In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Predictably, massive future overkill was justified in the name of “deterrence,” though the nuclear war plan in force back then was more about obliteration. It featured a devastating attack on the Soviet Union and communist China that would kill an estimated 600 million people in six months (the equivalent of 100 Holocausts, notes Daniel Ellsberg in his book, The Doomsday Machine). Slightly saner heads finally prevailed — in the sense that the Air Force eventually got “only” 1,000 of those Minuteman nuclear missiles.

Despite the strategic arms limitation talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the dire threat of nuclear Armageddon persisted, reaching a fresh peak in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. At the time, he memorably declared the Soviet Union to be an “evil empire,” while nuclear-capable Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles were rushed to Europe. At that same moment, more than a few Europeans, joined by some Americans, took to the streets, calling for a nuclear freeze — an end to new nuclear weapons and the destabilizing deployment of the ones that already existed. If only…

It was in this heady environment that, in uniform, I found myself working in the ultimate nuclear redoubt of the Cold War. I was under 2,000 feet of solid granite in a North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) command post built into Cheyenne Mountain at the southern end of the Colorado front range that includes Pikes Peak. When off-duty, I used to hike up a trail that put me roughly level with the top of Cheyenne Mountain. There, I saw it from a fresh perspective, with all its antennas blinking, ready to receive and relay warnings and commands that could have ended in my annihilation in a Soviet first strike or retaliatory counterstrike.

Yet, to be honest, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility of Armageddon. As a young Air Force lieutenant, I was caught up in the minuscule role I was playing in an unimaginably powerful military machine. And as a hiker out of uniform, I would always do my best to enjoy the bracing air, the bright sunshine, and the deep blue skies as I climbed near the timberline in those Colorado mountains. Surrounded by such natural grandeur, I chose not to give more than a moment’s thought to the nightmarish idea that I might be standing at ground zero of the opening act of World War III.  Because there was one thing I knew with certainty: if the next war went nuclear, whether I was on-duty under the mountain or off-duty hiking nearby, I was certainly going to be dead.

Then came 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over! America had won! Rather than nightmares of the Red Storm Rising sort that novelist Tom Clancy had imagined or Hollywood’s Red Dawn in which there was an actual communist invasion of this country, we could now dream of “peace dividends,” of America becoming a normal country in normal times.

It was, as the phrase went, “morning again in America” — or, at least, it could have been. Yet here I sit, 30 years later, at sea level rather than near the timberline, stunned by the resurgence of a twenty-first-century version of anticommunist hysteria and at the idea of a new cold war with Russia, the rump version of the Soviet Union of my younger days, joined by an emerging China, both still ostensibly conspiring to endanger our national security, or so experts in and out of the Pentagon tell us.

Excuse me while my youthful 28-year-old self asks my cranky 58-year-old self a few questions: What the hell happened? Dammit, we won the Cold War three decades ago. Decisively so! How, then, could we have allowed a new one to emerge? Why would any sane nation want to refight a war that it had already won at enormous cost? Who in their right mind would want to hit the “replay” button on such a costly, potentially cataclysmic strategic paradigm as deterrence through MAD, or mutually assured destruction?

Meet the new Cold War – same as the old one Quite honestly, the who, the how, and the why depress me. The “who” is simple enough: the military-industrial-congressional complex, which finds genocidal nuclear weapons to be profitable, even laudable. Leading the charge of the latest death brigade is my old service, the Air Force. Its leaders want new ICBMs, several hundred of them in fact, with a potential price tag of $264 billion, to replace the Minutemen that still sit on alert, waiting to inaugurate death on an unimaginable scale, not to speak of a global nuclear winter, if they’re ever launched en masse. Not content with such new missiles, the Air Force also desires new strategic bombers, B-21 Raiders to be precise (the “21” for our century, the “Raider” in honor of General Jimmy Doolittle’s morale-boosting World War II attack on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor). The potential price tag: somewhere to the north of $200 billion through the year 2050.

New nuclear missiles and strategic bombers obviously don’t come cheap. Those modernized holocaust-producers are already estimated to cost the American taxpayer half-a-trillion dollars over the next three decades. Honestly, though, I doubt anyone knows the true price, given the wild cost overruns that seem to occur whenever the Air Force builds anything these days. Just look at the $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter, for example, where the “F” apparently stands for Ferrari or, if you prefer brutal honesty, failure.

The “how” is also simple enough. The vast military machine I was once part of justifies such new weaponry via the tried-and-true (even if manifestly false) tactics of the Cold War. Start with threat inflation. In the old days, politicians and generals touted false bomber and missile “gaps.” Nowadays, we hear about China building missile silos, as if these would pose a new sort of dire threat to us. (They wouldn’t, assuming that China is dumb enough to build them.) A recent New Yorker article on Iran’s ballistic missile program is typical of the breed. Citing a Pentagon estimate, the author suggests “that China could have at least a thousand [nuclear] bombs by 2030.” Egad! Be afraid!

Yet the article neglects to mention America’s overwhelmingly superior nuclear weapons and the actual number of nuclear warheads and bombs our leaders have at their disposal. (The current numbers: roughly 5,600 nuclear warheads for the U.S., 350 for China.) At the same time, Iran, which has no nuclear weapons, is nonetheless defined as a serious threat, “an increasingly shrewd rival,” in the same article. A “rival” – how absurd! A nation with no nukes isn’t a rival to the superpower that nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing 250,000 Japanese, and planned to utterly destroy the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s. Believe me, nobody, but nobody, rivals this country’s military when it comes to apocalyptic scenarios — and the mindset as well as the ability to achieve them.

On a nuclear spectrum, Iran poses no threat and China is readily deterred, indeed completely overmatched, just with the U.S. Navy’s fleet of Trident-missile-firing submarines. To treat Iran as a “rival” and China as a nuclear “near-peer” is the worst kind of threat inflation (and imagining nuclear war of any sort is a horror beyond all measure).

The “why” is also simple enough, and it disgusts me. Weapons makers, though driven by profit, pose as job-creators. They talk about “investing” in new nukes; they mention the need to “modernize” the arsenal, as if nuclear weapons have an admirable return on investment as well as an expiration date. What they don’t talk about (and never will) is how destabilizing, redundant, unnecessary, immoral, and unimaginably ghastly such weapons are.

Nuclear weapons treat human beings as matter to be irradiated and obliterated. One of the better cinematic depictions of this nightmare came in the 1991 movie Terminator II when Sarah Connor, who knows what’s coming, is helpless to save herself, no less children on a playground, when the nukes start exploding. It’s a scene that should be seared into all our minds as we think about the hellish implications of the weapons the U.S. military is clamoring for.

In the late 1980s, when I was still in Cheyenne Mountain, I watched the tracks of Soviet nuclear missiles as they terminated at American cities. Sure, it only happened on screen in the missile warning center, driven by a scenario tape simulating an attack, but that was more than enough for me. Yet, today, my government is moving in a direction — both in funding the “modernization” of the American arsenal and in creating a new version of the Cold War of my Air Force days — that could once again make that old scenario tape I saw plausible in what remains of my lifetime.

Excuse me, but where has the idea of nuclear disarmament gone? A scant 15 years ago, old Cold War hands like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and Sam Nunn, joined by our “hope and change” president Barack Obama, promoted the end of nuclear terror through the actual elimination of nuclear weapons. But in 2010 Obama threw that possibility away in an attempt to secure Senate support for new strategic arms reduction talks with the Russians. Unsurprisingly, senators and representatives in western states like Wyoming and North Dakota, which thrive off Air Force bases that bristle with nuclear bombers and missiles, quickly abandoned the spirit of Obama’s grand bargain and to this day remain determined to field new nuclear weapons.

Not more, but no more This country narrowly averted disaster in the old Cold War and back then we had leaders of some ability and probity like Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. All this new cold war rhetoric and brinksmanship may not end nearly as well in a plausible future administration led, if not by Donald Trump himself, then by some self-styled Trumpist warrior like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Senator Tom Cotton. They would, I suspect, be embraced by an increasing number of evangelicals and Christian nationalists in the military who might, in prophetic terms, find nuclear Armageddon to be a form of fulfillment.

Ironically, I read much of Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy’s World War III thriller, in 1987 while working a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain. Thankfully, that red storm never rose, despite a climate that all too often seemed conducive to it. But why now recreate the conditions for a new red storm, once again largely driven by our own fears as well as the profit- and power-driven fantasies of the military-industrial-congressional complex? Such a storm could well end in nuclear war, despite pledges to the contrary. If a war of that sort is truly unwinnable, which it is, our military shouldn’t be posturing about fighting and “winning” one.

I can tell you one thing with certainty: our generals know one word and it’s not “win,” it’s more. More nuclear missiles. More nuclear bombers. They’ll never get enough. The same is true of certain members of Congress and the president. So, the American people need to learn two words, no more, and say them repeatedly to those same generals and their enablers, when they come asking for almost $2 trillion for that nuclear modernization program of theirs.

In that spirit, I ask you to join a young Air Force lieutenant as he walks past Cheyenne Mountain’s massive blast door and down the long tunnel. Join him in taking a deep breath as you exit that darkness into clear crystalline skies and survey the city lights beneath you and the pulse of humanity before you. Another night’s duty done; another night that nuclear war didn’t come; another day to enjoy the blessings of this wonder-filled planet of ours.

America’s new cold war puts those very blessings, that wonder, in deep peril. It’s why we must walk ever so boldly out of tunnels built by fear and greed and never return to them. We need to say “no more” to new nuclear weapons and recommit to the elimination of all such weaponry everywhere. We had a chance to embark on such a journey 30 years ago in the aftermath of the first Cold War. We had another chance when Barack Obama was elected. Both times we failed.

It’s finally time for this country to succeed in something again — something noble, something other than the perpetuation of murderous war and the horrific production of genocidal weaponry.  After all, only fools replay scenarios that end in doomsday.

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

Copyright ©2022 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 January 2022
Word Count: 2,141
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Throughout 2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask mandates, school closings, and the meaning of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile, geopolitical hot spots were erupting across Eurasia, forming a veritable ring of fire around that vast landmass.

Let’s circle that continent to visit just a few of those flashpoints, each one suffused with significance for the future of U.S. global power.

On the border with Ukraine, 100,000 Russian troops were massing with tanks and rocket launchers, ready for a possible invasion. Meanwhile, Beijing signed a $400 billion agreement with Tehran to swap infrastructure-building for Iranian oil. Such an exchange might help make that country the future rail hub of Central Asia, while projecting China’s military power into the Persian Gulf. Just across the Iranian border in Afghanistan, Taliban guerrillas swept into Kabul ending a 20-year American occupation in a frantic flurry of shuttle flights for more than 100,000 defeated Afghan allies.

Farther east, high in the Himalayas, Indian Army engineers were digging tunnels and positioning artillery to fend off future clashes with China. In the Bay of Bengal, a dozen ships from Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, led by the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, were conducting live gunnery drills, practice for a possible future war with China.

Meanwhile, a succession of American naval vessels continually passed through the South China Sea, skirting Chinese island bases there and announcing that no protests from Beijing “will deter us.” Just to the north, U.S. destroyers, denounced by China, regularly sailed through the Strait of Taiwan; while some 80 Chinese jet fighters swarmed into that disputed island’s air security zone, a development Washington condemned as “provocative military activity.”

Around the coast of Japan, a flotilla of 10 Chinese and Russian warships steamed aggressively across waters once virtually owned by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. And in frigid Arctic oceans way to the north, thanks to the radical warming of the planet and receding sea ice, an expanding fleet of Chinese icebreakers maneuvered with their Russian counterparts to open a “polar silk road,” thereby possibly taking possession of the roof of the world.

While you could have read about almost all of this in the American media, sometimes in great detail, nobody here has tried to connect such transcontinental dots to uncover their deeper significance. Our nation’s leaders have visibly not done much better and there’s a reason for this. As I explain in my recent book, To Govern the Globe, both liberal and conservative political elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power have been on top of the world for so long that they can’t remember how they got there.

During the late 1940s, following a catastrophic world war that left some 70 million dead, Washington built a potent apparatus for global power, thanks significantly to its encirclement of Eurasia via both military bases and global trade. The U.S. also formed a new system of global governance, exemplified by the United Nations, that would not only assure its hegemony but also — or so the hope was then — foster an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity.

Three generations later, however, as populism, nationalism, and anti-globalism roiled public discourse, surprisingly few in Washington bothered to defend their world order in a meaningful way. And fewer of them still had any real grasp of the geopolitics — that slippery mix of armaments, occupied lands, subordinated rulers, and logistics — that has been every imperial leader’s essential toolkit for the effective exercise of global power.

So, let’s do what our country’s foreign policy experts, in and out of government, haven’t and examine the latest developments in Eurasia through the prism of geopolitics and history. Do that and you’ll grasp just how they, and the deeper forces they represent, are harbingers of an epochal decline in American global power.

Eurasia as the epicenter of power on planet earth In the 500 years since European exploration first brought the continents into continuous contact, the rise of every global hegemon has required one thing above all: dominance over Eurasia. Similarly, their decline has invariably been accompanied by a loss of control over that vast landmass. During the sixteenth century, the Iberian powers, Portugal and Spain, waged a joint struggle to control Eurasia’s maritime commerce by battling the powerful Ottoman empire, whose leader was then the caliph of Islam. In 1509, off the coast of northeast India, skilled Portuguese gunners destroyed a Muslim fleet with lethal broadsides, establishing that country’s century-long dominance over the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the Spanish used the silver they had extracted from their new colonies in the Americas for a costly campaign to check Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean Sea. Its culmination: the destruction in 1571 of an Ottoman fleet of 278 ships at the epic Battle of Lepanto.

Next in line, Great Britain’s dominion over the oceans began with an historic naval triumph over a combined French-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar in 1805 and only ended when, in 1942, a British garrison of 80,000 men surrendered their seemingly impregnable naval bastion at Singapore to the Japanese — a defeat Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”

Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.”

In the early 1950s, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong forged a Sino-Soviet alliance that threatened to dominate the continent. Washington, however, countered with a deft geopolitical gambit that, for the next 40 years, succeeded in “containing” those two powers behind an “Iron Curtain” stretching 5,000 miles across the vast Eurasian land mass.

As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.

With the communist bloc bottled up behind the Iron Curtain, Washington then sat back and waited for its Cold War enemies to self-destruct — which they did. First, the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s shattered their hold on the Eurasian heartland. Then, the disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s ravaged the Red Army and precipitated the break-up of the Soviet Union.

After those oh-so-strategic initial steps to capture the axial ends of Eurasia, however, Washington itself essentially stumbled through much of the rest of the Cold War with blunders like the Bay of Pigs catastrophe in Cuba and the disastrous Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, by the Cold War’s end in 1991, the U.S. military had become a global behemoth with 800 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than a thousand ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked by the world’s only global system of communications satellites. For the next 20 years, Washington would enjoy what Trump-era Defense Secretary James Mattis called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”

The three pillars of U.S. global power In the late 1990s, at the absolute apex of U.S. global hegemony, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, far more astute as an armchair analyst than an actual practitioner of geopolitics, issued a stern warning about the three pillars of power necessary to preserve Washington’s global control. First, the U.S. must avoid the loss of its strategic European “perch on the Western periphery” of Eurasia. Next, it must block the rise of “an assertive single entity” across the continent’s massive “middle space” of Central Asia. And finally, it must prevent “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral.

Drunk on the heady elixir of limitless global power following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s foreign-policy elites made increasingly dubious decisions that led to a rapid decline in their country’s dominance. In an act of supreme imperial hubris, born of the belief that they were triumphantly at the all-American “end of history,” Republican neoconservatives in President George W. Bush’s administration invaded and occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq, convinced that they could remake the entire Greater Middle East, the cradle of Islamic civilization, in America’s secular, free-market image (with oil as their repayment). After an expenditure of nearly $2 trillion on operations in Iraq alone and nearly 4,598 American military deaths, all Washington left behind was the rubble of ruined cities, more than 200,000 Iraqi dead, and a government in Baghdad beholden to Iran. The official U.S. Army history of that war concluded that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”

Meanwhile, China spent those same decades building industries that would make it the workshop of the world. In a major strategic miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, bizarrely confident that a compliant China, home to nearly 20% of humanity and historically the world’s most powerful nation, would somehow join the global economy without changing the balance of power. “Across the ideological spectrum,” as two former Obama administration officials later wrote, “we in the U.S. foreign policy community shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.” A bit more bluntly, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster concluded that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.”

During the 15 years after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s exports to the U.S. grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion while, by 2014, its foreign currency reserves surged from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion, a vast treasure it used to launch its trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), aimed at uniting Eurasia economically through newly built infrastructure. In the process, Beijing began a systematic demolition of Brzezinski’s three pillars of U.S. geopolitical power.

The first pillar — Europe Beijing has scored its most surprising success so far in Europe, long a key bastion of American global power. As part of a chain of 40 commercial ports it’s been building or rebuilding around Eurasia and Africa, Beijing has purchased major port facilities in Europe, including outright ownership of the Greek port of Piraeus and significant shares in those of Zeebrugge in Belgium, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Hamburg, Germany.

After a state visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019, Italy became the first G-7 member to officially join the BRI agreement, subsequently signing over a portion of its ports at Genoa and Trieste. Despite Washington’s strenuous objections, in 2020, the European Union and China also concluded a draft financial services agreement that, when finalized in 2023, will more fully integrate their banking systems.

While China is building ports, rails, roads, and powerplants across the continent, its Russian ally continues to dominate Europe’s energy market and is now just months away from opening its controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, guaranteed to increase Moscow’s economic influence. As the massive pipeline project moved to completion last December, Russian President Putin intensified pressures on NATO with a roster of “extravagant” demands, including a formal guarantee that Ukraine not be admitted to the alliance, removal of all the military infrastructure installed in Eastern Europe since 1997, and a prohibition against future military activity in Central Asia.

In a power play not seen since Stalin and Mao joined forces in the 1950s, the alliance between Putin’s raw military force and Xi’s relentless economic pressure may indeed slowly be pulling Europe away from America. Complicating the U.S. position, Britain’s exit from the European Union cost Washington its most forceful advocate inside Brussels’ labyrinthine corridors of power.

And as Brussels and Washington grow apart, Beijing and Moscow only come closer. Through joint energy ventures, military maneuvers, and periodic summits, Putin and Xi are reprising the Stalin-Mao alliance, a strategic partnership at the heart of Eurasia that could, in the end, break Washington’s steel chains that have long stretched from Eastern Europe to the Pacific.

The second pillar — Central Asia Under its bold BRI scheme to fuse Europe and Asia into a unitary Eurasian economic bloc, Beijing has crisscrossed Central Asia with a steel-ribbed cat’s cradle of railroads and oil pipelines, effectively toppling Brzezinski’s second pillar of geopolitical power — that the U.S. must block the rise of “an assertive single entity” in the continent’s vast “middle space.” When President Xi first announced the Belt and Road Initiative at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in September 2013, he spoke expansively about “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” while building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

In the decade since, Beijing has put in place a bold design for transcending the vast distances that historically separated Asia and Europe. Starting in 2008, the China National Petroleum Corporation collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch a Central Asia-China gas pipeline that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles. By 2025, in fact, there should be an integrated inland energy network, including Russia’s extensive grid of gas pipelines, reaching 6,000 miles from the Baltic to the Pacific.

The only real barrier to China’s bid to capture Eurasia’s vast “middle space” was the now-ended U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. To join Central Asia’s gas fields to the energy-hungry markets of South Asia, the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline was announced in 2018, but progress though the critical Afghan sector was slowed by the war there. In the months before it captured Kabul, however, Taliban diplomats turned up in Turkmenistan and China to offer assurances about the project’s future. Since then, the scheme has been revived, opening the way for Chinese investment that could complete its capture of Central Asia.

The third pillar — the Pacific littoral The most volatile flashpoint In Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.” By building a half-dozen island bases of its own in the South China Sea since 2014, swarming Taiwan and the East China Sea with repeated fighter plane forays, and staging joint maneuvers with Russia’s navy, Beijing has been conducting a relentless campaign to begin what Brzezinski called “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along that Pacific littoral.

As China’s economy grows larger and its naval forces do, too, the end of Washington’s decades-long dominion over that vast ocean expanse may be just over the horizon. For one thing, China may at some point achieve supremacy in certain critical military technologies, including super-secure “quantum entanglement” satellite communications and hypersonic missiles. Last October, the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, called China’s recent launch of a hypersonic missile “very close” to “a Sputnik moment.” While U.S. tests of such weapons, which can fly faster than 4,000 m.p.h., have repeatedly failed, China successfully orbited a prototype whose speed and stealth trajectory suddenly make U.S. aircraft carriers significantly more difficult to defend.

But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. A battle fleet of two U.S. supercarriers operating 5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor could deploy, at best, 150 jet fighters. In any conflict within 200 miles of China’s coast, Beijing could use up to 2,200 combat aircraft as well as DF-21D “carrier-killer” missiles whose 900-mile range makes them, according to U.S. Navy sources, “a severe threat to the operations of U.S. and allied navies in the western Pacific.”

The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.

In the years to come, as more such incidents erupt around Eurasia’s ring of fire, readers can insert them into their own geopolitical model — a useful, even essential, means for understanding a fast-changing world. And as you do that, just remember that history has never ended, while the U.S. position in it is being remade before our eyes.

Alfred W. McCoy writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and 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: 17 January 2022
Word Count: 2,853
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The word “encirclement” does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War era term “containment” ever come up. Still, America’s top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status.

The gigantic 2022 defense bill — passed with overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis. For China’s leaders, who surely can’t tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it’s an open invitation to… well, there’s no point in not being blunt… fight their way out of confinement.

Like every “defense” bill before it, the $768 billion 2022 NDAA is replete with all-too-generous handouts to military contractors for favored Pentagon weaponry. That would include F-35 jet fighters, Virginia-class submarines, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and a wide assortment of guided missiles. But as the Senate Armed Services Committee noted in a summary of the bill, it also incorporates an array of targeted appropriations and policy initiatives aimed at encircling, containing, and someday potentially overpowering China. Among these are an extra $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, or PDI, a program initiated last year with the aim of bolstering U.S. and allied forces in the Pacific.

Nor are these just isolated items in that 2,186-page bill. The authorization act includes a “sense of Congress” measure focused on “defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific Region,” providing a conceptual blueprint for such an encirclement strategy. Under it, the secretary of defense is enjoined to “strengthen United States defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region so as to further the comparative advantage of the United States in strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC.

That the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act passed with no significant opposition in the House or Senate suggests that support for these and similar measures is strong in both parties. Some progressive Democrats had indeed sought to reduce the size of military spending, but their colleagues on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees instead voted to increase this year’s already staggering allotment for the Pentagon by another $24 billion — specifically to better contain (or fight) China. Most of those added taxpayer dollars will go toward the creation of hypersonic missiles and other advanced weaponry aimed at the PRC, and increased military exercises and security cooperation with U.S. allies in the region.

For Chinese leaders, there can be no doubt about the meaning of all this: whatever Washington might say about peaceful competition, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has no intention of allowing the PRC to achieve parity with the United States on the world stage. In fact, it is prepared to employ every means, including military force, to prevent that from happening. This leaves Beijing with two choices: succumb to U.S. pressure and accept second-class status in world affairs or challenge Washington’s strategy of containment. It’s hard to imagine that country’s current leadership accepting the first choice, while the second, were it adopted, would surely lead, sooner or later, to armed conflict.

The enduring lure of encirclement The notion of surrounding China with a chain of hostile powers was, in fact, first promoted as official policy in the early months of President George W. Bush’s administration. At that time, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice went to work establishing an anti-China alliance system in Asia, following guidelines laid out by Rice in a January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs. There, she warned of Beijing’s efforts to “alter Asia’s balance of power in its own favor” — a drive the U.S. must respond to by deepening “its cooperation with Japan and South Korea” and by “maintain[ing] its commitment to a robust military presence in the region.” It should, she further indicated, “pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance.”

This has, in fact, remained part of the governing U.S. global playbook ever since, even if, for the Bush team, its implementation came to an abrupt halt on September 11, 2001, when Islamic militants attacked the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., leading the administration to declare a “global war on terror.”

Only a decade later, in 2011, did official Washington return to the Rice-Cheney strategy of encircling China and blunting or suppressing its growing power. That November, in an address to the Australian Parliament, President Obama announced an American “pivot to Asia” — a drive to restore Washington’s dominance in the region, while enlisting its allies there in an intensifying effort to contain China. “As president, I have… made a deliberate and strategic decision,” Obama declared in Canberra. “As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future… As we end today’s wars [in the Middle East], I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority.”

Like the Bush team before it, however, the Obama administration was blindsided by events in the Middle East, specifically the 2014 takeover of significant parts of Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, and so was forced to suspend its focus on the Pacific. Only in the final years of the Trump administration did the idea of encircling China once again achieve preeminence in U.S. strategic thinking.

Led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Trump effort proved far more substantial, involving as it did the beefing-up of U.S. forces in the Pacific; closer military ties with Australia, Japan, and South Korea; and an intensified outreach to India. Pompeo also added several new features to the mix: a “quadrilateral” alliance between Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S. (dubbed the “Quad,” for short); increased diplomatic ties with Taiwan; and the explicit demonization of China as an enemy of Western values.

In a July 2020 speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Pompeo laid out the new China policy vividly. To prevent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from demolishing “the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build,” he declared, we must “draw common lines in the sand that cannot be washed away by the CCP’s bargains or their blandishments.” This required not only bolstering U.S. forces in Asia but also creating a NATO-like alliance system to curb China’s further growth.

Pompeo also launched two key anti-China initiatives: the institutionalization of the Quad and the expansion of diplomatic and military relations with Taiwan. The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as it’s formally known, had initially been formed in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and the leaders of Australia and India), but fell into abeyance for years. It was revived, however, in 2017 when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joined Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump in promoting a stepped-up effort to contain China.

As for Taiwan, Pompeo upped the ante there by approving diplomatic missions to its capital, Taipei, by senior officials, including Health Secretary Alex Azar and Undersecretary of State Keith Krach, the highest-ranking members of any administration to visit the island since 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with its government. Both visits were roundly criticized by Chinese officials as serious violations of the commitments Washington had made to Beijing under the agreement establishing ties with the PRC.

Biden adopts the encirclement agenda On entering the White House, President Biden promised to reverse many of the unpopular policies of his predecessor, but strategy towards China was not among them. Indeed, his administration has embraced the Pompeo encirclement agenda with a vengeance. As a result, ominously enough, preparations for a possible war with China are now the Pentagon’s top priority as, for the State Department, is the further isolation of Beijing diplomatically.

In line with that outlook, the Defense Department’s 2022 budget request asserted that “China poses the greatest long-term challenge to the United States” and, accordingly, that “the Department will prioritize China as our number one pacing challenge and develop the right operational concepts, capabilities, and plans to bolster deterrence and maintain our competitive advantage.”

In the meantime, as its key instrument for bolstering ties with allies in the Asia-Pacific region, the Biden administration endorsed Trump’s Pacific Deterrence Initiative. Proposed PDI spending was increased by 132% in the Pentagon’s 2022 budget request, rising to $5.1 billion from the $2.2 billion in 2021. And if you want a measure of this moment in relation to China, consider this: even that increase was deemed insufficient by congressional Democrats and Republicans who added another $2 billion to the PDI allocation for 2022.

To further demonstrate Washington’s commitment to an anti-China alliance in Asia, the first two heads of state invited to the White House to meet President Biden were Japanese Prime Minister Yoshi Suga and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. In talks with them, Biden emphasized the importance of joint efforts to counter Beijing. Following his meeting with Suga, for instance, Biden publicly insisted that his administration was “committed to working together to take on the challenges from China… to ensure a future of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

On September 24th, in a first, leaders of the Quad all met with Biden at a White House “summit.” Although the administration emphasized non-military initiatives in its post-summit official report, the main order of business was clearly to strengthen military cooperation in the region. As if to underscore this, Biden used the occasion to highlight an agreement he’d just signed with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia to provide that country with the propulsion technology for a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines — a move obviously aimed at China. And note as well that, just days before the summit, the administration formed a new alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom, called AUKUS, and again aimed at China.

Finally, Biden has continued to increase diplomatic and military contacts with Taiwan, beginning on his first day in office when Hsiao Bi-khim, Taipei’s de facto ambassador to Washington, attended his inauguration. “President Biden will stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region — and that includes Taiwan,” a top administration official said at the time. Other high-level contacts with Taiwanese officials, including military personnel, soon followed.

A “grand strategy” for containment What all these initiatives have lacked, until now, is an overarching plan for curbing China’s rise and so ensuring America’s permanent supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region. The authors of this year’s NDAA were remarkably focused on this deficiency and several provisions of the bill are designed to provide just such a master plan. These include a series of measures intended to incorporate Taiwan into the U.S. defense system surrounding China and a requirement for the drafting of a comprehensive “grand strategy” for containing that country on every front.

A “sense of Congress” measure in that bill provides overarching guidance on these disparate initiatives, stipulating an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank — meant to encircle and contain the People’s Republic. Ominously enough, Taiwan, too, is included in the projected anti-China network.

That island’s imagined future role in such an emerging strategic plan was further spelled out in a provision entitled “Sense of Congress on Taiwan Defense Relations.” Essentially, this measure insists that Washington’s 1978 pledge to terminate its military ties with Taipei and a subsequent 1982 U.S.-China agreement committing this country to reduce the quality and quantity of its arms transfers to Taiwan are no longer valid due to China’s “increasingly coercive and aggressive behavior” toward the island. Accordingly, the measure advocates closer military coordination between the two countries and the sale of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems to Taiwan, along with the technology to manufacture some of them.

Add all this up and here’s the new reality of the Biden years: the disputed island of Taiwan, just off the Chinese mainland and claimed as a province by the PRC, is now being converted into a de facto military ally of the United States. There could hardly be a more direct assault on China’s bottom line: that, sooner or later, the island must agree to peacefully reunite with the mainland or face military action.

Recognizing that the policies spelled out in the 2022 NDAA represent a fundamental threat to China’s security and its desire for a greater international role, Congress also directed the president to come up with a “grand strategy” on U.S.-China relations in the next nine months. This should include an assessment of that country’s global objectives and an inventory of the economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities the U.S. will require to blunt its rise. In addition, it calls on the Biden administration to examine “the assumptions and end-state or end states of the strategy of the United States globally and in the Indo-Pacific region with respect to the People’s Republic of China.” No explanation is given for the meaning of “end-state or end states,” but it’s easy to imagine that the authors of that measure had in mind the potential collapse of the Chinese Communist government or some form of war between the two countries.

How will Chinese leaders react to all this? No one yet knows, but President Xi Jinping provided at least a glimpse of what that response might be in a July 1st address marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. “We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us,” he declared, as China’s newest tanks, rockets, and missiles rolled by. “Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Welcome to the new twenty-first-century Cold War on a planet desperately in need of something else.

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: 13 January 2022
Word Count: 2,399
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The world lost a great moral leader this Christmas when Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away at the age of 90. I had the honor of meeting him a few times as a child. I was raised by a family dedicated to doing the work of justice, grounded in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and also sacred texts and traditions. We hosted the archbishop on several occasions when he visited Milwaukee — both before the end of apartheid and after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1996.

In the wake of one visit, he sent a small postcard that my mom framed and placed on the bookcase near our front door. Every morning before school I would grab my glasses resting on that same bookcase and catch a glimpse of the archbishop’s handwritten note. This wasn’t inadvertent on my mom’s part. It was meant as a visual reminder that, if I was to call myself a Christian — which I did, serving as a Sunday school teacher from the age of 13 and a deacon at 16 — my responsibility was to advocate for policies that welcomed immigrants, freed those held captive by racism and injustice, and lifted the load of poverty.

Given our present context, the timing of his death is all too resonant. Just over a year ago, the world watched as a mob besieged the U.S. Capitol, urged on by still-President Donald Trump and undergirded by decades of white racism and Christian nationalism. January 6th should have reminded us all that far from being a light to all nations, American democracy remains, at best, a remarkably fragile and unfinished project. On the first anniversary of that nightmare, the world is truly in need of moral leaders and defenders of democracy like Tutu.

The archbishop spent his life pointing to what prophets have decried through the ages, warning countries, especially those with much political and economic power, to stop strangling the voices of the poor. Indeed, the counsel of such prophets has always been the same: when injustice is on the rise, there are dark forces waiting to demean, defraud, and degrade human life. Such forces hurt the poor the most but impact everyone. And they often cloak themselves in religious rhetoric, even as they pursue political and economic ends that do anything but match our deepest religious values.

Democracy at stake

By now, lamenting the condition of American democracy comes almost automatically to many of us. Still, the full weight of our current crisis has yet to truly sink in. A year after the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, this nation has continued to experience a quieter, rolling coup, as state legislatures have passed the worst voter suppression laws in generations and redrawn political maps to allow politicians to pick whom their voters will be. The Brennan Center for Justice recently reported that more than 400 voter suppression laws were introduced in 49 states last year. Nineteen of those states passed more than 30 such laws, signaling the biggest attack on voting rights since just after the Civil War. And add to that another sobering reality — two presidential elections have now taken place without the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

This attack on democracy, if unmet, could alter the nature of American elections for at least a generation to come. And yet, so far, it’s been met with an anemic response from a painfully divided Congress and the Biden administration. Despite much talk about the need to reform democracy, Congress left for the holidays without restoring the Voting Rights Act or passing the For the People Act, which would protect the 55 million voters who live in states with new anti-voter laws that limit access to the ballot. If those bills don’t pass in January (or only a new proposal by Republican senators and Joe Manchin to narrowly reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is passed), it may prove to be too late to save our democracy as well as any hopes that the Democratic Party can win the 2022 midterm elections or the 2024 presidential race

Sadly, this nation has a strikingly bipartisan consensus to thank for such a moral abdication of responsibility. Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, in particular, have been vocal in refusing to overturn the filibuster to protect voting rights (though you know that, were the present Republicans in control of the Senate, they wouldn’t hesitate to do so for their own grim ends).

And of course, democracy isn’t the only thing that demands congressional action (as well as filibuster reform). Workers have not seen a raise in the minimum wage since 2009 and the majority of us have no paid sick leave in the worst public-health crisis in a century. Poor and low-income Americans, 140 million and growing, are desperately in need of the child tax credit and other anti-poverty and basic income programs at precisely the moment when they’re expiring and the pandemic is surging once again. And Manchin has already ensured weakened climate provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that he claims he just can’t support (not yet anyway). If things proceed accordingly, in some distant future, sadly enough, geological records will be able to show the impact of our government’s unwillingness to act quickly or boldly enough to save humanity.

As Congress debates voting rights and investing in the people, it’s important to understand the dark forces that underlie the increasingly reactionary and authoritarian politics on the rise in this country. In his own time, Archbishop Tutu examined the system of white-imposed apartheid through the long lens of history to show how the Christianity of colonial empire had become a central spoke in the wheel of violence, theft, and racist domination in South Africa. He often summed up this dynamic through parables like this one:

In our own American context, they have the Bible and, as things are going, they may soon have the equivalent of “the land,” too. Just look carefully at our political landscape for evidence of the rising influence of white Christian nationalism. While it’s only one feature of the authoritarianism increasingly on vivid display in this country, it’s critical to understand, since it’s helped to mobilize a broad social base for Donald Trump and the Republicans. In the near future, through control over various levers of state and federal power, as well as key cultural and religious institutions, Christian nationalists could find themselves well positioned to shape the nation for a long time to come.

Confronting White Christian Nationalism

Christian nationalism has influenced the course of American politics and policy since the founding of this country, while, in every era, moral movements have had to fight for the Bible and the terrain that goes with it. The January 6th assault on the Capitol, while only the latest expression of such old battlelines, demonstrated the threat of a modern form of Christian nationalism that has carefully built political power in government, the media, the academy, and the military over the past half-century. Today, the social forces committed to it are growing bolder and increasingly able to win mainstream support.

When I refer to “Christian nationalism,” I mean a social force that coalesces around a matrix of interlocking and interrelated values and beliefs. These include at least six key features, though the list that follows is anything but exhaustive:

Such ideas, by the way, didn’t just spring up overnight. This false narrative has been playing a significant, if not dominant, role in our politics and economics for decades. Since childhood — for an example from my own life — I’ve regularly heard people use the Bible to justify poverty and inequality. They quote passages like “the poor you will always have with you” to argue that poverty is inevitable and can never be ended. Never mind the irony that the Bible has been one of the only forms of the mass media — if you don’t mind my calling it that — which has had anything good to say about the poor (something those in power have tried to cover up since the days of slavery).

In many poor communities — rural, small town, and urban — churches are among the only lasting social institutions and so one of the most significant battlegrounds for deciding which moral values will shape our society, especially the lives of the needy. Indeed, churches are the first stop for many people struggling with poverty. The vast majority of food pantries and other emergency assistance programs are run out of them and much of the civic work going on in churches is motivated by varying interpretations of the Bible when it comes to poverty. These range from outright disdain and pity to charity to more proactive advocacy and activism for the poor.

Geographically, the battle for the Bible manifests itself most intensely in the Deep South, although hardly confined to that region, perhaps as a direct inheritance of theological fights dating back to slavery. For example, although there are more churches per capita than in any other state and high rates of attendance, Mississippi also has the highest child poverty rate, the least funding for education and social services for the needy, and ranks lowest in the country when it comes to overall health and wellness. It’s noteworthy that this area is known as both the “Bible Belt” and the “Poverty Belt.”

This is possible, in part, because the Bible has long been used as a tool of domination and division, while Christian theology has generally been politicized to identify poverty as a consequence of sin and individual failure. Thanks to the highly militarized rhetoric that goes with such a version of Christianity, adherents are also called upon to defend the “homeland,” even as their religious doctrine is used to justify violence against the most marginalized in society. These are the currents of white Christian nationalism that have been swelling and spreading for years across the country.

A moral movement from below

In the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair with Reverend William Barber II), we identify Christian nationalism as a key pillar of injustice in America that provides cover for a host of other ills, including systemic racism, poverty, climate change, and militarism. To combat it, we believe it’s necessary to build a multiracial moral movement that can speak directly to the needs and aspirations of poor and dispossessed Americans and fuse their many struggles into one.

This theory of change is drawn from our study of history. The most transformative American movements have always relied on generations of poor people, deeply affected by injustice, coming together across dividing lines of all kinds to articulate a new moral vision for the nation. This has also meant waging a concerted battle for the moral values of society, whether you’re talking about the pre-Civil War abolition movement, the Populist Movement of the late nineteenth century, labor upsurges of the 1930s and 1940s, or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, to grasp the particular history and reality of America means recognizing the need for a new version of just such a movement to contend directly with the ideology and theology of Christian nationalism and offer an alternative that meets the material and spiritual needs of everyday people.

Archbishop Tutu was clear that injustice and heretical Christianity should never have the last word and that the world’s religious and faith traditions still have much to offer when it comes to building a sense of unity that’s in such short supply in a country apparently coming apart at the seams. At the moment, unfortunately, too many people, including liberals and progressives, sidestep any kind of religious and theological debate, leaving that to those they consider their adversaries, and focusing instead on matters of policy. But as Archbishop Tutu’s deeds and words have shown, to change our world and bring this nation to higher ground means being brave enough to wrestle with both the politics and the soul of the nation — which, in reality, are one and the same.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Copyright ©2022 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 January 2022
Word Count: 2,487
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One month ago, we lost a giant of American democracy, Bob Dole. A national hero and statesman who was seriously and permanently injured on a battlefield in Italy while protecting his country from foreign threats, Dole epitomized what it meant to be a public servant. To honor his life, we should learn from his legacy.

In the weeks following his death, Americans have read and heard much about Senator Dole’s extraordinary achievements. And all the praise has been well deserved. As a member of Congress for 36 years and as a private citizen, Bob Dole did everything he could to make democracy work and to enable all Americans to participate in the democratic process as fully as possible.

Understandably, considerable attention has been focused on Bob Dole’s leadership role in enacting the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, the landmark law that prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities. But it would be a disservice to his legacy — especially in light of the present attacks on our democracy — not to note the breadth and depth of his commitment to providing equal opportunities for all Americans.

Senator Dole was an unabashed conservative Republican whose values demanded that he work across the aisle to protect the fundamental rights of all Americans — particularly the most vulnerable. As a young congressman from Kansas, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to support the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important of all civil rights laws. In the 1970s, Senator Dole worked to expand civil rights protections for women through the enactment of Title IX and for persons with disabilities through the enactment of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Dole’s most lasting civil rights legacy was forged during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. During those 12 years, despite intense opposition from the far right, a bipartisan congressional coalition passed more than a dozen bills strengthening the nation’s civil rights laws. Working with Republican and Democratic colleagues, Senator Dole, through his gift for compromise and consensus, played a leadership role in many of those achievements.

Two of those civil rights victories in particular stand out. First, of course, was the passage of the ADA. Second, Senator Dole worked with Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Senator Charles McC. Mathias to craft the timely and critical bipartisan compromise that ensured enactment of the 1982 Voting Rights Act Amendments. The Dole compromise provided a 25-year extension of the act and strengthened its key provisions. Twenty-five years later, Congress passed the Dole-inspired compromise by a 98–0 vote in the Senate and a 390–33 vote in the House of Representatives. President George W. Bush enthusiastically signed it into law. Regrettably, led by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito, the conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court have since decimated the Voting Rights Act’s most important provisions. Those provisions must be restored as soon as possible.

In war and as in peace, Bob Dole defended our democracy. Yet today American democracy is under attack once again.

A year ago, the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was an attempt to overturn a legitimate election. Now democracy is under assault from an “unarmed insurrection.” In 19 states controlled by Republican state legislatures, lawmakers have enacted 34 different voter suppression laws that would disenfranchise millions of voters, particularly people of color, persons with disabilities, and older Americans.

Some of those states are going one step further by allowing state legislators to manipulate valid outcomes for partisan gain, an ominous leap from representative democracy to autocracy. Not since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln defeated secession, has there been such a threat to our democracy. Sadly, the current crop of Republicans in Washington, by their silence or inaction, enable these unarmed insurrectionists.

Indeed, Senate Republicans continue to oppose the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, two of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in generations. These vital measures would guarantee the integrity of our electoral process by ensuring that every eligible citizen can vote and have that vote count.

The GOP’s present-day near-universal antipathy toward voting rights hasn’t always existed. The two of us worked together on Senate matters from 1978-1995 as moderate Republicans, a species that was admittedly endangered back then but is virtually extinct today. For nearly a half-century, and as recently as 2006, mainstream Republicans like Senator Dole worked across the aisle to defend and expand fundamental civil rights for all Americans. It was an era in which GOP senators embraced, not disgraced, democracy.

Ironically, the duty to uphold voting rights today falls not on moderate Republicans but on moderate Democrats — namely, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. This is because, except for Senator Lisa Murkowski, who supports the John Lewis bill, every Senate Republican not only opposes desperately needed voting rights protections but also refuses to allow their colleagues even to debate the measures.

Currently, the John Lewis bill and the Freedom to Vote Act appear to have the support of the entire Democratic Caucus. But for the bills to become law, Senators Manchin and Sinema need to do more than just side with the majority on voting rights. By coming out in support of limited filibuster reform that would allow for a 50-vote threshold to pass voting rights legislation, Manchin and Sinema can preserve the Senate’s bipartisan civil rights legacy — a defining achievement of American democracy, and one that Senator Dole fought tirelessly for throughout his life.

In doing so, they would be following the very example set by Dole, along with the late Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was willing, when necessary, to help reform Senate rules and precedents to advance the nation’s vital interests and preserve the integrity of the Senate. Indeed, between 1975 and 1986, Dole and many other Republicans joined Byrd on at least four occasions to change the legislative filibuster rule or establish new filibuster precedents.

As fierce partisans and passionate defenders of the filibuster, but also patriots and pragmatists, Senators Dole and Byrd knew how important it was to protect minority rights in the Senate. But they also knew that Senate rules are not a suicide pact and that sometimes new precedents must be established to enable the traditions of the Senate and the imperatives of democracy to coexist. The Senate must now adopt such a precedent, by fashioning a limited exception to the filibuster in order to defend the right to vote — the bulwark of democracy.

Finally, the two of us have been strong supporters of bipartisanship throughout our entire political careers. Indeed, we believe that pursuing bipartisanship is the best means to improving democracy. But we also know that at critical moments in our nation’s history, each party has on occasion adamantly refused to compromise and voted against essential reforms to better protect all our nation’s citizens.

For example, in the immediate wake of the Civil War, not one single Senate Democrat voted for the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the essential constitutional basis for the long overdue and historic legislation of the 1960’s protecting the right to vote. In more recent times, not one single Senate Republican voted for the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, perhaps the most consequential social justice reform of the past quarter century. In each of these challenging circumstances, the Senate acted in the best interests of American democracy.

And today, despite a lengthy and determined effort by Senator Manchin to convince Republicans to compromise on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting rights legislation, no Senate Republican will support the former and only one the latter. Once again, our nation faces another critical moment that will decide our future. And this time it is the preservation of democracy itself that hangs in the balance.

Nearly six decades ago while delivering his “I have a dream speech” at the Lincoln Memorial, and a year or two before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King eloquently declared that “we are now confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late.”

The Senate cannot afford to delay. The Senate must act now to protect the right to vote – and to save our democracy.

David F. Durenberger, now an independent, was the Republican senator from Minnesota from 1978 to 1995. Ralph G. Neas, now a Democrat, was formerly the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and currently serves as the senior counsel on voting rights at the Century Foundation.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2022
Word Count: 1,405
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Here’s a scenario to consider: a military force has purchased a million cheap, disposable flying drones each the size of a deck of cards, each capable of carrying three grams of explosives — enough to kill a single person or, in a “shaped charge,” pierce a steel wall. They’ve been programmed to seek out and “engage” (kill) certain human beings, based on specific “signature” characteristics like carrying a weapon, say, or having a particular skin color. They fit in a single shipping container and can be deployed remotely. Once launched, they will fly and kill autonomously without any further human action.

Science fiction? Not really. It could happen tomorrow. The technology already exists.

In fact, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) have a long history. During the spring of 1972, I spent a few days occupying the physics building at Columbia University in New York City. With a hundred other students, I slept on the floor, ate donated takeout food, and listened to Alan Ginsberg when he showed up to honor us with some of his extemporaneous poetry. I wrote leaflets then, commandeering a Xerox machine to print them out.

And why, of all campus buildings, did we choose the one housing the Physics department? The answer: to convince five Columbia faculty physicists to sever their connections with the Pentagon’s Jason Defense Advisory Group, a program offering money and lab space to support basic scientific research that might prove useful for U.S. war-making efforts. Our specific objection: to the involvement of Jason’s scientists in designing parts of what was then known as the “automated battlefield” for deployment in Vietnam. That system would indeed prove a forerunner of the lethal autonomous weapons systems that are poised to become a potentially significant part of this country’s — and the world’s — armory.

Early (semi-)autonomous weapons Washington faced quite a few strategic problems in prosecuting its war in Indochina, including the general corruption and unpopularity of the South Vietnamese regime it was propping up. Its biggest military challenge, however, was probably North Vietnam’s continual infiltration of personnel and supplies on what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran from north to south along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. The Trail was, in fact, a network of easily repaired dirt roads and footpaths, streams and rivers, lying under a thick jungle canopy that made it almost impossible to detect movement from the air.

The U.S. response, developed by Jason in 1966 and deployed the following year, was an attempt to interdict that infiltration by creating an automated battlefield composed of four parts, analogous to a human body’s eyes, nerves, brain, and limbs. The eyes were a broad variety of sensors — acoustic, seismic, even chemical (for sensing human urine) — most dropped by air into the jungle. The nerve equivalents transmitted signals to the “brain.” However, since the sensors had a maximum transmission range of only about 20 miles, the U.S. military had to constantly fly aircraft above the foliage to catch any signal that might be tripped by passing North Vietnamese troops or transports. The planes would then relay the news to the brain. (Originally intended to be remote controlled, those aircraft performed so poorly that human pilots were usually necessary.)

And that brain, a magnificent military installation secretly built in Thailand’s Nakhon Phanom, housed two state-of-the-art IBM mainframe computers. A small army of programmers wrote and rewrote the code to keep them ticking, as they attempted to make sense of the stream of data transmitted by those planes. The target coordinates they came up with were then transmitted to attack aircraft, which were the limb equivalents. The group running that automated battlefield was designated Task Force Alpha and the whole project went under the code name Igloo White.

As it turned out, Igloo White was largely an expensive failure, costing about a billion dollars a year for five years (almost $40 billion total in today’s dollars). The time lag between a sensor tripping and munitions dropping made the system ineffective. As a result, at times Task Force Alpha simply carpet-bombed areas where a single sensor might have gone off. The North Vietnamese quickly realized how those sensors worked and developed methods of fooling them, from playing truck-ignition recordings to planting buckets of urine.

Given the history of semi-automated weapons systems like drones and “smart bombs” in the intervening years, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this first automated battlefield couldn’t discriminate between soldiers and civilians. In this, they merely continued a trend that’s existed since at least the eighteenth century in which wars routinely kill more civilians than combatants.

None of these shortcomings kept Defense Department officials from regarding the automated battlefield with awe. Andrew Cockburn described this worshipful posture in his book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, quoting Leonard Sullivan, a high-ranking Pentagon official who visited Vietnam in 1968: “Just as it is almost impossible to be an agnostic in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, so it is difficult to keep from being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

Who or what, you well might wonder, was to be worshipped in such a temple?

Most aspects of that Vietnam-era “automated” battlefield actually required human intervention. Human beings were planting the sensors, programming the computers, piloting the airplanes, and releasing the bombs. In what sense, then, was that battlefield “automated”? As a harbinger of what was to come, the system had eliminated human intervention at a single crucial point in the process: the decision to kill. On that automated battlefield, the computers decided where and when to drop the bombs.

In 1969, Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland expressed his enthusiasm for this removal of the messy human element from war-making. Addressing a luncheon for the Association of the U.S. Army, a lobbying group, he declared:

“On the battlefield of the future enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. With first round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition will be less important.”

What Westmoreland meant by “fix the opposition” was kill the enemy. Another military euphemism in the twenty-first century is “engage.” In either case, the meaning is the same: the role of lethal autonomous weapons systems is to automatically find and kill human beings, without human intervention.

New LAWS for a new age — Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems Every autumn, the British Broadcasting Corporation sponsors a series of four lectures given by an expert in some important field of study. In 2021, the BBC invited Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, to deliver those “Reith Lectures.” His general subject was the future of artificial intelligence (AI), and the second lecture was entitled “The Future Role of AI in Warfare.” In it, he addressed the issue of lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, which the United Nations defines as “weapons that locate, select, and engage human targets without human supervision.”

Russell’s main point, eloquently made, was that, although many people believe lethal autonomous weapons are a potential future nightmare, residing in the realm of science fiction, “They are not. You can buy them today. They are advertised on the web.”

I’ve never seen any of the movies in the Terminator franchise, but apparently military planners and their PR flacks assume most people derive their understanding of such LAWS from this fictional dystopian world. Pentagon officials are frequently at pains to explain why the weapons they are developing are not, in fact, real-life equivalents of SkyNet — the worldwide communications network that, in those films, becomes self-conscious and decides to eliminate humankind. Not to worry, as a deputy secretary of defense told Russell, “We have listened carefully to these arguments and my experts have assured me that there is no risk of accidentally creating SkyNet.”

Russell’s point, however, was that a weapons system doesn’t need self-awareness to act autonomously or to present a threat to innocent human beings. What it does need is:

The reality is that such systems already exist. Indeed, a government-owned weapons company in Turkey recently advertised its Kargu drone — a quadcopter “the size of a dinner plate,” as Russell described it, which can carry a kilogram of explosives and is capable of making “anti-personnel autonomous hits” with “targets selected on images and face recognition.” The company’s site has since been altered to emphasize its adherence to a supposed “man-in-the-loop” principle. However, the U.N. has reported that a fully-autonomous Kargu-2 was, in fact, deployed in Libya in 2020.

You can buy your own quadcopter right now on Amazon, although you’ll still have to apply some DIY computer skills if you want to get it to operate autonomously.

The truth is that lethal autonomous weapons systems are less likely to look like something from the Terminator movies than like swarms of tiny killer bots. Computer miniaturization means that the technology already exists to create effective LAWS. If your smart phone could fly, it could be an autonomous weapon. Newer phones use facial recognition software to “decide” whether to allow access. It’s not a leap to create flying weapons the size of phones, programmed to “decide” to attack specific individuals, or individuals with specific features. Indeed, it’s likely such weapons already exist.

Can we outlaw LAWS? So, what’s wrong with LAWS, and is there any point in trying to outlaw them? Some opponents argue that the problem is they eliminate human responsibility for making lethal decisions. Such critics suggest that, unlike a human being aiming and pulling the trigger of a rifle, a LAWS can choose and fire at its own targets. Therein, they argue, lies the special danger of these systems, which will inevitably make mistakes, as anyone whose iPhone has refused to recognize his or her face will acknowledge.

In my view, the issue isn’t that autonomous systems remove human beings from lethal decisions. To the extent that weapons of this sort make mistakes, human beings will still bear moral responsibility for deploying such imperfect lethal systems. LAWS are designed and deployed by human beings, who therefore remain responsible for their effects. Like the semi-autonomous drones of the present moment (often piloted from half a world away), lethal autonomous weapons systems don’t remove human moral responsibility. They just increase the distance between killer and target.

Furthermore, like already outlawed arms, including chemical and biological weapons, these systems have the capacity to kill indiscriminately. While they may not obviate human responsibility, once activated, they will certainly elude human control, just like poison gas or a weaponized virus.

And as with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, their use could effectively be prevented by international law and treaties. True, rogue actors, like the Assad regime in Syria or the U.S. military in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, may occasionally violate such strictures, but for the most part, prohibitions on the use of certain kinds of potentially devastating weaponry have held, in some cases for over a century.

Some American defense experts argue that, since adversaries will inevitably develop LAWS, common sense requires this country to do the same, implying that the best defense against a given weapons system is an identical one. That makes as much sense as fighting fire with fire when, in most cases, using water is much the better option.

The convention on certain conventional weapons The area of international law that governs the treatment of human beings in war is, for historical reasons, called international humanitarian law (IHL). In 1995, the United States ratified an addition to IHL: the 1980 U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. (Its full title is much longer, but its name is generally abbreviated as CCW.) It governs the use, for example, of incendiary weapons like napalm, as well as biological and chemical agents.

The signatories to CCW meet periodically to discuss what other weaponry might fall under its jurisdiction and prohibitions, including LAWS. The most recent conference took place in December 2021. Although transcripts of the proceedings exist, only a draft final document — produced before the conference opened — has been issued. This may be because no consensus was even reached on how to define such systems, let alone on whether they should be prohibited. The European Union, the U.N., at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed. The U.S., Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.

Prior to such CCW meetings, a Group of Government Experts (GGE) convenes, ostensibly to provide technical guidance for the decisions to be made by the Convention’s “high contracting parties.” In 2021, the GGE was unable to reach a consensus about whether such weaponry should be outlawed. The United States held that even defining a lethal autonomous weapon was unnecessary (perhaps because if they could be defined, they could be outlawed). The U.S. delegation put it this way:

The U.S. delegation was similarly keen to eliminate any language that might require “human control” of such weapons systems:

In the same meeting, that delegation repeatedly insisted that lethal autonomous weapons would actually be good for us, because they would surely prove better than human beings at distinguishing between civilians and combatants.

Oh, and if you believe that protecting civilians is the reason the arms industry is investing billions of dollars in developing autonomous weapons, I’ve got a patch of land to sell you on Mars that’s going cheap.

The campaign to stop killer robots The Governmental Group of Experts also has about 35 non-state members, including non-governmental organizations and universities. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of 180 organizations, among them Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Council of Churches, is one of these. Launched in 2013, this vibrant group provides important commentary on the technical, legal, and ethical issues presented by LAWS and offers other organizations and individuals a way to become involved in the fight to outlaw such potentially devastating weapons systems.

The continued construction and deployment of killer robots is not inevitable. Indeed, a majority of the world would like to see them prohibited, including U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Let’s give him the last word:

I couldn’t agree more.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2022 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2022
Word Count: 2,633
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Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.

It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 and got it.” Badly enough, it turned out, to mess up her entry into high school. She says little more about it.

Still, I was shocked. In all the years when my father and his sister were alive and, from time to time, talked about the past, never had they (or my mother, for that matter) mentioned the disastrous “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-1920. I hadn’t the slightest idea that anyone in my family had been affected by it. In fact, until I read John Barry’s 2005 book, The Great Influenza, I hadn’t even known that a pandemic devastated America (and the rest of the world) early in the last century — in a fashion remarkably similar to, but even worse than, Covid-19 (at least so far) before essentially being tossed out of history and the memory books of most families.

That should stun anyone. After all, at that time, an estimated one-fifth of the world’s population, possibly 50 million people, reportedly died of the waves of that dreaded disease, often in horrific ways, and, even in this country, were sometimes buried in mass graves. Meanwhile, some of the controversies we’ve experienced recently over, for instance, masking went on in a similarly bitter fashion then, before that global disaster was chucked away and forgotten. Almost no one I know whose parents lived through that nightmare had heard anything about it while growing up.

Ducking and covering My aunt’s brief comment was, however, a reminder to me that we’ve long inhabited a perilous world and that, in certain ways, it’s only grown more so as the decades have passed. It also left me thinking about how, as with that deathly flu of the World War I era, we often forget (or at least conveniently set aside) such horrors.

After all, in my childhood and youth, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this country began building a staggering nuclear arsenal and would soon be followed on that path by the Soviet Union. We’re talking about weaponry that could have destroyed this planet many times over and, in those tense Cold War years, it sometimes felt as if such a fate might indeed be ours. I can still remember hearing President John F. Kennedy on the radio as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 began — I was a freshman in college — and thinking that everyone I knew on the East Coast, myself included, would soon be toast (and we almost were!).

To put that potential fate in perspective, keep in mind that, only two years earlier, the U.S. military had developed a Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China. In it, a first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons would be “delivered” to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities. If all went “well,” those would have ceased to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured — and, given what wasn’t known about the effects of radiation then, not to speak of the “nuclear winter” such an attack would have created on this planet, that was undoubtedly a grotesque underestimate.

When you think about it now (if you ever do), that plan and — to steal Jonathan Schell’s famed phrase — the fate of the earth that went with it should still stun you. After all, until August 6, 1945, Armageddon had been left to the gods. In my youth, however, the possibility of a human-caused, world-ending calamity was hard to forget — and not just because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In school, we took part in nuclear drills (“ducking and covering” under our desks), just as we did fire drills, just as today most schools conduct active-shooter drills, fearing the possibility of a mass killing on the premises. Similarly, while out walking, you would from time to time pass the symbol for a nuclear shelter, while the media regularly reported on people arguing about whether, in the case of a nuclear alert, to let their neighbors into their private backyard shelters or arm themselves to keep them out.

Even before the Cold War ended, however, the thought that we could all be blasted off this planet faded into the distant background, while the weaponry itself spread around the world. Just ask yourself: In these pandemic days, how often do you think about the fact that we’re always just a trigger finger or two away from nuclear annihilation? And that’s especially true now that we know that even a regional nuclear war between, say, India and Pakistan could create a nuclear-winter scenario in which billions of us might end up starving to death.

And yet, even as this country plans to invest almost $2 trillion in what’s called the “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal, except for news about a potential future Iranian bomb (but never Israel’s actual nukes), such weapons are seldom on anyone’s mind. At least for now, the end of the world, nuclear-style, is essentially forgotten history.

That good-old nation-building urge Right now, of course, the exhausting terror on all our minds is the updated version of that 1918 pandemic. And another terror has come with it: the nightmare of today’s anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, anti-social distancing, anti-whatever-crosses-your-mind version of the Republican Party, so extreme that its mask-less followers will even boo former President Donald Trump for suggesting they get vaccinated.

The question is: What do most of the leaders of the Republican Party actually represent? What terror do they embody? In a sense, the answer’s anything but complicated. In an all-too-literal way, they’re murderers. Given the urge of Republican governors and other legislators, national and local, to cancel vaccination mandates, stop school-masking, and the like, they’ve functionally become serial killers, the disease equivalents of our endless rounds of mass shooters. But putting all that aside for a moment, what else do they represent?

Let me try to answer that question in an indirect way by starting not with the terror they now represent but with America’s “Global War on Terror.” It was, of course, launched by President George W. Bush and his top officials in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Like their neocon supporters, they were convinced that, with the Soviet Union relegated to the history books, the world was rightfully theirs to shape however they wished. The United States was often referred to then as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and they felt it was about time that it acted accordingly. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested to his aides in the ruins of the Pentagon on 9/11, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”

He was, of course, referring not simply to al-Qaeda, whose hijackers had just taken out the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, but to the autocratic ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with that terror group. In other words, to those then in power in Washington, that murderous assault offered the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how, in a world of midgets, the globe’s military and economic giant should act.

It was a moment, as the phrase then went, for “nation building” at the point of a sword (or a drone) and President Bush (who had once been against such efforts) and his top officials came out for them in a major way. As he put it later, the invasion of Afghanistan was “the ultimate nation-building mission,” as would be the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later.

Of course, we now know all too well that the most powerful country on the planet, through its armed might and its uniquely well-funded military, would prove incapable of building anything, no less a new set of national institutions in far-off lands that would be subservient to this country. In great power terms, left alone on Planet Earth, the United States would prove to be the ultimate (un)builder of nations, a dismantler of the first order globally. Compared to Saddam’s Iraq, that country is today a chaotic mess; while Afghanistan, a poor but reasonably stable and decent place (even home to the “hippy trail“) before the Soviets and Americans fought it out there in the 1980s and the U.S. invaded in 2001 is now an almost unimaginable catastrophe zone.

The Republican Party unbuilds America Perhaps the strangest thing of all, though, was this: somehow, that powerful, all-American, twenty-first-century urge not to build but unbuild nations seems to have migrated home from our global war on (or, if you prefer, for) terror. As a result, while anything but an Iraq or Afghanistan, the United States has nonetheless begun to resemble a nation in the process of being unbuilt.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that you know what I mean. Think of it this way: thank god the party of Donald Trump was never called the Democratic Party, since it’s now in the process of “lawfully” (law by striking law) doing its best to dismantle the American democratic system as we’ve known it and, as far as that party’s concerned, the process has evidently only begun.

Keep in mind that Donald Trump would never have made it to the White House, nor would that process be so advanced if, under previous presidents, this country hadn’t put its taxpayer dollars to work dismantling the political and social systems of distant lands in such a striking fashion. Without the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the ongoing war against ISIS, al-Shabaab, and other proliferating terror outfits, without the siphoning off of our money into an ever-expanding military-industrial complex and the radical growth of inequality in this country, a former bankruptee and con man would never have found himself in the Oval Office. It would have been similarly inconceivable that, more than five years later, “as many as 60% of Republican voters [would] continue to believe his lies” in an essentially religious fashion.

In a sense, in November 2016, Donald Trump was elected to unbuild a country already beginning to come apart at the seams. In other words, he shouldn’t have been the shock that he was. A presidential version of autocracy had been growing here before he came near the White House, or how would his predecessors have been able to fight those wars abroad without the slightest input from Congress?

And now, of course, this nation is indeed being unbuilt big time by Republicans with the help of that former president and failed coupster. They already have a stranglehold on all too many states with the possibility of taking back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

And let’s not forget the obvious. Amid a devastating pandemic and nation-unbuilding on an unnerving scale here at home, there’s another kind of unbuilding going on that couldn’t be more dangerous. After all, we’re living on a planet that is itself being unbuilt in striking ways. In the Christmas season just past, for instance, news about the extremes of weather globally — from a devastating typhoon in the Philippines to staggering flooding in parts of Brazil to the possible melting of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica — has been dramatic, to say the least.

Similarly, in this country in the last weeks of 2021, the word “record” was attached to weather events ranging from tornados of an unprecedented sort to winter heat waves to blizzards and drenching rains to — in Alaska of all places — soaring temperatures. And so it goes, as we face an unprecedented climate emergency with those Republicans and that “moderate” Democrat Joe Manchin all too ready not just to unbuild a nation but a world, aided and abetted by the worst criminals in history. And no, in this case, I’m not thinking of Donald Trump and crew, bad as they may be, but of the CEOs of the fossil-fuel companies.

So, here’s what I wonder: Assuming Armageddon doesn’t truly arrive, leaving us all in the dust (or water or fire), if you someday tell your grandchildren about this world of ours and what we’ve lived through, will the Pandemic of 2020-?? and the Climate Crisis of 1900-21?? be forgotten? Many decades from now, might such nightmares be relegated to the scribbled notes found in some ancient relative’s account of his or her life?

As 2022 begins, I can only hope so, which, in itself, couldn’t be a sadder summary of our times.

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: 06 January 2022
Word Count: 2,132
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After the first year of investigations into the January 6 insurrection, which the House in authorizing its Select Committee termed a “domestic terrorist attack,” there is extensive evidence that the assault was instigated and incited by then-President Donald Trump. In precipitating the mob attack on the Capitol, Trump acted in concert with key officials in the White House, the Congress, state legislatures, and the Republican Party with the goal of stopping the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the Electoral College and preventing Biden from rightfully becoming president. Far more than mere norms and standards were willfully ignored in this plot to overturn the election result and keep Trump in office. Federal and state laws were violated with the goal of circumventing the intent of the Constitution.

Numerous identifiable concrete acts by Trump and his confederates led directly to the January 6 insurrection, which was undertaken for the purpose of seeking to overturn valid election results by the use of force. Under U.S. law, Trump and those who collaborated with him violated statutes criminalizing such attacks on federal and state voting rights, as well as a host of other federal laws.

Most fundamentally, these acts constituted a “conspiracy against rights,” as defined by the applicable federal civil rights criminal statute (Title 18, U.S. Code 241). Team Trump also perpetrated a scheme involving public officials to contravene the “one person, one vote” principle of the Fourteenth Amendment, in violation of a second federal criminal law, “deprivation of rights under color of law” (Title 18, U.S. Code 242). The term “color of law” refers to the use of governmental authority for a purpose that is unlawful. Trump and those who participated in these schemes are also culpable for incitement to commit an insurrection under a specific federal criminal law enacted during the Civil War directed at Southern secessionists and their aiders and abettors.

Both of these civil rights federal criminal statutes have extensive histories; violations of the former statute are punishable with a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and of the latter statute just one year but increased to 10 years when someone has been injured. The sentences can extend to life imprisonment or even capital punishment when someone has been killed in connection with such crimes. To that point, five people died during or as a consequence of the January 11 insurrection, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, while more than 140 police suffered concussions, rib fractures, burns, and bodily mutilation.

More than 700 Americans who participated in direct physical action to “breach the Capitol” — the euphemism used by the Justice Department to describe the insurrection — have now been indicted for their roles in physically shutting down the Congress as it was engaged in its constitutionally mandated responsibility to count Electoral College votes on January 6.

Almost all of those charged were foot soldiers, prosecuted for such routine, low-level offenses as knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building; theft of government property; entering and remaining on the floor of Congress; and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. A small subset of the accused, some 45 of those who participated in person in the physical attack, including members of vigilante groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have been charged with the more serious crime of conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional proceeding, through violence aimed at stopping Congress from moving forward with the process that would ratify Biden’s election as president.

But to date, except for those who were physically present at the insurrection, no one has been indicted for any of the actions that preceded and led to the mob attack on the Capitol, such as planning, scheduling, organizing, arranging, paying for, inciting, or otherwise causing the January 6 insurrection to occur.

The lack of ringleader indictments is notable. The attack on the Capitol was not spontaneous, nor was its timing a coincidence. It had a political purpose from the outset: a last-ditch effort by Trump and his supporters to immobilize the electoral vote count long enough to enable Republican state legislatures to rescind the certifications of the electoral vote count they had already submitted. Their plan in seven states was then to replace the legitimate electors with Trump electors — despite the fact that Trump had lost the vote in those states — thereby carrying out what I have previously described as a constitutional coup (see “Roadmap,” Washington Spectator, October 2021).

The drumbeat for politically motivated violence began immediately after the November 3 election. Two days later, former Trump campaign strategist and White House official Steve Bannon urged beheading FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. public health chief Anthony Fauci and placing their heads on pikes outside the White House. That same day, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., speaking at a rally in Georgia, advocated “total war over the election.” Vernon Jones, a Republican state representative addressing the rally, declared, “We’re starting now to see the white in their eyes, and we’re getting ready to start shooting.”

As the official Trial Memorandum prepared by the House of Representatives for its second impeachment of Trump explains, Trump acted as the convenor of the January 6 insurrection with his December 19, 2020, tweet, “Big Protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!” It was timed exactly for the date the electoral vote count was to take place. Immediately thereafter, armed far-right groups like the Proud Boys, conspiracy theorists, and white supremacists began organizing to come to Washington on the day Trump stipulated. By January 5, Bannon, in his War Room podcast, crystallized the prediction of mayhem into a new incitement that “all hell will break loose tomorrow.”

On the morning of January 6, the incitement launched with Trump’s in-person pre-insurrection speech on the Ellipse on the National Mall, when he told his supporters to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to “fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the assembled followers it was time for “trial by combat”; and another Trump lawyer, John Eastman, one of those master-minding the effort to stop the electoral count certification, told the crowd that the vote to certify the elections for president needed to be delayed because “dead people voted.” Then Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama declared: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” derided “weakling, cowering, wimpy Republican congressmen and senators who covet power and the prestige the swamp has to offer while groveling at the feet of the special interest masters,” and called for revolution: “Now our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives to give us — their descendants — an America that is the greatest nation in the world’s history. So I have a question for you: Are you willing to do the same?” North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn exhorted the crowd to stop Biden’s certification, “This crowd has some fight in it.”

The House Trial Memorandum for Trump’s second impeachment summarized how Trump’s effort to overturn the election led directly to the insurrection. In its words: “Trump fixated on January 6, 2021 — the date of the Joint Session of Congress — as presenting his last, best hope to reverse the election results and remain in power. Even as he continued improperly to pressure state officials, DOJ, and Members of Congress to overturn the electoral outcome, he sharply escalated his public statements, using more incendiary and violent language to urge supporters to ‘stop the steal’ on January 6…. These statements turned his ‘wild’ rally on January 6 into a powder keg waiting to blow. Indeed, it was obvious and entirely foreseeable that the furious crowd assembled before President Trump at the ‘Save America Rally’ on January 6 was primed (and prepared) for violence if he lit a spark.” The House’s January 13, 2021, Article of Impeachment then expressly linked Trump’s incitement of the insurrection to his effort to “subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election.”

Trump’s actions not only constituted a basis for impeaching him, as found by bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate (including 57 senators out of the 67 required for his removal from and permanent disqualification from holding federal office). They also meet the test of the federal crime of incitement: “solicitation to commit a crime of violence.” Such an indictment is not complicated to plead. The Justice Department helpfully provides a template to be filled in for such an indictment:

The federal criminal code (18 U.S. Code §2383) contains a further, separate, and special crime when a person incites others to undertake an insurrection or gives them “aid and comfort.” That crime is not only punishable by up to 10 years in prison but also includes the further penalty of making the perpetrator ineligible for ever holding any kind of public office “under the United States.” The statute, adopted originally in 1862, seems custom-made for the particular actions undertaken by Trump and other Republican public officials on January 6, in addition to those he and others undertook to bring the insurrectionists to Washington on that date in the first place. Indicting and convicting Trump for this offense, with this penalty, is especially appropriate given his actions.

(Notably, some right-wing law professors are already preemptively arguing that disbarment from office cannot constitutionally apply to elected officials — i.e., Trump — only to appointed ones. They cite Alexander Hamilton’s writings in the Federalist Papers from 1777–8 to make this case and to negate the clear intent and purpose of the drafters of the 1862 provision, which was written to apply to the supporters of the insurrection by the Confederacy against the Union in the Civil War.)

Beyond Trump, others undertook direct efforts to intimidate state election officers, including explicit death threats, especially in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, in the days following the November 3 elections. That reign of intimidation arose with the goal of stopping the officials from counting votes for Biden. Such acts appear to violate the federal law that makes physical threats or reprisals against election officials criminal offenses.

At the core of the conspiracy was the nationwide effort involving Trump and others, including other federal and state officials, to deprive the American people of their right to choose their president through voting. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the right to vote for federal offices is secured by Article 1, Sections 2 and 4 of the Constitution. As a result, the right to vote is specifically within the coverage of the federal law criminalizing any conspiracy to deny people the right to vote or to prevent their vote from being counted. This includes any action to prevent an official count of ballots in an election, any effort to alter votes, and any effort to omit the counting of votes and make false election returns.

Significantly, the federal crime of conspiring to prevent citizens from being able to have their votes counted does not require that the conspiracy succeed. What is required is that there be an actual agreement between two or more persons to accomplish the prohibited objective of overturning lawful election results.

Along with the violent rhetoric, attempts to throw out lawfully cast ballots in order to overturn the election results also began soon after Election Day. On November 16, 2020, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina had called him to see if he could throw out mail ballots that Raffensperger had previously found to have been cast lawfully. The same day, two Republican members of an election board in Wayne County, Michigan, refused to certify Detroit’s election results, a decision they reversed only after people pointed out that 78 percent of the city’s residents were Black and that white precincts had been certified by the same board. On December 8, Trump contacted the Republican Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, asking him to take action to reverse Trump’s loss in the state, after doing the same four days earlier with Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp, asking him to overturn the state’s vote for Biden and replace Biden’s electors with ones for Trump.

These efforts culminated in Trump’s infamous January 2, 2021, phone call to Raffensperger, cited by the House in its January 13 Article of Impeachment, in which Trump directly asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”

Trump’s conduct in all these interventions meets each of the elements of the two federal criminal statutes covering conspiracies against voting rights and deprivation of voting rights under color of law. Throughout, he used his position as a federal official — president — for the illicit purpose of trying to overturn the election results. And in all of this, he was far from alone: the failure of the collective attempts of Trump and his co-conspirators to throw out the electoral votes for president that had been accurately determined under the applicable federal and state laws and the Constitution became the predicate for the further incitement and organization of the January 6 insurrection.

As Trump’s efforts to overturn the election became more frenzied, the Council for National Policy (CNP), an umbrella organization of highly placed conservatives supporting Trump, issued a manifesto.

As originally reported in the Spectator in February 2021 by Anne Nelson, that document, signed by a “who’s who” of right-wing Trump-aligned activists, declared that Biden’s victory was unlawful and invalid. It called on Republican-controlled legislatures in six swing states where a majority of the voters had chosen Biden to appoint alternative electors to vote for Trump in the Electoral College, and asked the House and Senate “to object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states.” The manifesto further stated: “Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the U.S. Constitution.”

The CNP manifesto contained a hot link to a 21-page white paper, dated December 8, which laid out alleged election irregularities in detail. The unnamed author claimed these irregularities should justify declaring the presidential elections “null and void” in five states where the Republican party controlled both houses of the state legislatures (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), and called for them to be overruled. The CNP-linked white paper provided a blueprint for the activities Trump and his Republican collaborators carried out over the next four weeks to prevent the January 6 certification of the Electoral College that would confirm the Biden victory.

Based on the public record to date, Trump’s collaborators in these schemes from within the U.S. government included Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows; lieutenants in Congress, such as Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Justice Department official Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who sought to turn the DOJ into a political instrument to invalidate elections in states where Republican-controlled legislatures could then flip the results and thereby keep Trump in power. They also included aiders and abettors in statehouses, such as Pennsylvania Representative Doug Mastriano, who arranged and used campaign funds to pay for a bus to transport January 6 insurrectionists to Washington, D.C.; and Arizona Representative Mark Finchem, whose tweets and text messages show him to have been at the Capitol during the insurrection and coordinating with Ali Alexander, the Trump activist who helped organize the January 6 Stop the Steal events and led pre-insurrection chants calling for “victory or death.”

These figures interacted with many others across the country to take concrete steps with the unlawful goal of overturning the results of the election. A glaring clue to the breadth and orchestration of the conspiracy is found in the fact that in each of the five states identified in the CNP white paper (as well as in two others, Nevada and New Mexico), Trump electors met synchronously on December 14, 2020, to vote for Trump and send their votes to Vice President Pence.

Unfortunately, there has been little comment on the significance of this highly concerted effort to convene “Trump electors” in swing states to join together, without a constitutional basis under federal or state law, and then to send their illegitimate ballots to Vice President Pence as if they were valid and equal to the certified electoral votes submitted from those same states for Biden.

The public record does not yet document precisely who organized the scheme for Trump electors to cast these invalid electoral votes in the seven most contested states. An investigation of this unprecedented, multistate and clearly coordinated action would expose who laid the groundwork for delaying congressional certification of Biden’s victory and provided the impetus for the mob to attack the Capitol.

There is yet another clue to the importance of this aspect of the plot. On that very day, December 14, Attorney General William Barr announced his resignation, stating he had just briefed Trump on “voter fraud allegations” and “how these allegations will continue to be pursued.” Given the ongoing conspiracies to overturn the results of a legitimate election, including the improper casting of votes by the Trump electors in the states he had lost, the timing of the Barr resignation leads to the obvious question: What did Bill Barr know, and when did he know it? And one that may be less obvious: Was Barr concerned that senior federal officials seeking to overturn the election as January 6 approached might themselves wind up with criminal liability?

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has issued more than 50 subpoenas, reportedly interviewed more than 300 witnesses, and made three criminal referrals to the Justice Department for criminal contempt (Mark Randall Meadows, Jeffrey B. Clark, and Steven K. Bannon), but to date it has held only one public hearing. On December 27, The Washington Post reported that the Committee intends to hold extensive public hearings beginning early in 2022 and continuing through the summer. These hearings are said to include tracking the money that paid for the “Stop the Steal” rallies and the pressure campaigns to overturn the election results and delay the electoral certification. The hearings are also likely to provide the foundation for decisions by the committee to make criminal referrals covering the major figures, in addition to Trump, whose actions played a material role in leading to the January 6 “domestic terrorist attack.”

On the eve of the committee’s public phase, one basic truth must be recognized: there was indeed a conspiracy to invalidate a lawful presidential election. There should be no doubt that this conspiracy violated U.S. criminal laws protecting the right to vote and to have those votes counted. Nor should there be any doubt that Donald Trump personally incited the insurrection on January 6. Convicting him of that crime alone would create a significant, if not necessarily insurmountable, barrier to his holding the presidency again. Nor should any of his confederates, including members of the Congress, escape the long arm of the law.

Whatever the committee does, it is ultimately up to the Justice Department to review the facts and to apply the relevant federal criminal law impartially. There’s no sign that the Justice Department is undertaking this work, despite the extensive existing public evidence of violations of federal law by Trump and those who conspired with him. Given the scope of its investigation, it’s reasonable to assume the committee will find even more such evidence. Failure by the Justice Department to apply justice to all those whose activities contributed to the insurrection, rather than just to the foot soldiers, risks allowing impunity, rather than the law, to determine the future of our democracy.

Jonathan Winer is a Washington lawyer who previously served as the State Department’s senior official for international law enforcement, and a member of Keep Our Republic, a group focused on protecting American democracy.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 January 2022
Word Count: 3,458
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It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.

Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.

“I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.

In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, airstrikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in 22 countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the U.S. State Department, more than doubled.

Under that AUMF, U.S. troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”

For nearly a year, the Biden administration has conducted a comprehensive evaluation of this country’s counterterrorism policies, while continuing to carry out airstrikes in at least four countries. The 2001 AUMF has, however, already been invoked by Biden to cover an unknown number of military missions in 12 countries: Afghanistan, Cuba, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.

“A lot is being said about the Biden administration’s rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy, and while it’s true that Biden has conducted substantially less drone strikes so far than his predecessors, which is a positive step,” Savell told TomDispatch, “his invocation of the 2001 AUMF in at least 12 countries indicates that the U.S. will continue its counterterrorism activities in many places. Basically, the U.S. post-9/11 wars continue, even though U.S. troops have formally left Afghanistan.”

AUMFing in Africa “[W]e are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billion emergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”

If you want to buy a house, a 20% down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1% was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.

“This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to one million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.

Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in 13 countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.

In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed U.S. troops in Niger — one of the 13 AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, U.S. Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.

Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (section 127e of title 10 of the U.S. Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.

The U.S. military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, codenamed Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Trump and Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of 13 African nations where U.S. troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.

In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where U.S. troops saw combat.

American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged U.S. troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a U.S. military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”

In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war-on-terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.

In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the U.S. military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then-Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.

Between March and October of 2011, in fact, U.S. drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.

The war for terror? In the wake of 9/11, 90% of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.

As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”

While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the U.S. military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”

In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around 90 troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”

In Africa, Biden noted, U.S. forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, U.S. troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.

Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than 20 years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report, itself, was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.

The State Department had counted 32 foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around six trillion dollars, and nearly one million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at 69.

With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after 20 years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in 22 countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.

“The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”

When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.

As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.

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: 04 January 2022
Word Count: 2,582
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The holiday season this year brought competing versions of reality into focus. Hallmark-lite invocations of Peace and Joy stubbornly proliferated. Bezos and Co. will likely establish new milestones for online shopping. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” (which she first released in 1994) was the number one song in the world this week. And over at Instagram, scrolling addicts in the millions replayed Tom and Zendaya’s every adorable interaction.

With Omicron tearing across the country, airlines shutting down, and intensive care units filling up disproportionately with the unvaccinated, Republicans continued to complain that Democratic efforts to protect public health and safety are an attack on personal freedom and a veiled attempt to further the interests of big government. Senator Joe Manchin went on Fox News to stymie the Biden agenda and oppose the extension of the child tax credit, making a strong case for excluding millionaires from public office and perhaps himself from the Democratic Party. Across the aisle, North Dakota’s conservative Senator Kevin Cramer went on Fox News to argue that Manchin had in fact saved the Democratic Party, estimating that Manchin had protected three to four senators by his actions. The pope gave his annual Christmas message to a socially distanced audience, calling for more dialogue.

You could argue that all this amounts to normal media fare, at least by present-day standards. But there does seem to be a significant shift in the media’s fairly recent and heated coverage of the fragility of democracy. Newsweek trumpeted that the idea that people would take up arms against an American election “is no longer farfetched.” CNN reported the findings of a CIA researcher that the United States is “close to a civil war.” Foreign Affairs argued, again, that the rise of authoritarian states and reactionary populists is the real threat to democracy.

In a widely touted article for The Atlantic, Barton Gellman cited the electoral rules changes recently put in place by state Republicans who “have been building an apparatus of election theft.” The Atlantic piece built on Jonathan Winer’s reporting in this publication on the Republicans’ use of the State Legislative Doctrine to justify consolidating control over the outcome of elections.

Gellman explores why seemingly rational people have adopted such unshakeable adherence to the false narrative of the stolen election and the illegitimacy of the current administration. (As with so many aspects of the Trump era, one feels here the sharp pang of recognition with conditions in wartime Germany, when ordinary people — neighbors and childhood friends — fell in thrall with authoritarianism and committed atrocities.)

There are many factors that explain the passion of Trump’s admirers and the alternate realities they inhabit. Gellman demonstrates more clearly than ever how right-wing, fringe, and extremist groups have successfully deployed the internet and its vast realms of conspiracy-mongering and unvetted content to bypass traditional news media and shape the hardened views of their followers.

Arguably the most influential and surely the most resilient of the internet extremists is Stephen Kevin Bannon, whose astonishing biography includes a seven-year stint in the Navy (including several years as special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon), Georgetown (where he received a master’s in national security studies), Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood film producer, co-founder of Breitbart News, CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and chief strategist to POTUS. Bannon was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall campaign, but Trump pardoned him before his trial. Bannon’s Twitter account was suspended after he recommended that Anthony Fauci be beheaded, and he was indicted by a federal grand jury on two criminal contempt charges after he defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.

Bannon’s ties to white supremacist groups in the United States and far-right Catholic extremists in Europe and Latin America may make him seem easy to dismiss, but given his strong ties to Trump, the extremist drift of the Republican Party, and the uncertainties surrounding the upcoming elections, he remains a dominant figure in domestic politics.

These days, Bannon is trading cryptocurrency and presiding over two to three tapings a day of The War Room, his political talk show and top-ranked podcast, which are translated into Chinese and Japanese and carried over a mishmash of cable and streaming services since his banishment from Twitter. I listened in on Episode 1,472, recorded this past December 9, when his guest was Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, the self-styled firebrand from the Florida panhandle.

Several themes with a direct bearing on the near-term future of democracy emerged from their exchange, but the starting point was clear. Much as these two felt the need to genuflect to the memory of Bob Dole, the Republican Party of Dole’s era — a “party that won elections and lost the country” — is dead.

Not content with burying Dole, Bannon gratuitously goes after David Brooks, whom he pictures “with the wire-rimmed glasses, crying about the end of conservatism and the end of Edmund Burke and all that.” Bannon speaks in rapid bursts, stepping on his sentences, spitting out words and phrases in a way that is sometimes hard to hear or unintelligible. Still, everything he says is carefully chosen and stems from or works toward a point in his framing.

Early in their conversation, Bannon introduces his ground strategy, in language that is sprinkled with the military metaphors he uses interchangeably when talking politics — the “little platoons” that go to the school board meetings, or “the little platoons that are becoming precinct committee men.”

“This is the rise of the American laobaixing.” Bannon embellishes his commentary with esoteric terms that send you racing to Google; this last reference is a Chinese word meaning “everyday, regular people.”

Then he lays it out, putting chilling words in Gaetz’s mouth that reflect Bannon’s overall analysis and, at the same time, signal the teacher-and-pupil hierarchy in the relationship. “If you want to control the administrative state and the apparatus, you have to engage in combat with it, right?” (There are echoes here of Trump’s public comments, in which, presumably with Bannon’s encouragement, he frequently employed the language and imagery of warfare.) Bannon turns to Gaetz, “Walk through what you’re trying to accomplish.”

Gaetz is up, and quickly runs through a litany of ineffectual attacks on Democrats, their “addled” president, and legislative leaders “that would have a hard time winning elections for block captains.” He singles out Hakeem Jeffries as the most talented Democrat, and Bannon oddly interjects that Jeffries is the next Speaker after Nancy Pelosi.

Gaetz spends a few more minutes scrambling for Bannon’s approval, while reinforcing the impression that he is self-absorbed and delusional. “Democrats have to threat-construct around a series of political villains. And I’m willing to shoulder that burden,” he continues. “If Republicans need to know how to be led. … I’ll show them how to do it, so will Marjorie Taylor Greene.” Yikes.

Then Gaetz hits his stride. “We will staff our committees with Republican leads who are not just there to engage in this theater of legislating with bills that will just be vetoed.” Bannon concurs: “Hey, I was in front of these guys. It’s all theater up there. It’s performative.”

Gaetz again.

To get a better feel for Matt Gaetz and his approach to his job in Congress, it is worth watching an episode of C-Span’s coverage of the House Judiciary Committee. He stands apart from his colleagues and disrupts the hearings to the maximum extent allowed by the rules of the committee. He reads from prepared texts on topics unrelated to the hearing underway. Chairman Nadler is unfailingly courteous in the face of these outbursts; he indulges Gaetz’s requests for rulings on minor parliamentary matters, he calms the frustrated members on both sides who are eager to proceed and embarrassed by Gaetz’s theatrics. These are the finely tuned leadership qualities the junior congressman from Florida apparently wishes to transfer to his Republican colleagues.

Returning to the podcast, Bannon takes back control of the discussion. “I want MSNBC to understand this.” He adds, “What we’re trying to explain to folks is that you have something that’s impervious to elections, and that’s this massive administrative state. And for all the limited-government conservatives, you won a ton of elections and you never got serious.”

“I think this is brilliant, and it’s never been done before. This is what Matt Gaetz says: Every committee’s an oversight committee.” Bannon finishes with a flourish: “All the apparatchiks are going to be in the dock.”

Although Bannon refers frequently to MSNBC, it feels like he is using the term to cast a wider net, a catchall that includes his adversaries not just at the liberal cable news network and Microsoft but also Twitter and Google, and the banks, and the universities — in fact all of what for these purposes and in his mind would be considered liberal capital.

Gaetz follows with another salvo, this time aimed at “the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country.” (Can he mean the Frontline Doctors, the right-wing group of ersatz medical professionals that promotes and profits from fake cures for Covid-19? Probably not.)

Bannon then goes for the jugular. “This is a theory of governing, right? And it’s fresh and new. This is Trumpism in power . . . the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that are going to man the government, and get them ready now, right? We’re going to hit the beach. You have landing teams and beachhead teams. [Who is he talking to?] No more Trey Gowdys [the former Republican congressman from South Carolina], no more powder-puff derby. This is going to be hard-core accountability at every committee.”

The twin forces that shaped Bannon’s formative years were Catholicism and the military. He grew up in an Irish Catholic household and attended an all-male Catholic military school in Richmond, Virginia. What additional influences led him to embrace white nationalism and develop a taste for the language, imagery and tactics of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is grist for a more ambitious biography.

Gaetz again: “And we’re going to start at the Department of Justice and the FBI. That’s the job I want. Send me over to the Judiciary Committee, and their sphincters will tighten because they’ve been doing a lot of corrupt things over there. The FBI and Department of Justice have become the enforcement wing of the Democratic Party.”

And Bannon adds: “They understand it. MSNBC understands that we’re coming for them, or that we’re going to come for this.”

Bannon — and Gaetz, too, though to a lesser extent — is saying here that the goal is not modest reform of the intelligence agencies but a wholesale revamping of the intelligence apparatus that is the Deep State. In their conversation, Bannon calls for a Church Committee-style investigation of the intelligence community, which Gaetz unguardedly dismisses, perhaps because he’s too young to recognize the implication.

Bannon then synthesizes the ground strategy with the new theory of governance. “I want everybody to understand that when you’re out there at a school board meeting, when you’re running for a county clerk, county commissioner on the elections, when you’re trying to volunteer, or you’re volunteering to be an election official or a poll watcher, or if you signed up to be a precinct committee member, we need you to do that. This is how it all ties together, OK? It ties together in a theory of governance that we are going to take on.”

Before the last segment with Gaetz begins, there’s a paid announcement that is worth citing, an ad for In Trump Time, by Peter Navarro who served in the Trump White House as assistant to the president.

That ad is followed by one that Bannon reads on the air, on behalf of MyPillow.com and its founder and CEO Mike Lindell, a right-wing activist and ardent Trump supporter. Bannon even manages to get off a homophobic shot at Pete Buttigieg during the ad. He’s talking about delivering the pillows in time for Christmas and says, “And here’s the beauty of it, Pete Buttigieg does not have to come off parental leave to make sure that your gifts, that Santa’s gifts, arrive.”

Bannon opens the last segment with a roundup of his grievances:

I.F. Stone memorably observed that you can get all the information you need to cover the seat of government simply by going to the hearings on the Hill or reading the Congressional Record. In just this one short podcast featuring the brilliant tactician and key political adviser to the Trump administration in exile, and a half-cocked but easily underestimated right-wing agitator from the Florida panhandle, you can find large swaths of the pathology and strategy of the extreme right in American politics.

It’s reactionary populism mixed with the politics of retribution: The stance is aggrieved, anti-establishment, and resentful of elites; the program is to purge the Republican Party, take over the mechanisms of democracy — from school boards to the oversight of elections — and convert the congressional committees into Star Chambers to prosecute political and cultural adversaries.

As detached from reality as the content of this program may seem, it is not some sideshow at the margins of American politics. These men and their ideas are driving a movement that is currently favored in the polls and poised to assume the reins of the Republic.

Hamilton Fish is the editor of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 January 2022
Word Count: 2,624
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