian continent smooth and… make steady progress on major oil and gas cooperation projects.” These words gained weight with the announcement that Russia would spend another $118 billion on new oil and gas pipelines to China. (Four-hundred billion dollars had already been invested in 2014 when Russia faced European sanctions over its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.) The result: an integrated Sino-Russian oil-and-gas infrastructure is being built from the North Sea to the South China Sea.

In a landmark 5,300-word statement, Xi and Putin proclaimed the “world is going through momentous changes,” creating a “redistribution of power” and “a growing demand for… leadership” (which Beijing and Moscow clearly intended to provide). After denouncing Washington’s ill-concealed “attempts at hegemony,” the two sides agreed to “oppose the… interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

To build an alternative system for global economic growth in Eurasia, the leaders planned to merge Putin’s projected “Eurasian Economic Union” with Xi’s already ongoing trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to promote “greater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.” Proclaiming their relations “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era,” an oblique reference to the tense Mao-Stalin relationship, the two leaders asserted that their entente has “no limits… no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”  On strategic issues, the two parties were adamantly opposed to the expansion of NATO, any move toward independence for Taiwan, and “color revolutions” such as the one that had ousted Moscow’s Ukrainian client in 2014.

Given the Ukraine invasion just three weeks later, Putin got what he so desperately needed. In exchange for feeding China’s voracious appetite for energy (on a planet already in a climate crisis of the first order), Putin got a condemnation of U.S. interference in “his” sphere. In addition, he won Beijing’s diplomatic support — however hesitant China’s leadership might actually be about events in Ukraine — once the invasion started. Although China has been Ukraine’s main trading partner since 2019, Beijing set aside those ties and its own advocacy of inviolable sovereignty to avoid calling Putin’s intervention an “invasion.”

A planet Mackinder would hardly recognize In fact, even before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and China were pursuing a strategy of ratcheting up slow, relentless pressure at both ends of Eurasia, hoping the U.S. chains of steel ringing that vast continent would sooner or later snap. Think of it as a strategy of push-push-punch.

For the past 15 years, Putin has been responding to NATO in just that manner. First, through surveillance and economic leverage, Moscow has tried to keep client states in its orbit, something Putin learned from his four years as a KGB agent working with East Germany’s Stasi secret police in the late 1980s. Next, if a favored autocrat is challenged by pro-democracy demonstrators or a regional rival, a few thousand Russian special forces are sent in to stabilize the situation. Should a client state try to escape Moscow’s orbit, however, Putin promptly moves to massive military intervention and the expropriation of buffer enclaves, as he did first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. Through this strategy, he may be well on his way to reclaiming significant parts of the old Soviet sphere of influence in East Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Due south of Moscow in the ever-volatile Caucasus Mountains, Putin crushed NATO’s brief flirtation with Georgia in 2008, thanks to a massive invasion and the expropriation of the provinces of North Ossetia and Abkhazia. After decades of fighting between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia recently sent in thousands of “peace-keeping” forces to resolve the conflict in favor of the loyal, pro-Moscow regime in Azerbaijan. Further east, when democratic protesters challenged Moscow’s local ally in Kazakhstan in January, thousands of Russian troops — under the rubric of Moscow’s version of NATO — flew into the former capital, Almaty, where they helped crush the protests, killing dozens and wounding hundreds.

In the Middle East where Washington backed the ill-fated Arab spring rebels who tried to topple Syria’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad, Moscow operates a massive air base at Latakia in that country’s northwest from which it has bombed rebel cities like Aleppo to rubble, while serving as a strategic counterweight to U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf.

But Moscow’s main push has been in Eastern Europe. There, Putin backed Belarus’s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, in crushing the democratic opposition after he had rigged the 2020 elections, and so making Minsk a virtual client state. Meanwhile, he’s been pressing relentlessly against Ukraine since his loyal client there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” First, he seized Crimea in 2014 and then he armed separatist rebels in that country’s eastern region adjacent to Russia. Last month, after proclaiming that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia,” Putin recognized the “independence” of those two separatist enclaves, much as he had done years before in Georgia.

On February 24th, the Russian president sent nearly 200,000 troops across the Ukraine’s borders to seize much of the country and its capital, Kyiv, as well as replace its feisty president with a pliable puppet. As international sanctions mounted and Europe considered providing Ukraine with jet fighters, Putin ominously put his nuclear forces on high alert to make it clear he would brook no interference with his invasion.

Meanwhile, at the eastern end of Eurasia, China has pursued a somewhat similar, if more subtle push-push strategy, with the punch yet to come. Starting in 2014, Beijing began dredging a half-dozen military bases from atolls in the South China Sea, slowly ramping up their role from fishing ports to full-fledged military bases that now challenge any passing U.S. naval patrol. Then came swarming fighter squadrons over the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, followed, last October, by a joint Chinese-Russian fleet of 10 ships that steamed provocatively around Japan in what had previously been considered unchallenged U.S. waters.

If Xi follows Putin’s playbook, then all that push/push could indeed lead to a punch — possibly an invasion of Taiwan to reclaim lands Beijing sees as an integral part of China, much as Putin sees Ukraine as a former Russian imperial province that should never have been given away.

Should Beijing attack Taiwan, Washington might find itself hamstrung to do anything militarily except express admiration for the island’s heroic yet futile resistance. Should Washington send its aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Straits, they would be sunk within hours by China’s formidable DF-21D “carrier-killer” missiles or its unstoppable hypersonic ones. And once Taiwan was gone, Washington’s position on the Pacific littoral could be effectively broken and a retreat to the mid-Pacific preordained.

All of this looks possible on paper. However, in the grim reality of actual invasions and military clashes, amid the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, and on a planet that’s seen better days, the very nature of geopolitics is likely to be up for grabs. Yes, it’s possible that, if Washington is whipsawed between the eastern and western edges of Eurasia with periodic eruptions of armed combat from the Xi-Putin entente, its chains of steel could strain and finally snap, effectively evicting it from that strategic land mass.

As it happens, though, given a Sino-Russian alliance so heavily based on the trade in fossil fuels, even if Vladimir Putin doesn’t himself go down thanks to his potentially disastrous invasion of Ukraine, both Beijing and Moscow may find themselves whipsawed in the years to come by a troubled energy transition and climate change. The ghost of Sir Halford Mackinder might then point out to us not just that U.S. power will fade with the loss of Eurasia, but that so much other power may fade as well on an ever hotter, ever more endangered planet he couldn’t in his lifetime have truly imagined.

Alfred W. McCoy writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His new book, just published, is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

Copyright ©2022 Alfred W. McCoy — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 March 2022
Word Count: 3,113
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In recent days, experts have begun laying out the potential hardships the Russian invasion of Ukraine might inflict here in the United States, thousands and thousands of miles from the battle zone. As former White House national security official Richard Clarke bluntly put it, “Russia will bring the war to our homeland.” He pointed to potential damage in two particular realms, possible Russian cyberattacks and disinformation meant to unsettle our domestic politics. Similarly, economists and financial firms are predicting what an ongoing war in Ukraine could mean in terms of rising prices for wheat, vegetable oil, and oil and gas, among other commodities.

How different this sense of potential damage is than that expressed when, in the wake of 9/11, America went to war globally with its invasion of Afghanistan and its war on terror.  As the president of that moment, George W. Bush, insisted so confidently in 2001, Americans should simply “go shopping” and not be distracted by the country’s distant battles. As he later put it, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

At the heart of those claims was the thought that foreign wars could be fought by a great power without damage at home — or put another way, that the theaters of conflict for the Global War on Terror were somehow eternally separable from the daily lives of Americans. But tell that to the country that elected Donald Trump as president 15 years later and has been coming apart at the seams ever since.

With the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a possible Potemkin superpower, it already seems clear that Bush’s notion no longer holds (if it ever did) when it comes to war on this planet, no matter where it takes place or which power initiates it. Even though the current conflict isn’t directly our war, one thing is guaranteed: its outcome will be of major significance to the well-being of this country and the international order, thanks to an all-too-basic reality — that the global and the local in today’s world are now virtually indistinguishable. This will, in fact, be the key lesson the ongoing war in Ukraine holds for us as a nation.

The twenty-first century From the American perspective, the inseparable and dangerous nature of the relationship between the U.S. and the world has been creeping up on us ever since this century began.  The post-9/11 installation of airport screenings, perpetually reminding us of the threat of the global war on terror, was one early sign. Since then, the number of life-threatening dangers has swelled immeasurably.

After all, our children, like those the world over, have been going to school for nearly two years now wearing masks. While the discomfort and distancing those face shields represented may have been burdensome, the underlying reality was the fear of becoming infected with Covid-19, given the six million deaths it has caused worldwide. And among other dangers in our American world, even the wave of shootings at our schools and other public places in these years has had a global dimension, linked as some of them were to white extremist attacks abroad. Notably, in April 2019, the synagogue shooter in California praised an avowed white supremacist who had murdered Muslims in Christ Church, New Zealand, earlier that year (as did the gunman in the 2019 Walmart shootings in El Paso, Texas). And since then, the global ties among white supremacists bent on anti-immigrant violence have only escalated.

Within such a context of war, disease, and fear in which the local and the global continue to merge, there are now some simmering realities the Russian war in Ukraine has exposed in new and powerful ways.

The nuclear threat Like the pandemic, the threat of nuclear warfare has long recognized neither boundaries nor borders.  Remember, for instance, that President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was premised on the lie manufactured as a pretext for war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Beyond that the Iran nuclear deal and concern about North Korea’s growing nuclear capabilities have been constant themes in the international news in these years.

Ukraine, however, threatens to take the fear of a nuclear disaster to a new level. There was, of course, Vladimir Putin’s ominous announcement that he was putting the Russian nuclear arsenal on “high alert,” as well as the drills the Russians conducted with land-based missiles and nuclear subs. As spokespeople for the Nuclear Threat Initiative pointed out, that was his grim way of trying to “deter outside interference with his invasion of Ukraine.”

Unfortunately, such a threat only increases the risk of catastrophic mistakes. In addition, within 24 hours of the invasion, Russian troops had gained access to the still-dangerous remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant buried in concrete after a meltdown in 1986 that took 47 lives, devastated crops in Ukraine and neighboring countries, and led to an estimated exposure of 530,000 people to nuclear fallout. Later, they seized and burned part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which happens to be the largest in Europe.

Imagine that, in our future, the equivalent of the duck-and-cover drills of my childhood may once again become a reality.

Climate change and clean energy The Ukraine crisis has exposed the inseparability of the local and the global in another way: energy policy and threats from climate change. As much as this conflict may be about the post-Cold War order, NATO, and Putin’s appetite for heightening the stakes, it’s also about oil and gas. The new Nord Stream 2 pipeline Russia has built to Germany was specifically intended to bypass Ukraine and so deny it the profits that might come from transporting Russian fossil fuels to Europe. (Under the auspices of Nord Stream 2, by the way, the profits of the oil and gas industry in the region were expected to double, enriching both Russia and Western oil enterprises.) Opponents have argued that the pipeline “would make Germany and a few other countries slaves to Russian gas.” As Eric Reguly, the Berlin-based European bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, explained, the move to build Nord Stream 2 was seen as “intensifying Europe’s fossil fuel reliance when it should be devoting its might and creativity to renewable energy.”

It’s no mistake that Putin launched this campaign during the cold of winter. He was well aware of Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas for its heating in a world in which the threat of climate change has failed to substantially redirect the energy policies of either our country or so many others in significant enough ways.  Despite President Biden’s attempts to address climate change — including rejoining the Paris climate accord, empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, and aiming to get the U.S. to “net-zero” by 2050 — his remedies have not been equal to the task. Many of his moves have been thwarted, of course, by Republican opposition in Congress, with even worse possibly to come in the near future from a right-wing Supreme Court.

Democrats have proposed a Climate Civilian Corps to address the climate emergency and our younger generations have indeed displayed an urge to counter the warming of our world. In May of 2021, a Pew Research poll showed that “32% of Gen Zers and 28% of Millennials have taken at least one of four actions (donating money, contacting an elected official, volunteering or attending a rally) to help address climate change in the last year.” Significantly, the poll indicated that, even among Republicans, 49% of Gen Zers and 48% of Millennials “say action to reduce the effects of climate change needs to be prioritized today, even if that means fewer resources to deal with other important problems.”

Yet the move to clean energy in this country is, at best, creeping along at a snail’s pace. And no matter how forward-thinking the green-energy movement itself may be, the megadrought in the Southwest (of a sort not seen in 1,200 years) and California’s raging mega-fires that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands are indications of just how far short this country (and the rest of the world) are falling in terms of responding to climate change.

Whatever else happens, the pressing need for energy independence and non-greenhouse-gas-producing fuels should be one of the key lessons learned from the Ukraine-Russia crisis. With nuclear threats in the air, profits seem to diminish in importance. With the onset of this conflict, in fact, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was halted by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has brought energy policy to the forefront of world affairs not because of fires or flooding or the erosion of beaches or intolerable temperatures or even the recent devastating Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, but because the threat Russia poses to world stability has suddenly clarified the stakes involved in not prioritizing clean energy.

Cyber threats A third issue of both local and global importance to which the Ukraine crisis has instantly lent a new level of awareness is the potential damage cyberattacks could cause — in Ukraine, of course, but far beyond as well, including in the United States. As Richard Clarke pointed out recently, Vladimir Putin could bring the global danger of cyberattacks home to each and every one of us. “Russia could attempt to prevent anyone’s online access to key parts” of the global and local financial system, he pointed out. Cyberattacks could similarly target our power grids and so the electricity that runs our homes, businesses, trains, and more.

Beyond fears of running out of cash or losing electricity, there’s yet another danger posed by the weaponizing of cyberspace — information warfare. “Russian trolls, bots, and disinformation experts,” Clarke reminds us, have been used to stoke conflict in American politics for years now. Old videos of bloodshed, published as if they were part of the current Ukraine conflict, have started filling social-media sites as Russia attempts to use disinformation to counter resistance in that country with its own online version of military successes.

Dealing with such social-media disinformation is a global problem that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later via laws, international accords, and new regulations. For now, Facebook’s parent company Meta and several other social media giants have actively thwarted the spread of false information on Ukraine, removing both accounts and websites. But far more will need to be done.

Displaced persons Yet another arena where the overlap of the global and local has been highlighted by the Russian war is the world’s ever-expanding population of displaced people, including refugees. In November 2021, there were an estimated 84 million of them worldwide.

The plight of Ukrainian refugees is increasing those numbers exponentially.  In just the first days of that conflict, they have already reached an estimated million and a half. Experts are currently predicting that such refugee flows could hit five million as the war plays out. Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Moldova have offered to take in such refugees, largely women and children, for the time being, but their long-term sustenance will undoubtedly pose significant challenges, especially if the situation in Ukraine isn’t settled soon.

The United States, too, has been challenged by a refugee response recently.  Dozens of American agencies have become involved in helping the 76,000 Afghans who have arrived here since the U.S. withdrew its troops in August, after defeat in our war there. Across the country, from Philadelphia to Texas to Seattle, help has been offered for their sustenance, shelter, medical care, and even schooling. However, in a country that, in the Trump era, has been increasingly riven by the very idea of refugees and immigrants coming here, tensions may only continue to rise.

Once again, in the context of refugees, the local and the global are merging in worrying ways, underscoring the urgent need for new strategies and policies.

Facing the future from the present, not the past In search of explanatory paradigms for the current crisis, experts and pundits keep rummaging through the past — Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet incursions into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, not to mention the Cold War paradigm that infuses Vladimir Putin’s thinking and increasingly Washington’s as well. In all too many ways, unfortunately, such invocations of the past fail to offer us help. They are distractions rather than guideposts.

The current conflict in Ukraine demands that we look to the present and the future on this increasingly endangered planet of ours. It’s time to recognize that, whether you’re talking about nuclear weapons, cyberattacks, refugees, pandemics, or the fate of a fast-warming planet, that conflict stands in for the most pressing global and local realities of this century, not the previous one.

The war there should be a wake-up call. Its unmistakable directive: accept the realities of the twenty-first-century world. We are so much more interconnected than we care to acknowledge and, with that in mind, we need new norms and protections in place of those that have led us to this point on an all-too-new and dangerous planet.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of the newly published Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press). Julia Tedesco helped with research for this piece.

Copyright ©2022 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 March 2022
Word Count: 2,193
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake — freedom will prevail,” President Biden asserted in a televised address to the nation the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. But while Russia and the West disagree on many issues of principle, this is not a replay of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical twenty-first-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If comparisons are in order, think of this moment as more akin to the situation Europe confronted prior to World War I than in the aftermath of World War II.

Geopolitics — the relentless struggle for control over foreign lands, ports, cities, mines, railroads, oil fields, and other sources of material and military might — has governed the behavior of major powers for centuries. Think of Gibraltar, Pearl Harbor, the diamond mines of Africa, or the oil fields of the Middle East. Aspiring world powers, from the Roman Empire on, have always proceeded from the assumption that acquiring control over as many such places as possible — by force if necessary — was the surest path to greatness.

During the Cold War, it was considered uncouth in governing circles to openly express such blatantly utilitarian motives. Instead, both sides fabricated lofty ideological explanations for their intense rivalry. Even then, though, geopolitical considerations all too often prevailed. For example, the Truman Doctrine, that early exemplar of Cold War ideological ferocity, was devised to justify Washington’s efforts to resist Soviet incursions in the Middle East, then a major source of oil for Europe (and of revenue for American oil firms).

Today, ideological appeals are still deployed by top officials to justify predatory military moves, but it’s becoming ever more difficult to disguise the geopolitical intent of so much international behavior. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is the most ruthless and conspicuous recent example, but hardly the only one. For years now, Washington has sought to counter China’s rise by bolstering U.S. military strength in the western Pacific, prompting a variety of countermoves by Beijing. Other major powers, including India and Turkey, have also sought to extend their geopolitical reach. Not surprisingly, the risk of wars on such a global chessboard is likely to grow, which means understanding contemporary geopolitics becomes ever more important. Let’s begin with Russia and its quest for military advantage.

Fighting for position in the European battlespace Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified his invasion in ideological terms by claiming that Ukraine was an artificial state unjustly detached from Russia. He’s also denigrated the Ukrainian government as infiltrated by neo-Nazis still seeking to undo the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. These considerations seem to have grown more pervasive in Putin’s mind as he assembled forces for an attack on Ukraine. Nevertheless, these should be viewed as an accumulation of grievances overlaying an all too hardcore set of geopolitical calculations.

From Putin’s perspective, the origins of the Ukrainian conflict date back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when NATO, taking advantage of Russia’s weakness at the time, relentlessly expanded eastward. In 1999, three former Soviet-allied states, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all previously members of the Warsaw Pact (Moscow’s version of NATO), were incorporated into the alliance; in 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia were added, along with three former actual republics of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). For NATO, this staggering enlargement moved its own front lines of defense ever farther from its industrial heartlands along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Meanwhile, Russia’s front lines shrank hundreds of miles closer to its borders, putting its own heartland at greater risk and generating deep anxiety among senior officials in Moscow, who began speaking out against what they saw as encirclement by hostile forces.

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe,” Putin declared at a Munich Security Conference in 2007. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

It was, however, NATO’s 2008 decision to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, that thoroughly inflamed Moscow’s security anxieties. After all, Ukraine shares a 600-mile border with Russia, overlooking a large swath of its industrial heartland. Should it ever actually join NATO, Russian strategists feared, the West could deploy powerful weapons, including ballistic missiles, right on its border.

“The West has explored the territory of Ukraine as a future theater, future battlefield, that is aimed against Russia,” Putin declared in a fire-breathing address on February 21st, just before Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. “If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

For Putin and his top security aides, the invasion was primarily intended to preclude such a future possibility, while moving Russia’s front lines farther from its own vulnerable heartland and thereby enhancing its strategic advantage in the European battlespace. As it happens, they seem to have underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against them — both the determination of ordinary Ukrainians to repel the Russian military and the West’s unity in imposing harsh economic sanctions — and so are likely to emerge from the fighting in a worse position. But any geopolitical foray of this magnitude entails such draconian risks.

Mackinder, Mahan, and U.S. strategy Washington, too, has been guided by cold-blooded geopolitical considerations over the past century-plus and, like Russia, has often faced resistance as a result. As a major trading nation with a significant dependence on access to foreign markets and raw materials, the U.S. has long sought control over strategic islands globally, including Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, using force when needed to secure them. That quest continues to this day, with the Biden administration seeking to preserve or expand U.S. access to bases in Okinawa, Singapore, and Australia.

In such endeavors, U.S. strategists have been influenced by two major strands of geopolitical thinking. One, informed by the English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), held that the combined Eurasian continent possessed such a large share of global wealth, resources, and population that any nation capable of controlling that space would functionally control the world. From that followed the argument that “island states” like Great Britain and, metaphorically speaking, the United States, had to maintain a significant presence on the margins of Eurasia, intervening if necessary to prevent any single Eurasian power from gaining control over all the others.

The American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) similarly held that, in a globalizing world where access to international commerce was essential to national survival, “control of the seas” was even more critical than control of Eurasia’s margins. An ardent student of British naval history, Mahan, who served as president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1886 to 1893, concluded that, like Britain, his country must possess a powerful navy and a range of overseas bases to advance its status as a preeminent global trading power.

From 1900 on, the United States has pursued both geopolitical strategies, though on opposite sides of Eurasia. With respect to Europe, it has largely hewed to Mackinder’s approach. During World War I, despite widespread domestic misgivings, President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to intervene by the Anglo-French argument that a German victory would lead to a single power capable of dominating the world and so threatening vital American interests. The same line of reasoning led President Franklin Roosevelt to support U.S. entry into World War II in Europe and his successors to deploy substantial forces there to prevent the Soviet Union (today, Russia) from dominating the continent. This, in fact, is NATO’s essential reason for existing.

In the Asia-Pacific theater, however, the United States has largely followed Mahan’s approach, seeking control over island military bases and maintaining the region’s most powerful naval force. When, however, the U.S. has gone to war on the Asian mainland, as in Korea and Vietnam, disaster and ultimate withdrawal followed. As a result, Washington’s geopolitical strategy in our time has focused on maintaining island military bases across the region and ensuring that this country keeps its overwhelming naval superiority there.

Great-power competition in the 21st century In this century, Washington’s increasingly fraught post-9/11 global war on terror (GWOT), with its costly and futile invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, came to be viewed by many strategists in Washington as a painful and misguided diversion from a long-established focus on global geopolitics. A fear only grew that it was providing China and Russia with opportunities to advance their own geopolitical ambitions, while the U.S. was distracted by terrorism and insurgency. By 2018, America’s senior military leadership, reaching the end of its patience with the endless war on terror, proclaimed a new strategic doctrine of “great-power competition” — a perfect euphemism for geopolitics.

“In this new era of great power competition, our warfighting advantages over strategic competitors are being challenged,” explained Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in 2019. As the Pentagon winds down the GWOT, he noted, “we are working to re-allocate our forces and equipment to priority theaters that enable us to better compete with China and Russia.”

That, he went on to explain, would require concerted action on two fronts: in Europe against an increasingly assertive, well-armed Russia, and in Asia against an ever more powerful China. There, Esper sought an accelerated buildup of air and naval forces along with ever closer military cooperation with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and — increasingly — India.

In the wake of this country’s Afghan War defeat, such an outlook has been embraced by the Biden administration which, at least until the current crisis over Ukraine, saw China, not Russia, as the greatest threat to America’s geopolitical interests. Because of its growing wealth, enhanced technological capacity, and ever-improving military, China alone was viewed as capable of challenging American dominance on the geopolitical chessboard. “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive,” the White House stated in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of March 2021. “It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”

In early February, to provide high-level guidance for a “whole-of-nation” struggle to counter China, the White House issued a new “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” just as Russia was mobilizing its forces along Ukraine’s borders. Describing the Indo-Pacific as the true epicenter of world economic activity, the strategy called for a multifaceted effort to bolster America’s strategic position and — to use a word from another age — contain China’s rise. In a classic expression of geopolitical thinking, it stated:

In implementing this blueprint, Biden’s national security team views key islands and sea passages as vital to its strategy for containing China. Its senior officials have emphasized the importance of defending what they call the “first island chain” — including Japan and the Philippines — that separates China from the open Pacific. Smack in the middle of that chain is, of course, Taiwan, claimed by China as its own and now viewed in Washington (in a typical Mahanian fashion) as essential to U.S. security.

In that context, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs Ely Ratner told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December:

From Beijing’s point of view, however, such efforts to contain its rise and prevent its assertion of authority over Taiwan are intolerable. Its leaders have repeatedly insisted that U.S. interference there could cross a “red line,” leading to war. “The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” said Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., recently. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”

With Chinese warplanes regularly intruding on Taiwan-claimed airspace and U.S. warships patrolling the Taiwan Strait, many observers expected that Taiwan, not Ukraine, would be the site of the first major military engagement arising from the great-power competition of this era. Some are now suggesting, ominously enough, that a failure to respond effectively to Russian aggression in Ukraine could induce Chinese leaders to begin an invasion of Taiwan, too.

Other flashpoints Unfortunately, Ukraine and Taiwan are hardly the only sites of contention on the global chessboard today. As great-power competition has gained momentum, other potential flashpoints have emerged because of their strategic location or access to vital raw materials, or both. Among them:

In recent years, there have been minor clashes or incidents in all of these locations and their frequency is on the rise. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions are only going to increase globally, so keep an eye on these flashpoints. History suggests that global geopolitics rarely ends peacefully. Under the circumstances, a new cold war — with militaries largely frozen in place — might just prove good news and that’s about as depressing as it gets.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. He is a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy.

Copyright ©2022 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 March 2022
Word Count: 2,570
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We live on a planet in motion, a world of collision and drift. This was once an Earth of super-continents — Gondwana, Rodinia, Pangea. The eastern seaboard of the United States sidled up against West Africa, while Antarctica cozied up to the opposite side of the African continent. But nothing in this world lasts and the tectonic plates covering the planet are always in motion. Suddenly — over the course of hundreds of millions of years — supercontinents cease to be super, breaking into smaller landmasses that drift off to the far corners of the world.

More recently, those itinerant continents were carved up by human beings into countries. A couple — China and India — are now home to more than a billion people each. But even modest-sized nations can be massive in their own right. Spain and Canada, neighbors in Pangea hundreds of millions of years ago, now have populations of almost 47 million and nearly 38 million, respectively, making them the 30th and 39th most populous countries on this planet. But together, they’re no larger than a nation-less nation, a state of the stateless that exists only as a state of mind. I’m talking about the victims of conflict now adrift on the margins of our world.

The number of people forcibly displaced by war, persecution, general violence, or human-rights violations last year swelled to a staggering 84 million, according to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. If they formed their own country, it would be the 17th largest in the world, slightly bigger than Iran or Germany.  Add in those driven across borders by economic desperation and the number balloons past one billion, placing it among the three largest nations on Earth.

This “nation” of the dispossessed is only expected to grow, according to a new report by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), an aid organization focused on displacement. Their forecast, which covers 26 high-risk countries, predicts that the number of displaced people will increase by almost three million this year and nearly four million in 2023.  This means that, in the decade between 2014 and 2023, the displaced population on this planet will have almost doubled, growing by more than 35 million people. And that doesn’t even count most of the seven million-plus likely to be displaced by Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

“It is extremely worrying to see such a rapidly increasing number of displaced persons in such a short time,” said Charlotte Slente, the secretary general of the Danish Refugee Council. “This is where the international community and diplomacy need to step up. Unfortunately, we see a decreasing number of peace agreements and a lack of international attention to countries where displacement is predicted to rise most.”

Homeless survivors of nameless wars The history of humanity is a story of populations in motion, people eternally impelled and compelled and propelled to travel from here to there. The luckiest have always shoved off of their own volition, in comfort and with happy hearts.  Many others have been shoved along in chains or at the point of a bayonet; forced to flee as bombs were crashing down around them; or because soldiers in military trucks or motorcycle-riding jihadis, armed with Kalashnikovs, came roaring into their villages.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the enormity of 84 million people on the run today. It means that the population of the forcibly displaced is now more than double the number of Europeans driven from their homes by the cataclysm of World War II; six times the number of those displaced by the traumatic partition of India and Pakistan in 1947; or 105 times the number of Vietnamese “boat people” who fled to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand during the 20 years that followed the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.  Thought of another way, about one in every 95 people on this planet is involuntarily on the move.  Add in those driven by economic imperatives and one of every 30 people on Earth is now a migrant.

As of last June, nearly 27 million people were refugees on what Bob Dylan once called the “unarmed road of flight” — with 68% of them hailing from five countries: Syria (6.8 million), Venezuela (4.1 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.2 million), and Myanmar (1.1 million).  Far more of the forcibly displaced are, however, homeless within their own lands — victims of conflicts that go largely unnoticed by the wider world.

In 2018, I watched as a postage-stamp-sized camp for displaced people in Ituri Province in the far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo mushroomed from hundreds of people to more than 10,000, spilling beyond its borders and necessitating the creation of another sprawling encampment across town.  At the time, women, children, and men in Ituri were being butchered alive by militiamen armed with machetes. And the attacks have never fully abated. Three years later, the violence and displacement continues.

In the first 10 days of this month alone, militiamen carried out eight attacks in Ituri.  On February 1st, a massacre at a displaced persons camp there killed 62 people, injured 47, and displaced 25,000, adding to the already astronomical numbers in Congo.  Around 2.7 million Congolese were driven from their homes between January and November 2021, according to the United Nations, swelling the grand total of internally displaced people in that country to 5.6 million.

In 2020, as I traveled an ocher dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in West Africa, I watched an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Families were streaming down that road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population had almost doubled that year. They were victims of a war without a name, a lethal contest between Islamist terrorists who massacre without compunction and government forces that have killed more civilians than militants.

And the suffering there persists as that conflict continues to force people from their homes. The number of internally displaced Burkinabe jumped 50% last year to more than 1.5 million, while another 19,200 people fled to neighboring countries, a 50% increase over 2020.  This year, according to the Danish Refugee Council, an additional 400,000 Burkinabe will likely be displaced. And that’s only part of a wider regional crisis that has engulfed neighboring Mali and Niger where another one million people have been rendered homeless.

Across the continent, the civil war in Ethiopia that began in November 2020 has left it with one of the world’s largest internally displaced populations.  At the end of that year, 2.1 million people had already been put to flight within the country.  By the close of 2021, that number had doubled to 4.2 million.  As in Congo, violence and displacement has left some of the unluckiest doubly victimized.  Earlier this month, for example, Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia’s Barahle refugee camp were attacked by armed men who killed five of them, kidnapped several women, and sent more than 14,000 refugees fleeing to other towns.

Afghanistan has been the site of still another conflict-driven crisis. Since the U.S. invasion of their country in 2001, almost six million Afghans have been either internally displaced or become refugees, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Similarly, more than 10 years after the start of the civil war in Syria, half that country’s population remains trapped in limbo with about 6.6 million of them refugees abroad and 6.7 million displaced within their own country.

The February 2021 military takeover in Myanmar similarly spawned a mammoth displacement crisis with armed clashes, including airstrikes and shelling, accelerating the suffering.  There are now at least 980,000 refugees and asylum-seekers from Myanmar in neighboring countries and around 812,000 internally displaced people there, including 442,000 forced from their homes since the coup.

Continental divide In 2014, about nine million of the world’s displaced lived in low-income countries.  Today, that number stands at an estimated 36 million and is forecast, by the Danish Refugee Council, to increase to 40 million by the end of 2023. The displacement crisis “disproportionally affects poorer countries and areas that already have enough on their plate,” said the Council’s Charlotte Slente. “We see that humanitarian funding is inadequate in a number of countries where displacement is taking place.”

The DRC’s forecast, based on a sophisticated model utilizing more than 120 indicators related to conflict, as well as to governance and environmental, demographic, and economic factors, suggests that Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan will all experience significant displacement in 2022 while Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Somalia are likely to see substantial increases in 2023.  All told, the Council predicts that the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa driven from their homes will jump by more than five million by the end of next year.

In 2020, as I traveled down a road in a comfortable SUV with a heavily armed police escort toward the conflict zone in Burkina Faso, I watched families who had hitched up their donkeys and piled everything they could — kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots — into sun-bleached carts heading the other way.  If we were still living on the super-continent of Pangea, they could have bypassed the way station in Kaya and headed west through Mali and Guinea, ending up in Miami, Florida.  But today that city of “cutting-edge art galleries, top-notch restaurants and funky but chic boutiques” where the median home price is $471,000 and a country where 80% of the population lives on less than $3 per day are a world apart or, rather, separated by 250 million years and 5,200 miles.

We live in a world where continental drift has left so many displaced Afghans, Burkinabe, Congolese, and others bottled up inside their own borders or in neighboring nations that are ill-equipped to bear the burden. The tyranny of the oceans that separate those displaced by conflict from safety has been intensified by callous governments, sealed borders, and heartless policies that curtail and criminalize humanity’s most ancient response to danger: flight.

The very least the world’s comfortable classes could do is throw money at the problem. The U.S. government — responsible for up to 60 million displaced people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen due to its war on terror — bears a special responsibility, but hasn’t stepped up. “Funding constraints continue to hamper [the] humanitarian response to displacement,” reads the Danish Refugee Council’s 2022 Global Displacement report. “Looking at the current forecasts for 2022 and 2023, crises where humanitarian funding and attention from the international community is lacking, displacement is forecast to increase significantly.”

In the countries where humanitarian response plans were more than 50% funded in 2021, displacement is predicted to increase by an average of 59,000 people. In those where funding was less than 50%, it’s projected to jump by 160,000 people, on average. “The international community needs to step up with extra support to the countries that are most affected by displacement,” said the DRC’s Slente.

If only.

One day, our itinerant continents will slam back together with, according to some forecasts, North America crashing into Africa, old neighbors rejoined after so much time apart. It will, unfortunately, be 300 million years too late for those now within the nationless nation, those rendered homeless by war, violence, and persecution.  Our arbitrary borders, miserly aid, and cruel policies ensure that those most victimized by conflict will remain adrift, wandering the planet in search of safety, discarded by the rest of us as marginal people on the margins of an unforgiving world.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch (where this article originated) and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright ©2022 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2022
Word Count: 1,925
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Dear Mr. President:

I send greetings from the other side — and no, I don’t mean the other side of the aisle. I refer to the place where old politicians go to make amends for their sins.

Apart from our shared Catholicism and affinity for sunglasses, I suspect you and I don’t have a lot in common. Actually, that may not quite be true. After all, your family and mine have both experienced more than our share of tragedy and you and I both did make it to the top rung of American politics.

Forgive me for being blunt, Joe — may I call you Joe? — but after more than a year in office your administration clearly needs help. Having had ample time to reflect on my own abbreviated stay in the White House, I thought I might share some things I learned, especially regarding foreign policy. Sadly, you seem intent on repeating some of my own worst mistakes. A course change is still possible, but there’s no time to waste. So please listen up.

I’m guessing that you may be familiar with this timeless text: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

I no longer have any idea what prompted my aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen to pen those immortal words or how exactly they found their way into my inaugural address. No matter, though. People then thought it expressed some profound truth — a Zen-like aphorism with an Ivy League pedigree.

Its implicit subtext, though, totally escaped attention: If negotiations don’t yield the desired results, it’s time to get tough. And that turned out to be problematic.

Fearing fear itself? Candor obliges me to admit that, politically speaking, my administration made good use of fear itself. If my run for the White House had an overarching theme, it was to scare the bejesus out of the American people. And once in office, fearmongering formed an essential part of my presidency. The famous Jack Kennedy wit and charisma was no more than a side dish meant to make the panic-inducing main course more palatable.

Here’s me at the National Press Club early in the 1960 campaign, sounding the alarm about “increasingly dangerous, unsolved, long postponed problems” that would “inevitably explode” during the next president’s watch. KABOOM! Chief among those problems, I warned, was “the growing missile gap, the rise of Communist China, the despair of the underdeveloped nations, the explosive situations in Berlin and in the Formosa [i.e., Taiwan] Strait, [and] the deterioration of NATO.”

Note the sequencing.  Item number one is that nuclear “missile gap,” with its implications of an Armageddon lurking just around the corner. It was my own invention and, if I do say so myself, a stroke of pure political genius. Of course, like the “bomber gap” that preceded it by a few years, no such missile gap actually existed. When it came to nukes and the means to deliver them, we were actually way ahead of the Soviets.

President Eisenhower knew that the missile gap was a load of malarky.  So did his vice president, Dick Nixon, the poor sap. But they couldn’t say so out loud without compromising classified intelligence.

Even today, people still treat my inaugural address — “The torch has been passed,” etc. — as if it were sacred scripture. But when it came to putting the nation on notice, the Kennedy-Sorensen fright machine really hit its stride barely a week later during my appearance before a joint session of Congress.

“No man entering upon this office,” I said with a carefully calibrated mixture of grace and gravitas, “could fail to be staggered upon learning — even in this brief 10-day period — the harsh enormity of the trials through which we must pass in the next four years.” Then came a generous dose of Sorensen’s speechwriting magic:

For eight years, Ike had been asleep at the switch. Now, in a mere 10 days as chief executive, I had grasped the harrowing magnitude of the dangers facing the nation. Time running out! The enemy growing stronger! The hour of maximum danger approaching like a runaway freight train!

But not to worry. With a former PT-boat skipper at the helm, assisted by the likes of Mac Bundy, Bob McNamara, Max Taylor, brother Bobby, and a whole crew of Harvard graduates, the Republic was in good hands. That was my message, anyway.

Okay, Joe, now let me come clean. In the months after that, we hit a few bumps in the road. Having promised action, we did act with vigor, but in ways that may not have been particularly judicious.  (Had I lived long enough to finish my term and win a second one — that was the plan, after all — things might have been put right.)

So, yes, the CIA’s Bay of Pigs Cuban debacle of April 1961 was an epic snafu, although as much Ike’s fault as my own. Viewed in hindsight, my escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam, that distant “frontier” of the Cold War — thousands of U.S. troops test-driving the latest counterinsurgency theories — wasn’t exactly the Best and Brightest’s best idea. And the less said about my administration’s complicity in the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem the better. That was not our best day either.

You didn’t know Bobby, but when my brother got a bit in his mouth, he was unstoppable. So I will admit that he got more than slightly carried away with Operation Mongoose, the failed CIA program aimed at assassinating Fidel Castro and sabotaging the Cuban Revolution.

If given the chance to do it over again, I also might think twice about ordering the deployment of 1,000 Minuteman land-based ICBMs, a classic illustration of Cold War “overkill,” driven more by domestic politics than any strategic calculus. Mind you, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command was lobbying for 10,000 ICBMs so it could have been worse! (In the things-never-change category, I hear that your administration is quietly pursuing a $1.7-trillion upgrade of the U.S. nuclear strike force. Does that form part of your intended legacy?)

The limits of fear Learn from our mistakes, Joe, but pay special attention to what we got right. Yes, fear led us to do some mighty stupid things. On occasion, though, fear became a spur to prudence and even wisdom. In fact, on two occasions overcoming fear enabled me to avert World War III. And that’s not bragging, that’s fact.

The first occurred in August 1961 when the East German government, with the approval of the Kremlin, began erecting the barrier that would become known as the Berlin Wall. The second took place in October 1962 during the famous Cuban Missile Crisis.

On the first occasion, I did nothing, which was exactly the right thing to do. Doing nothing kept the peace.

As long as East Berliners (and by extension all East Germans) could enter West Berlin and so flee to the West, that city would remain, in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s words, “a bone in the throat” of the Communist bloc. Dividing Berlin dislodged that bone. Problem solved. Khrushchev got what he wanted and so did I. As a result, the likelihood that Berlin-induced tensions could trigger a great power conflagration eased markedly. True, the outcome might not have pleased East Berliners, but they weren’t my chief concern.

On the second occasion, I employed skills I learned from my father Joe. Whatever his reputation as an appeasement-inclined isolationist before World War II, my dad knew how to cut a deal. So while Mac, Bob, Max and the rest of the so-called ExComm were debating whether to just bomb Cuba or bomb and then invade the island, I called an end-around.

Using Bobby to open a back-channel to Khrushchev, I negotiated a secret compromise. I promised to pull U.S. nuclear missiles out of Turkey and Italy and pledged that the United States would not invade Cuba. In return, Khrushchev committed to removing Soviet offensive weapons from that island. As a result, both sides (along with the rest of humanity) got a rain check on a possible nuclear holocaust.

Let me emphasize, Joe, that the theme common to both episodes wasn’t toughness. Both times, I set aside the question of fault — the U.S. not exactly being an innocent party in either instance — in favor of identifying the terms of a resolution. That meant conceding their side had legitimate concerns we could ill-afford to ignore.

This crucially important fact got lost in the grandstanding that followed. I’ll bet you remember this comment, reputedly from my secretary of state Dean Rusk, about the negotiations with the Soviets over Cuba: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” That invented quote supposedly captured the essence of the showdown over Cuba. The truth, however, was that Khrushchev and I both stared into the abyss and jointly decided to back away.

As for Berlin, Ted Sorensen wrote me a great speech to give there (“Ich bin ein Berliner,” etc.).  In it, I pretended to be unhappy with the Wall, when in truth that structure allowed me to sleep well at night. And, of course, my memorable star-turn in Berlin created a precedent for several of my successors to stage their own photo-ops with the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop. (Don’t count on Kyiv offering a similar opportunity, Joe.)

You’ll never get me to acknowledge this on the record, but in both Berlin and Cuba I opted for “appeasement” — a derogatory term for avoiding war — over confrontation. Not for a second have I ever regretted doing so.

Just say no You may be wondering by now what any of this has to do with you and the fix you find yourself in today. Quite a lot, I think. Hear me out.

I inherited a Cold War in full swing. You seem to be on the verge of embarking on a new cold war, with China and Russia filling in for, well, the Soviet Union and China.

I urge you to think carefully before making the leap into such an unmourned past.  Whatever your political advisers may imagine, displays of presidential toughness aren’t what our nation needs right now. You’ve extricated us from the longest war in U.S. history — a courageous and necessary decision, even if abysmally implemented. The last thing the United States needs is a new war, whether centered on Ukraine, the island of Taiwan, or anyplace in between. Military confrontation will drive a stake through the heart of your “Build Back Better” bill and kill any hopes for meaningful domestic reform. And it may also boost your predecessor’s prospects for making a comeback, a depressing thought if ever there was one.

You probably caught this recent headline in the Washington Post: “With or without war, Ukraine gives Biden a new lease on leadership.” The implication: perceived toughness on your part will pay political dividends.

Don’t believe it for a second, Joe. An armed conflict stemming from the Ukraine crisis is likely to destroy your presidency and much else besides. The same can be said about a prospective war with China. Let me be blunt: the leadership we need today is akin to what the nation needed when I steered a course away from war in Berlin and Cuba.

And please don’t fall for the latest propaganda about growing “gaps” between our own military capabilities and those of potential enemies. Take it from me, when it comes to endangering our security both China and Russia trail well behind our military-industrial-congressional complex.

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”  A nice turn of phrase that. Damned if it doesn’t turn out to be a sentiment to govern by as well.

Joe, if I can be of any further help in these tough times, don’t hesitate to call. You know where to find me.

Sincerely,
Jack

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.

Copyright ©2022 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 March 2022
Word Count: 2,053
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