When The Daily Star, Lebanon’s leading English-language newspaper, ceased publication and laid off its entire staff earlier this week, my whole life flashed before my eyes — as did the history of the Arab world since the 1950s that the paper both chronicled and reflected in so many ways. The Daily Star bookended my entire journalistic career, which included my first job as a reporter there in 1973 and my most recent position in journalism as its executive editor from 2003 to 2005.

When I started that first job after college in 1973, I was itching to report and write stories that, I imagined, would bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East and the wider world. My initiation was not as I had anticipated; on my first day at The Daily Star, at its office just off Riad al-Solh Square in the heart of Beirut, the paper’s then editor-in-chief, Jihad Khazen, assigned me to write a feature about the problem of cockroaches in the city. World peace and justice would have to wait.

Eager to show what I could do, I researched cockroaches from every dimension of their creepy lives. I spoke with biologists at the American University of Beirut; representatives of foreign companies that sold the chemical weapons of mass destruction that killed household insects and pests; municipal officials for the city of Beirut in charge of sanitation; and fellow citizens who shared with me a common disgust with these hardy little beasts. I spent hours in the library and made several trips to the area under my apartment’s elevator, where our resident cockroaches found safety, expanded their families and planned terror sorties into our homes.

A week of research later, I wrote my first article as a full-time professional journalist that told readers everything they needed to know about cockroaches, and probably a few things they didn’t want to. It remains, I’m proud to say, a classic in the category of cockroach journalism. And now, as I recall my 50-year-long personal association with The Daily Star, it reminds me why that little newspaper played such an outsized role in the Arab public sphere from its founding in 1952 until this week. This was due to its location, its management, its language and the relentless drive of its mostly young staff.

Thanks to the force of personality and professional aims of the late Kamel Mroue, who founded it in 1952, and his widow Salma and son Jamil, who carried it through difficult days during and after the Lebanese Civil War, The Daily Star in its early years was able to transcend its peripheral status as a small, English-language daily in an Arabic-speaking country and region. The determined owner-publishers appointed highly qualified top editors like George Hishmeh, Jihad Khazen, Raphael Calis and others, who consistently motivated their staff to practice and produce the best possible brand of journalism they could.

They were not shielded from the constraints of money and ideology that shaped journalism — and mostly shattered it — across the Middle East, which has long been politically controlled by either conservative monarchs or mostly hapless soldiers who seized power in coups. But Lebanon, and Beirut at its heart, were an Arab anomaly. Power was not concentrated in the hands of a single man or family, but rather was defined by deep cultural and political pluralism that generated a lively press and an even livelier society.

Outside money, from Arab and other foreign interests, greased much of the media that could not possibly survive only on sales and advertising in such a small market of a few million people. The Daily Star always seemed able to minimize the pressure of external financiers, and because it was in English, it could publish material that Arabic-language media feared to disseminate, so as not to anger their backers. In fact, the Lebanese media — pluralistic, professional and relatively free in a region of autocracies — became the arena where rival Arab and other foreign powers could express themselves, stake out public positions and openly criticize their foes in print and, later, on the air, as satellite news flooded the region.

These factors all converged to allow The Daily Star to carve out a unique regional role for itself; for years, it was shipped to and sold the next day in numerous Arab countries. It provided foreigners in the region with news from their home countries, as well as deep insights into the Arab world. For foreign residents of Beirut and Lebanon, it also provided practical information for their daily lives, like the opening of new beach clubs and restaurants, a mega-world of cultural events, and, of course, updates on the ubiquitous cockroaches. (Note: For those who still suffer this dread, keep in mind that cockroaches fear humans more than we fear them, which is why they scamper away when they sense us in their presence. The best way to minimize them in your home is to keep spotlessly clean areas where food, warmth and damp converge, like underneath refrigerators and kitchen stoves.)

The Daily Star struggled and closed once during the civil war, but it came back with renewed vigor in the 1990s, after the war had finally ended. At one point, it published jointly with the International Herald Tribune and was distributed across the region, from Cairo to Amman to Doha. But it could not survive the impact of the twin ravages of the advent of digitized media that sharply reduced advertising revenues and readers, and a corrupt, uncaring political class that seized Lebanon after Syria withdrew in 2005, ending its 29-year occupation. That ruling sectarian oligarchy, which remains in place today, syphoned off state funds for their own private wealth, while allowing educational, water, transportation and energy infrastructure to all deteriorate, savaging the private banking system and finally driving the country into its current bankruptcy and near-total collapse.

By the early 2000s, other Arab countries also no longer needed mouthpieces in Lebanon, as every autocratic regime set up its own satellite television channel and hired digital henchmen to assault their enemies on social media, whether they were fellow Arabs, Iran, Israel or foreign powers like the United States. Like many newspapers across Lebanon and the region, The Daily Star was unable to overcome the new challenges it faced despite heroic efforts by its staff, in part because of the erratic ways of its newest owners, who are linked to the family of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

The demise of The Daily Star is a moment of sadness — a time to mourn a plucky and meaningful institution that launched the journalism careers of hundreds of young men and women in Lebanon, as it dared to report the news seriously and fearlessly in a politically unserious and fearful region. But this is also a moment of celebration — to recall and honor what The Daily Star did achieve against terrible odds of war, corruption, incompetent national management, and the global forces of digitization, globalization and polarization. The spirit and daring professionalism that always characterized the paper’s publishers, editors and staff have not died, but have been scattered again to the four corners of a turbulent world in constant change.

When it is quiet at night in Beirut, and I walk gingerly to not disturb any scheming cockroaches, I do not fret the inevitable demise of another Arab newspaper. Rather, I look around and see so many new online Arab publications and successful, determined journalists working in Arabic, English and French. I smile when I remind myself that so many of them stand on the shoulders of hundreds of journalists who once worked at The Daily Star and dozens of other Arab publications that dared, in their day, to try and create Arab societies where human dignity, justice, truth and the rule of law matter. You cannot ask much more than that from any journalist or citizen.

Rami G. Khouri is director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. He tweets @ramikhouri (This article originated at DAWN)

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 8 November 2021
Word Count: 1,310
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I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request.

Authors wait their whole lives for I-told-you-so moments like these. But mine passed without accolades, awards, or adulation.

Being way ahead of the pack is supposed to bring honors and rewards, isn’t it? Imagine the response if, for example, a writer had predicted the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, one more or less did. “I conceived of Blowback — written in 1999, published in 2000 — as a warning to the American public. It was: you should expect retaliation from the people on the receiving end of now innumerable clandestine activities,” TomDispatch regular Chalmers Johnson recalled of his blockbuster book in a 2004 interview. “The warning was not heeded… But then after 9/11, when, all of a sudden, inattentive Americans were mobilized to seek, at least on an emergency basis, some understanding of what they were into, it became a bestseller.”

Johnson had been ahead of the game by a year and was celebrated for it. In 2010, I published The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, a collection of essays and articles highlighting the futility of that conflict and the need to end America’s involvement there. This summer, the arguments that other contributors (including Johnson) and I made finally carried the day. “Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan,” President Joe Biden announced on August 31st. “I give you my word: With all of my heart, I believe this is the right decision, a wise decision, and the best decision for America.”

It may have been the best idea, but it wasn’t an original one. And yet, Biden never mentioned my book. Or offered me cursory acknowledgement. Or admitted that he was at least a decade behind the curve.

Of course, I understood the reasons. If I were him, I’d want to keep my failings quiet, too. So, I waited for the cable news networks to take note. I kept checking my phone as the war in Afghanistan careened to its close. I could almost imagine the way the interview would go.

“How does it feel to have been so prescient and have had the arguments in your book finally win out?” Fox News’s Chris Wallace would ask.

“Well, Chris, it’s about time somebody asked that…” I would say before launching into an answer that would, of course, double as an advertisement for my book and, after all these years, land it atop the bestseller list.

But that call from Fox News never came. And when I checked the bestseller list, what I found there was some ridiculous book on “the final eight months of the pursuit of Osama bin Laden” — co-written by Chris Wallace, no less! — instead of mine.

Maybe MSNBC would get in touch. So again, I checked my phone messages, my email, my texts. Nothing. Instead, they went with retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a former national security advisor to President Trump and one of the Americans who lost the war in Afghanistan. In fact, McMaster popped up on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News seven times between August 16th and August 26th, just edging out disgraced former general, CIA director, and Afghan War chief David Petraeus, who appeared six times on those networks, according to Media Matters for America.

I was heartened to see that some news outlets did, at least, seek out TomDispatch regular and president of the Washington D.C.-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Andrew Bacevich. One of them even referenced prescient comments he made in Foreign Affairs five years ago. But did any of them mention that his work appeared in The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan five years before that? Nope!

Let down by the mainstream media, I still held out a shred of hope. Surely my publisher, Verso, would get in touch. “We did it!” the managing director would write. “You offered the argument for withdrawal. A multitrillion-dollar organization made the case against it for 10 years, but as in Afghanistan itself, they lost!” If he tried to send that message, it must have been by Western Union telegram, because it still hasn’t arrived.

Gotta be wrong to be right It’s never been a good idea to be right about America’s wars. At least, not from the start. A committed Cold Warrior and CIA analyst, Chalmers Johnson achieved great notoriety only after renouncing his hawkish ways. It was the same for Bacevich, a Vietnam War veteran and also a dedicated Cold Warrior once upon a time. And before Spencer Ackerman was celebrated — in two New York Times book reviews, no less! — for his incisive and insightful Reign of Terror, he supported the Iraq War and was an unabashed cheerleader for David Petraeus.

I’m still waiting for the Times to review The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan even once. Admittedly, anthologies are a tough sell, but mine advanced the argument 10 years before Biden finally made his case to the American people. Being that far ahead of the president should demand notice, but not, it seems, in the United States.

And there’s a reason for that. Americans love a conversion story, a tale of redemption. You need to be wrong before you can get it right. At some point, you need to drink the Kool-Aid — even if it leaves you standing in a Jonestown-esque sea of corpses — or they’ll never take you seriously. This country hates to be reminded that not everyone was duped by the domino theory or beguiled by a two-bit camouflage-clad huckster.

To be fair, almost every American was wrong about the war in Afghanistan. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90% of us approved of the United States attacking that country, just 5% disapproved and only a fraction of them actively tried to stop the impending war. During a September 2001 antiwar march in New York City, for example, I can remember a middle-aged man nearly frothing at the mouth only inches from my face. He was so enraged by those who believed it would be a mistake to bomb Afghanistan, the war would fail, and Afghans would suffer, that his face had turned a color somewhere between scarlet and plum. I can still see the spittle flying from his lips as he bellowed “SCUM!”

I hope that incensed man is now hosting Afghan refugees in his home. I wouldn’t, however, put money on it. I would wager, instead, that he’s never apologized for his bellicosity and belligerence, for being wrong on the war, or for all the pain and death that conflict caused. And if so, he isn’t alone.

How many mea cuplas did you hear this August as a defeated American military limped out of Kabul, killing 10 civilians in its final drone strike of the war? That ending was as fitting as it was heartbreaking. Overwhelming evidence of the slaughter of seven children and three adults forced the U.S. military to make a singular and unprecedented apology for those killings. But what about the rest of America? When are the 90% — perhaps even you, dear reader — going to take responsibility for the failed war they backed? When are they going to apologize to Afghans for 20 years of death, failure, and loss?

So wrong for so long If you haven’t caught on by now, the aggrieved tone of this piece is a rhetorical device… sort of. I never expected that call from Chris Wallace or a text from MSNBC or President Biden to name-check me. I never thought that the New York Times Book Review would see the error of its ways and I’d be plenty pleased if they gave Ackerman’s Reign of Terror a third, fourth, or fifth positive review.

I wasn’t kidding, however, about H.R. McMaster or David Petraeus. The truth is: no news producer should ever book either of them unless it’s for a segment on how to lose a war, how to profit from one, or how to live with copious amounts of blood on one’s hands. But that’s hardly a burden they bear alone. I, too, share in the responsibility for the lives taken so needlessly in Afghanistan. I may not have been among the 90% of Americans braying for war in 2001, but I paid my taxes for the next 20 years, so I’m culpable for every Afghan civilian shot at a checkpoint or killed by a drone. And I also bear some responsibility for the deluge of suffering that followed as this country’s Global War on Terror spread across the Greater Middle East and Africa — for civilians executed by U.S.-backed troops in Burkina Faso and Cameroon, killed by air strikes in Libya and Iraq, or wiped out by drones in Somalia and Yemen.

This is all to say that I deserve neither champagne, congratulations, nor special acknowledgement but instead, like the rest of America, shame, blame, and guilt. And I’d be more than happy to see the last copies of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan pulped and the book completely forgotten. But, in return, I do have a small ask: remember TomDispatch regular Jonathan Schell? Twenty years ago, he led his “Letter from Ground Zero: November 1, 2001” at the Nation with this sentence: “The war in Afghanistan is not going well.” How right he was.

Schell proved exceptionally prescient as he saw, even in the opening moments of the Afghan War, that U.S. “military policy is at odds with its political policy. And in a war on terrorism — as distinct from a war on a state — it is politics, not military force, that will probably decide the outcome.” Schell intimately understood this because he had witnessed American hubris and ineptitude decades earlier in Vietnam. He had watched the United States so completely botch the political war there that tens of billions of dollars and decades of effort on the “military half” of the conflict bought the Potemkin state of South Vietnam only two years of existence after U.S. combat troops withdrew from that country.

In that now-ancient “Letter from Ground Zero,” Schell drew attention to a contemporaneous article by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer who saw “destroying Al Qaeda and the Taliban” as the chief U.S. goal in Afghanistan. “What comes after will be an interesting problem. But it comes after,” wrote that conservative pundit, neglecting to understand the nature of the war. It turned out that the United States all but defeated the Taliban in short order but bungled potential victory into a 20-year insurgency. This country was, then, so completely outplayed on the political front that two decades of effort and trillions of U.S. tax dollars proved incapable of sustaining the Afghan government and its U.S.-built army even until the American departure was complete. In the end, it turned out to be less “an interesting problem” than the disastrous crux of 20 years of conflict.

Schell saw it all too clearly in November 2001. “The United States can unquestionably defeat the Taliban in a ground war and occupy Afghanistan,” he wrote. “But politics will not disappear because it has been ignored. The state that is already missing in Afghanistan will still be missing.”

Schell game Schell wasn’t only right about Afghanistan. Earlier, he had been far ahead of the curve when it came to the U.S. war in Vietnam and the peril of nuclear weapons, as he would later be on the increasing strength of people power around the world, and the dangers of climate change. Krauthammer, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic booster of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His prediction: that the conflict would be a “Three Week War.” He deemed David Petraeus “brilliant,” defended the use of torture, touting its efficacy, and promoted climate skepticism.

He was regularly cited for regularly being wrong, as in this September 27, 2009 prediction on Fox News Sunday:

Chris Wallace: “Best guess — will the president end up giving [U.S. Afghan War commander General Stanley] McChrystal the troops he wants, or will he change the war strategy?”

Charles Krauthammer: “I think he doesn‘t and McChrystal resigns.”

Weeks later, as you may recall, Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and McChrystal stated that President Obama had “provided me with a clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task.” Nobody bothered to look back or keep score on any of it, so Schell continued writing for a niche left-leaning audience in the pages of the Nation, while Krauthammer remained a cable-news regular, his syndicated column available in newspapers across the country.

Neither Schell nor Krauthammer lived to see America’s ignominious defeat in Afghanistan. But last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made an uncharacteristic admission that completely settled the question of who got it right in November 2001. “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths: that we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in [the Afghan army’s] senior ranks… that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that the Taliban commanders struck with local leaders.” As the retired general told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which — and for whom — many of the Afghan forces would fight.” He only understood this after 20 years of war, trillions of dollars squandered, and at least 176,000 lives spent in vain to achieve outright defeat. Jonathan Schell put it in writing before the war was a month old.

When Charles Krauthammer died in 2018, the New York Times devoted almost 1,800 words to his memory. Four years earlier, at the time of Jonathan Schell’s death, the Times spent less than 1,250 words summing up his life.

As I said, it doesn’t pay to be right about America’s wars, especially from the start. Nobody cares. Nobody remembers. Nobody keeps the receipts, just as nobody who matters is going to hold Lloyd Austin to account for all he “failed to fully grasp” about the Afghan War or any of his other forever war failures.

It’s a given that, when he shuffles off this mortal coil, Austin’s obituary will trump Krauthammer’s or Schell’s (maybe even the two combined). The same for David Petraeus. And, of course, for President Biden. That’s the way it goes in America. Jonathan Schell is never going to get his due, but somebody (other than me) at least owes him an acknowledgement for making the case for withdrawal from Afghanistan 20 years early.

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 ©2021 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 November 2021
Word Count: 2,434
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On February 17, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the U.S. found itself in a global war, Henry Luce, in an editorial in Life magazine (which he founded along with Time and Fortune), declared the years to come “the American Century.”  He then urged this country’s leaders to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit.”

And he wasn’t wrong, was he?  Eight decades later, who would deny that we’ve lived through something like an American century? After all, in 1945, the U.S. emerged triumphant from World War II, a rare nation remarkably unravaged by that war (despite the 400,000 casualties it had suffered). With Great Britain heading for the imperial sub-basement, Washington found itself instantly the military and economic powerhouse on the planet.

As it turned out, however, to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence,” one other thing was necessary and, fortunately, at hand: an enemy. From then on, America’s global stature and power would, in fact, be eternally based on facing down enemies.  Fortunately, in 1945, there was that other potential, if war-ravaged, powerhouse, the Soviet Union. That future “superpower” had been an ally in World War II, but no longer. It would thereafter be the necessary enemy in a “cold war” that sometimes threatened to turn all too hot. And it would, of course, ensure that what later came to be known as the military-industrial complex (and a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying many planets like this one) would be funded in a way once historically inconceivable in what might still have passed for peacetime.

In 1991, however, after a disastrous war in Afghanistan, the Soviet empire finally collapsed in economic ruin. As it went down, hosannas of triumph rang out in a surprised Washington. Henry Luce, by then dead almost a quarter of a century, would undoubtedly have been thrilled.

The indispensable superpower In the meantime, in those cold-verging-on-hot-war years, the U.S. ruled the roost in what came to be known as “the free world,” while its corporations came to economically dominate much of the planet. Though it would be a true global imperial power with hundreds of military bases scattered across every continent but Antarctica, there would prove to be significant limits to that power — and I’m not just thinking of the Soviet Union or its communist ally (later opponent), Mao Zedong’s China.

At the edges of what was then called “the Third World” — whether in Southeast Asia during and after the disastrous Vietnam War or in Iran after 1979 — American power often enough came a cropper in memorable ways.  Still, in those years, on a planet some 25,000 miles in circumference, Washington certainly had a remarkable reach and, in 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared, it seemed as if Luce had been a prophet of the first order.  After all, the United States as the ultimate imperial power had — or so, at least, it appeared at that moment — been left without even a major power, no less another superpower, as an enemy on a planet that looked, at least to those in Washington, like it was ours for the taking. And indeed, take it we soon enough would try to do.

No wonder, in those years, American politicians and key officials filled the airwaves with self-congratulation and self-praise for what they liked to think of as the most “exceptional,” “indispensable,” “greatest” power on the planet and sure to remain so forever and a day.

In another sense, however, problems loomed instantly. Things were so desperate for the military-industrial complex in a country promised a cut in “defense” spending, then known as a “peace dividend,” thanks to the triumph over the Soviets, that enemies had to be created out of whole cloth. They were, it turned out, fundamental to the organization of American global power. A world without them was essentially inconceivable or, at least, inconvenient beyond imagining.  Hence, the usefulness of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein who would be not-quite-taken-down in the first Gulf War of 1991.

Perhaps the classic example of the desperate need to create enemies, however, would occur early in the next century. Remember the “Axis of Evil” announced (and denounced) by President George W. Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address? He called out three states — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — that then had not the slightest way of injuring the U.S.  (“States like these, and their terrorist allies,” insisted the president, “constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”) Of course, this was, in part, based on the claim that Iraq might have just such weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t!) and that it would, in turn, be willing to give them to terror groups to attack the U.S. That lie would become part of the basis for the invasion of that country the next year.

Think of all this as the strangest kind of imperial desperation from a superpower that seemed to have it all. And the result, of course, after Osama bin Laden launched his air force and those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers against New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, was the Global War on Terror, which would soon prove a self-imposed, self-created disaster.

Or think of it another way, when considering the imperial fate of America and this planet: the crew who ran Washington (and the U.S. military) then proved — as would be true throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century — incapable of learning even the most basic lessons history had to offer. After all, only a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, thanks in significant part to what its leader called its “bleeding wound,” a disastrous war in Afghanistan in which the Red Army became endlessly mired, the Bush administration would launch its own disastrous war in Afghanistan in which it would become — yep, endlessly mired. It was as if this country, in its moment of triumph, couldn’t help but take the Soviet path into the future, the one heading for the exits.

Cold wars and hot wars In November 2021, just three decades after the implosion of the Soviet Union, no one could imagine any longer that such a vision of victory and success-to-come caught the underlying realities of this country or this century. The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House five years earlier had been the most visible proof of that.

It’s hard to imagine today that he wasn’t the truest of all products of that very American Century, a genuine message from it to us and the rest of the world. He was, after all, the man who, in his key slogan in 2016 as this country’s first declinist candidate for president — “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) — suggested that it had been all over for a while when it came to this country being the first player in history. He had, in fact, been coughed up by an authoritarian system already in formation.  He vaulted into office not just claiming that the American system was a fraud, but that it had lost its firstness and its greatness. In response to that message, so many Americans who felt that they, too, had lost their way, that they were, in fact, being crushed by history, voted for him.  In a mere four years in the Oval Office, he would bring a true sense of enemy-ness home in a new and shattering way, creating a world in which the enemy was distinctly American and needed to be overthrown.

The topsy-turvy nature of the Trumpian version of the American century is something this country — and certainly the Biden administration — still hasn’t fully come to grips with. For decades, we had indeed led the rest of the world and this is what we had led them into: the conspiracy theory of history (almost any conspiracy theory you want to mention), the “fraudulent” election now being eternally denounced by Donald Trump, the coup attempt of January 6th, a Republican Party that’s become the opposition from hell, a planet on which fossil-fuel companies (often American) knew decades ago just what was happening with the climate and invested their extra funds in making sure that other Americans didn’t, and… but why go on?  If you don’t sense the depth and truth of this tale of the American Century, just ask Joe Manchin.

Its final decades seem to be a time when this country’s politicians can hardly agree on a thing, including how to keep Americans safe in a pandemic moment. Check out the New York Times Covid-19 “global hotspots” map and, in these last months, it’s looked like a replay of the Cold War, since the U.S. and Russia are the two largest “hotspots” of death and destruction on the planet, each colored a wild red. Think of it as a new kind of hot war.

And little wonder at the confusion of it all. I mean, talk about a superpower that proved incapable of learning from history! In response to the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 — and mind you, something like 3,000 Americans were being slaughtered every two days most of this year thanks, in part, to the murderous leadership of various Trumpian figures in this pandemic moment — the greatest power ever decided that the only response imaginable to 9/11 was to launch its own war in Afghanistan. Thank you, Soviet Union, for your example (not to speak of our own example in Vietnam back when)!  And yes, 20 years later, on a planet far more filled with Islamist terror groups than might have seemed even faintly imaginable on September 11, 2001, failure is just another word for a “new cold war.”

Oh, yes, in 2021, there is indeed another power rising on this planet, one it’s necessary to organize against with all due haste — or so the Biden administration and the U.S. military would like us to believe. And no, I’m not thinking about the power of a fast-heating climate, which threatens to take down anyone’s century. I’m thinking, of course, about China.

An upside-down version of 1991 As we head into the final two decades of the all-American era that Luce predicted, think about this: the American Century has been a disaster of the first order. In the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, the U.S. decided to remake the world and did so — at least in the sense of allowing climate change to run riot on Planet Earth — while, in the process, unmaking itself.

So, 80 years after Henry Luce proclaimed its existence, welcome indeed to the American Century, or rather to the increasingly nightmarish planet it’s left us on. Welcome to an age of billionaires (that could even one day see its first trillionaire); to levels of desperate inequality that would once have been unimaginable here; to large-scale death due to a pandemic from hell mismanaged by men who were functionally murderers; and to a literally hellish future that, without the kind of war-style mobilization Joe Manchin among others is ensuring will never happen, will sooner rather than later envelop this country and the planet it meant to rule in a climate disaster.

Honestly, could the Chinese century — not that it’s likely, given how the world is trending — be worse? You don’t even have to leave this country and go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or Yemen to judge that question anymore.

And sadly, the one thing the triumphalists of 1991 agreed on — and American politicians have never changed their minds about, no matter the course of our wars — was funding the military-industrial complex in a way that they never would have funded either the bolstering of human health or the halting of climate change. That urge to dump taxpayer dollars into the American war machine, despite failure after failure in war after war, has never been stanched. It remains more or less the only thing congressional Democrats and Republicans can still agree on — that and the need for an enemy to endlessly prepare to fight.

And now, of course, the imperial power that simply couldn’t exist without such enemies and has left Afghanistan and much of the rest of its War on Terror (despite the odd drone strike) largely in the lurch, is in the process of creating its newest enemy for a new age: China.  Think of the new cold war that the Biden administration (like the Trump administration before it) has been promoting as 1991 turned upside down when it comes to enemy-ness. The ultimate moment of American triumph and then of despair both needed their distant enemies, an ever-more well financed military-industrial-congressional complex, and an ever more “modernized” nuclear arsenal.

Oh, the hubris of it all. We were the country that would remake the world in our image. We would bring “liberation” and “democracy” to the Afghans and the Iraqis, among others, and glory to this land. In the end, of course, we brought them little but pain, displacement, and death, while bringing American democracy itself, with all its failings, to the autocratic edge of hell in a world of “fraudulent” elections and coupsters galore.

Now, it seems, we are truly living out the end of the American Century in the world it created.  Who woulda thunk it?

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 ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 November 2021
Word Count: 2,274
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I know, I know. It’s the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I’m sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of… well, who knows what? But for me, it’s different. I went to Afghanistan in 2002, already angry about this country’s misbegotten war on that poor land, to offer what help I could to Afghan women. And little as I may have been able to do in those years, Afghanistan left a deep and lasting impression on me.

So, while this country has fled its shameful Afghan War, I, in some sense, am still there. That’s partly because I’ve kept in touch with Afghan women friends and colleagues, some living through the nightmare of the Taliban back again and others improbably here in America, confined in military barracks to await resettlement in the very country that so thoroughly wrecked their own. And after all these years, I’d at least like to offer some thoughts on the subject, starting with a little history that most Americans know nothing about.

So be patient with me. War is never over when it‘s over. And it would be wrong to simply leave Afghanistan and its people in the dust of our disastrous departure. For me, at least, some thoughts are in order.

A little history News about America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan was swift, ugly, and then all over and largely forgotten. The news cycle moved on to the next sensation. But consider me behind the times. I’m still lost in remembrance of the years I spent in Afghanistan and the tales I was told of earlier days in a proud and peaceful land.  Afghan history is so much longer and more complex than we know. But let me take you back for a moment to what may still prove to have been the last best days of Afghanistan.

Muhammad Zahir Shah, the final king of that country, ascended to the throne in 1933. He was only 19, but already planning Afghanistan’s future. He didn’t want the country to be communist — or capitalist. He didn’t want Afghanistan to become a servant of the Soviet Union or of any of the other large, overbearing countries in its vicinity. He wanted it to take its place in the world as a modern social democracy and so proposed a new constitution, an elected parliament, egalitarian civil rights for men and women alike, and universal suffrage to sustain just such a democratic state. He even enrolled Afghanistan in the international League of Nations.

British India, France, and Germany had already built and staffed modern-language high schools in Kabul, including one established in 1921 for girls. King Zahir Shah then built a modern university with faculties of medicine, law, science, and letters. After 1960, when the entire university became coeducational, American universities helped it establish yet more fields of study, including agriculture, education, and engineering. Photographs exist of its young students, women and men alike, clad in modern European garb, seated together on the campus lawn.

During the 1960s, Afghanistan became the most popular stop for European and American students traveling east along the world famous Hippie Trail. In southern Afghanistan, U.S. engineers and their families settled in to conduct an American aid project. Working with Afghans, they built dams and irrigation systems to bring the arid land of the South to life. Such developments were filmed in black and white and clipped into newsreels shown in American movie theaters, so that moviegoers could feel good about what their country was doing around the world.

Then, in 1973, while King Zahir Shah was on a trip to Italy, his cousin, brother-in-law, and former prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, suddenly declared a new Republic of Afghanistan and named himself president, prime minister, foreign minister, and minister of defense.  And so ended the Afghan monarchy and a 40-year-long peace in a remarkably progressive Afghanistan.

One coup begets another. Five years later, Daoud himself was shot and killed to launch the Saur (April) Revolution. He would be replaced by a newly minted communist leader, Noor Mohammad Taraki, the founder of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Some of the party’s modern ideas, especially education for girls and women, had already been well established in the capital, but in the countryside they were met with violent opposition that split the party in two. A more conservative communist party, Parcham, arose to battle the revolutionary PDPA.  Thousands of Afghans would be killed in the struggle. Exiled King Zahir Shah said sadly that his decision to send some outstanding young Afghan men to be educated in Moscow had been “a great mistake.”

But it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, who, as Chalmers Johnson revealed long ago, provoked the Soviet Union to send the Red Army in to clean up the mess. That was the first misstep in the USSR’s 10-year-long unwinnable war in Afghanistan against mujahideen guerillas, both local and foreign. By then, Washington had shifted its attention from irrigation to espionage, sabotage, and what was euphemistically termed “special interest.”

When an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Afghans had been killed and it appeared that the Russians were going to fight until the last Afghan was dead, CIA Director Stansfield Turner questioned America’s incitement of what had clearly become an apocalyptic war. He asked whether it was right to “use other peoples for the geopolitical interests of the United States?”

By the time Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a peace treaty with the Afghans in 1988 and the last Soviet soldiers fled the country in February 1989, some two million Afghans had been killed. And even then, the U.S. didn’t stop meddling in that country’s affairs, prompting yet more conflict among factions of the Afghan mujahideen. By the time the U.S. abandoned the country in 1992 after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.N. reported that nearly two million more Afghans had been killed and another 600,000 to two million maimed.

In that period, more than six million Afghans had fled to Pakistan and Iran, becoming the world’s largest population of refugees from a single country. Another two million sought refuge in other countries, while two million more became internal refugees.  The Afghan casualties of that period of seamless wars added up to about half the population of prewar Afghanistan, a country that, by the way, is about the size of Texas.

Only four years later, the Taliban (“students”) rose up from the south and, propelled by Pakistan, captured the capital, Kabul, proclaiming the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. A new, more primitive Afghanistan steeped in the Taliban’s hard-boiled brand of Deobandi Islamic fundamentalism would then be created.

Women were confined to their homes, girls kept from school. Zahir Shah, still in exile in Italy, must have regretted his second truly bad mistake as king: he had sent another group of young Afghan men to Egypt to study fundamentalist Islam. The graduates, hiding out in Pakistan during the Afghan war against the Soviets, had formed seven radical groups, seven militias, all supported by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and — because America chose godliness over democracy — the U.S.A. It was then (and still remains) past time to raise Stansfield Turner’s question again: Was it ever right for Washington to “use other peoples for the geopolitical interests of the United States?”

A personal story I opposed the American war in Afghanistan.

The assault upon America’s military-industrial-congressional complex that smashed the Pentagon, brought down New York’s twin towers, and aimed (via a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) for the Capitol had not been launched by Afghans, but by suicidal Saudi Arabian hijackers carrying out the plan of their Saudi mastermind Osama bin Laden, who happened to be living in Afghanistan then. The Taliban government tried to negotiate with George W. Bush’s administration to bargain for time — perhaps to hand over bin Laden, or even to surrender themselves.

In that context, the hasty, knee-jerk vote of Congress, supposedly a “deliberative body,” to “authorize” military force seemed to me a reckless display of mindless, macho muscle-flexing by men who knew they would not be required to fight in the war they were about to bring upon this country and the innocent people of Afghanistan.  Only Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California had the courage to vote against the mob. For her principled stand, she was reviled and threatened by Americans who did not hesitate to offer opportunities for heroism to other people’s children.

Initially, a trigger-happy administration in Washington didn’t even bomb bin Laden’s compound in rural Afghanistan. Instead, it bombed Kabul, among other places, until there was truly nothing left to bomb. President Bush proclaimed victory. Laura Bush delivered a radio address, declaring that America had liberated the women of Afghanistan almost as if they had thrown off their burqas and become “free.” For his part, Bush paid off a posse of Afghan strongmen to search for bin Laden — predictably they didn’t find him — while he himself, along with Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warmed up for yet another prefabricated war, this time against Iraq.

I arrived in Kabul in early 2002 after the bombing had stopped, as a volunteer with a small NGO run by and for women. From my frigid room on the second floor of what had once been a house, I looked down upon a bungalow next door: the windows still painted white to prevent people from staring at the women confined there and to prevent the women from looking out. It seemed, whatever Laura Bush might have imagined, that they had not been set free by America’s bombs.

In fact, it took both time and courage for women in the capital and other Afghan urban centers to find one another and begin to make common cause. From 2002, I worked with some of those women for years, not so much teaching or leading them, as merely answering questions, offering friendship and assistance as they worked together to make their own way out of those confining burqas and into a new world of greater confidence.

They chose their own projects, their own strategies, their own compatriots. Then they entered public life, denouncing violence against women, backing women candidates for the new legislature, and publicizing their work. They developed ways to help widows, child brides, new mothers, rape victims, battered women, incarcerated women, and the raft of girls who had tried and failed to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire.

“Night Letters,” as they were known, were nailed to the gates of our office compound, threatening us with death and worse.  But the women, many of them very young, tore those letters up and just kept on working. They worked in hospitals, courts, jails, schools, and government ministries. They supported women and girls who were becoming athletes, musicians, and singers, as well as reporters for newspapers, radio stations, and TV. With the support of fathers, brothers, and husbands, women and girls, in the cities at least, were making the world anew. At the same time, the so-called International Community, led by the United States, carried its war, and its bombs and Hellfire missiles, into the heartland of the country and the strongholds of the Taliban.

Among an older generation of urban women were the well-educated former teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, judges, and others from that older, better time, capable of helping rebuild a peaceful and improved society. With the support of international NGOs, urban Afghan women, young and old, set out to do just that, although many would be murdered along the way. Still, the success of their work could be seen — until last August — in a new post-Taliban generation: the young women and girls who walked fearlessly to work or school dressed in clothes of their own devising, long loose shirts, pants, and bright headscarves, the uniform of a brave new world.

But that new world had not reached the 70% of the country that remained “rural.” As Anand Gopal recently reported movingly in the New Yorkermagazine, Afghanistan’s “other women” living in the countryside had not been visited by progress or peace. They had instead been plagued by the assaults of foreign forces, of American-trained Afghan soldiers, and of murderous American “air support.” If the lives of rural women as the chattel of the Taliban were grim, they were made much worse by American forces carrying out their own ill-conceived sense of duty.

And now, the Taliban has predictably come again for the women of the cities. None who survived Taliban rule had forgotten what life was like then. Not after spending five years confined to the house, venturing out only with a male keeper, half-blinded by a wretched burqa, fearful of the punitive squads of men from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who patrolled the streets, bearing their corrective whips.

Those were the same sorts of whips today’s Taliban were seen using again in August on the women of Kabul. That’s when they changed the name of Afghanistan’s Ministry for Women’s Affairs back to the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Suddenly, we were once again back in the previous century.

Flight In mid-August, women activists in Kabul fortunate enough to have passports checked their documents, packed essentials, and made their way carefully to that city’s airport. They came with colleagues, husbands, children, babies, and parents, with families large and small. Some — the lucky ones — waited at the airport for hours. Many more waited for days. Many were turned away for lack of “papers.” One of my friends and her family passed the documents test, waited two or three days inside the airport, and then boarded a plane already inexplicably crowded with Pakistanis.

Friends who made it onto flights to the U.S. now speak of grief, terror, exhaustion, impatience, fear, chaos, hope, gratitude, and sorrow. All hearts are broken. One is a lawyer I met almost 20 years ago when, as a teenager, she came to work at a German-sponsored women’s organization.  She rose over the years to lead the office, then left it for law school and a new role as an advocate for women in the courts. Now, she’s confined with her husband and sons, along with 13,000 other Afghans, at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. Another friend, a founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, once summoned to Washington to meet Hillary Clinton, among others, is now detained at Fort McCoy with nine members of her family, including a brother and a sister confined to wheelchairs by debilitating afflictions that seem to have no English name.

Both of these friends, as English speakers and leaders, have been called upon to attend management meetings at Fort McCoy to help with tough questions like: “What do Afghan people eat?” Meanwhile, thousands of “rescued” Afghans, half of them children, are daily standing in very long lines, waiting for food they hope they might recognize.

My two friends are exhausted, but they don’t complain. They say that the officers there do listen, that the food does look a little more familiar, and that the long lines move a little faster.  They also speak of other colleagues left behind: women and their families who couldn’t get inside Kabul airport, as well as others who did get in but were never able to board a plane, or made it onto a plane only to be thrown off again. My friends say sadly, “We are the lucky ones.” But no one knows when they will be released from Fort McCoy or where they will be sent.

In the meantime, the phone is their lifeline (and mine, too). It’s also a lifeline to Afghanistan where, for instance, I often talk to my wonderful friend Mahbouba Seraj, about whom I’ve written for TomDispatch before. She has long been an American citizen. Her prominent family fled the murderous Communist regime when she was a girl, but she’s lived and worked in both countries all her life. Now, she’s chosen to remain in Kabul. A founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, she now cares for about 40 women who have sought refuge in its Women’s Shelter.

Mahbouba Seraj is passionate about her homeland and scornful of the Big Men, past and present, foreign and domestic, who choose to inflict their second-hand ideas by force. This time around, the Taliban first stole her vehicles, then came late at night demanding to see the women in the shelter. She spoke to them firmly about the importance of good Afghan manners, such as respect for the privacy of women and warned that, if they carried on as they were doing, no one in Kabul would have any respect for them.  Then she invited them to call at her office in the morning to discuss their business, as is the Afghan custom, over a cup of tea. They left and some days later, miraculously enough, they returned her vehicles.

Outspoken and brave as she is, Mahbouba Seraj is sought after by visiting journalists. Frontline broadcast a riveting account in mid-October of the abrupt American exodus from Afghanistan.  It included two interviews with Seraj, identified correctly as “one of the most influential women in Afghanistan.” She surprises the reporter — himself an Afghan-American — by saying that she wants to “really talk” with some Taliban leaders. A second interview is interrupted by a woman seeking Seraj’s help. She fears the Taliban may have taken her daughter. Seraj sends her gently home, saying there’s nothing she can do. The reporter asks: “Can’t you protect her?”

“No,” Seraj says, “I cannot protect any woman.” The stunned reporter persists: Can’t she call someone? She replies that, of course, she used to be able to call influential people, mentioning men in the offices of past Afghan presidents, but “now there is no one to call.” At the moment, though the Taliban have indeed taken control of Kabul, there simply is no real government. There is, in fact, no indication that the Taliban will be able to construct such a thing as a government, and certainly not a government that represents the people.

No one is in charge of anything really. There’s no hierarchy among the Taliban, and the American habit of naming certain Talibs as Number 1 and Number 2 doesn’t make it so.  Any member of the Taliban or the rival Haqqani Network seen one day as Number 1 may never be seen again. And yet here they are, after 20 years of America’s Afghanistan, already not one but two rival hyper-religious and violent factions, the Haqqani Network aligned with Pakistan and the Taliban with their god.

Who actually won the war is already a matter of dispute.

The Frontline reporter seemed baffled by the vehemence of Mahbouba Seraj. Then, referring to her inability to save the lost daughter, he asked, “Does this make you sad?” She took a breath, as I know she does when she finds an interlocutor is missing her point. Then she replied fiercely, “No, it makes me angry. This is no time to be sad. Now is the time to be angry.”

I’m thousands of miles away in a kind of safety Mahbouba Seraj has repudiated. But I’m angry, too. Especially because, for decades, now, I’ve seen, sometimes first-hand, the damage done by America’s toxic militarism — not only to the Afghan people but to our own misguided soldiers as well. The only “winners” in the long Afghan war are the members of America’s military-industrial-congressional complex, who continue to be funded as if they were the ultimate winners of everything. PolitiFact reports that the Pentagon has handed more than $100 billion to military contractors alone, while the generals who ran our losing wars join corporate boards of military industries, give remarkably well-paid speeches, and “consult.” So many thousands of Afghan civilians and American and allied soldiers died for that.

Ann Jones writes regularly for TomDispatch — where this article originated. She is a non-resident fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. She is at work on a book about social democracy in Norway (and its absence in the United States). She is the author of several books, including Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and most recently They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books original.

Copyright ©2021 Ann Jones — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 November 2021
Word Count: 3,330
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The United States began taxing corporate income in 1909, with a 1 percent tax on profits exceeding $5,000 ($150,000 in today’s dollars). The top tax rate peaked at around 50 percent between World War II and 1978. It then declined slowly, reaching 35 percent in 1998. President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act cut the rate sharply — to 21percent starting in 2018. The Brookings Institution, an economic think tank, estimated that this last change reduced corporate tax revenues in the United States by 40 percent, or $135 billion.

These are legislated rates; the rates companies actually pay are much lower. Last year, 55 highly profitable U.S. companies paid nothing in federal income taxes. Some firms, including Amazon, Facebook, and Nike, have paid few or no taxes to the federal government for many years.

One reason for this is that corporations book their profits in subsidiaries located in international tax havens, such as Bermuda and Ireland, as well as in corporate-friendly states like South Dakota and Delaware (as revealed in the recently disclosed Pandora Papers), where corporate profits are taxed lightly, if at all, and related information is closely guarded.

This is easy to do, in part, because firms do business with their subsidiaries. They buy things from their subsidiaries and sell things to their subsidiaries. The price they pay is not set by the market; it is not the going price. Rather, firms set these prices in order to distort the amount and source of their profits. When companies pay high prices to their tax-haven subsidiaries, the subsidiary makes a great deal of money; the rest of the firm (located outside the tax haven) earns little. One famous example of this is Nike’s trademarked “swoosh,” owned by a Bermuda subsidiary responsible for most of Nike’s profits. Bermuda doesn’t tax corporate profits, and the United States doesn’t tax profits that are booked abroad and remain abroad.

The result is a race to the bottom. Nations compete for corporate tax revenue by lowering their corporate tax rate. Lowest rate wins. The consequences are just what one would expect. In the 1950s, corporate income taxes provided around 30 percent of U.S. federal government tax revenues. By the 1980s, the figure was 10 percent. The 2017 tax bill cut this to under 7 percent. As corporations pay less in taxes, governments accumulate more debt to finance their expenditures and come under increasing pressure to cut their spending.

A standard objection to taxing corporate income is that it involves “unfair” double taxation — after corporations get taxed, their shareholders are taxed again when reporting dividends and capital gains on individual income tax returns. Other critics claim the tax is regressive, paid by workers and consumers, because firms pass taxes along via higher prices and lower wages. Neither claim is true.

Corporate income taxes are paid mainly by firm shareholders. If workers did pay the tax via lower wages, cutting the corporate income tax should lead to large wage gains (as President Trump promised when promoting his 2017 tax bill). But this hasn’t happened. As corporate tax rates have fallen since 1978, wages have stagnated, increasing by not much more than inflation. Firms have had greater incentives to squeeze workers because the firm gets to keep most of the gains from cutting wages and benefits since it pays very little in corporate income taxes.

The double-taxation objection is also fatuous. Our income gets taxed many times. It is taxed by the federal government, state governments, and local governments. Then people pay sales taxes when buying things and property taxes on their home.

The real problem, though, is not double taxation but untaxed corporate income. Jeff Bezos provides a good example. Most of his wealth consists of Amazon stock. His pay as CEO was a bit more than $1 million annually. Amazon pays no dividends. Profits remain within the firm to help boost stock prices. Bezos’s capital gains are not taxed unless he sells his Amazon stock; and these gains can be passed tax-free to heirs because of estate tax loopholes. Unless Amazon’s profits are taxed, the majority of Bezos’s income remains untaxed, making it easier for him to accumulate vast wealth.

Of course, the filthy rich who want to avoid taxes as much as possible generally borrow at low interest rates to meet immediate spending needs above their annual salary. This lets them avoid taxes on stock gains and to continue earning high returns on their stock holdings.

Taxing corporate profits is an important step toward getting the rich to pay for expenditures required to run the country. It would also provide revenue to fund essential government spending. And both the rich and large multinational corporations benefit significantly from these social expenditures.

Companies are protected by national laws and courts, and by defense spending. They make money using government-educated workers, and transporting goods over government-funded roads and bridges. Firms make profits when hired to participate in government infrastructure and building projects. Further, if companies are people with rights, and can make unlimited political expenditures (as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), they should be taxed like people so that they contribute toward protecting these rights.

Even Adam Smith favored high taxes on monopoly profits. For Smith, taxing the profits of large companies facing little competition was desirable because it reduced monopoly profits. Monopoly power has risen substantially over the past several decades. Monopolistic firms have developed enormous political power on top of great economic power. Taxing corporate income would help reverse this undemocratic trend and discourage the rise of large monopolistic firms.

Corporate income taxation is in such disarray because our corporate tax laws were written more than 100 years ago. A century ago, international trade involved parts and goods produced in one country and sold to a firm in another country. There were no foreign subsidiaries muddying the water. Nor was there a problem with trade in services. Today, one-quarter of international trade involves services — advertising, call centers, streaming, intellectual property (Nike’s swoosh), and legal services. Complicating things further, when customer likes and searches are sold to advertisers (e.g., Facebook), it is unclear where “production” takes place and where profits are made. Companies get to decide this, and of course choose tax havens as the place of production.

The good news is that things may soon change for the better. In July, the finance ministers of the G20 countries agreed to a U.S. proposal to change corporate taxation worldwide. The plan has two key provisions. First, a 15 percent minimum corporate tax rate on companies with more than $890 billion in revenue worldwide. Second, multinationals with more than $23.8 billion in revenue will pay 20 percent to 30 percent of their profits (above 10 percent of their revenue) to countries where they sell goods rather than to the countries where they claim to earn their profits. More than 130 nations and jurisdictions have agreed to this plan.

The 15 percent floor would end the race to the bottom. If Ireland retains its 12.5 percent tax rate, other nations can tax 2.5 percent of each corporation’s worldwide profits. Just as important, taxing profits based on company sales rather than a company’s decisions about where it wants to declare profits will reduce tax-haven shopping.

There is a danger that the 15 percent rate will become a ceiling, as all nations cut their corporate tax rates to 15 percent. On the other hand, once countries agree on a floor, they may see the benefits to a higher minimum rate. A global minimum tax rate, once institutionalized, can easily be raised.

And it should be raised. A 15 percent rate is not nearly sufficient; it is the tax rate paid by an average U.S. worker. Large, profitable firms can certainly afford to pay a higher tax rate. Even a 25 percent rate is less than half the rate that prevailed during the post-WWII era, a time of rapid economic growth in the United States and throughout the developed world. So a higher corporate income tax rate should not slow economic growth; firms will forgo a larger fraction of their profits rather than shun those profits.

Key technical and political issues remain. There are questions about how to divide up additional tax revenues (somewhere between $100 billion and $240 billion annually). Here, the United States provides a good model. Many U.S. states use the location of sales and employment to determine the fraction of corporate profits that each state gets to tax. This prevents companies from reporting their profits in low-tax states. States participating in this agreement then have free rein to tax the corporate profits allocated to them.

The key political issue concerns how to get all nations to sign on to new international tax rules. Without approval by all European Commission members, the accord cannot pass. Ireland and Hungary are two of the biggest problems because their corporate income tax rate is currently below 15 percent. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called the minimum corporate tax an “absurd” idea. However, in early October both countries agreed to support the new corporate tax legislation, after considerable pressure from the United States and other developed nations.

The new international corporate tax rules must still be officially approved by all nations. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block, moving forward, is whether President Biden can get the Senate to approve new corporate tax laws, when 67 senators (at least 17 Republicans) must approve any tax treaty.

An international agreement on taxing corporate income would be a huge step forward, after decades of government spending cutbacks and rising government debt in the face of reduced revenues from corporations. It would also be a big win for the Biden administration because solving the world’s problems, such as climate change, requires the cooperation of other nations and it would show that the Biden administration has the ability to work with other countries to achieve such ends.

Steven Pressman is professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3^rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2021
Word Count: 1,657
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Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Illinois, and returned as an adult — ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up — that she delved deep into her city’s history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor while enriching their white neighbors. Of course, this isn’t the kind of history that’s taught in school, even if today’s students do sometimes learn unsavory truths about the American empire. Local history is different, perhaps because it can be especially uncomfortable to examine how that empire’s economic plunder shaped our present-day communities. Yet experiencing such discomfort may be preferable to any alternative — and I write this as a white person.

In 2017, Simmons ran for Evanston City Council and won. She was interested in the idea of reparations and began studying a bill that has been sitting in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, as it’s called — the number refers to a broken promise of the post-Civil War era that formerly enslaved people should receive 40 acres and a mule — would establish a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and how restitution could be made. Federal reparations will be necessary to address this country’s vast racial wealth gap that’s the cumulative result of economically oppressive policies since the plantation era. Yet Simmons also knew that the federal government was hardly alone when it came to committing such injustices — and here she had a visionary idea.

“I thought, I’ll start with one in my community,” she told me by phone. Specifically, she would seek reparations for harms caused by her own city’s twentieth-century housing policies, which effectively restricted Black residents to a single neighborhood known as the 5th Ward. As Evanston’s Black population grew during the Great Migration — in which African Americans fled terror and oppression in the South — the 5th Ward became overcrowded, and the cost of housing ballooned. By 1940, when the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the Federal Loan Bank Board drew up a map denoting the “risk” of lending in certain places, it shaded the 5th Ward red. That nationwide practice, known as redlining, indicated that the area was ineligible for the sort of loans that would help white families build intergenerational wealth. Today, whites in Evanston on average enjoy property values twice that of their Black neighbors.

By 2019, Simmons had successfully put reparations on Evanston’s City Council agenda and soon won widespread support for the idea. She then led the painstaking work of gathering community input about how such redress should be made. As a result, in early December, just weeks from now, the first reparations by a municipal government will be awarded to Black residents in acknowledgement of a long history of structural racism: housing grants of $25,000 to 16 Evanston families — money that can be put toward a down payment or used as mortgage assistance or for repairs on an existing home. This is just the beginning of reparations in Evanston, a small yet mighty step. Indeed, the truth is that imperial America isn’t just a far-flung reality. It’s as local as wherever you’re reading this, which means the antidote to it can be local as well.

An empire rebranded A year after Simmons unveiled the idea of reparations to her City Council colleagues, two residents of Amherst, Massachusetts (where I live), noticed that Black Lives Matter signs had proliferated around town following the murder of George Floyd, and guessed that the public might finally be in the mood to pursue reparations here, as well. In Evanston, the initiative was a response to a specific set of housing policies. Why, though, would reparations be warranted in mostly white Amherst?

The answer, to use a term favored by genealogist Nicka Smith, was in the way this town had been, in essence, rebranded. Today Amherst is known for “progressive” politics and prosperity, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white town leaders had systematically excluded African Americans from local housing and economic opportunities — even though, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the hard labor of enslaved people abducted from Africa had helped build the place. (Yes, there was slavery in Massachusetts.)

The town’s rebranding was no accident. In at least one case, local historians falsified a town tax chart to exclude the valuation of human chattel, attempting to expunge slavery from the record. More generally, the hard truths of Amherst’s history were whitewashed in favor of a pleasant story about virtuous European-Americans. In this way, its rebranding mirrored that of the nation. As of 2019, the median income for white families in Amherst was $108,500, more than twice that of Black families.

Nonetheless, over the past year, thanks to activists, the notion of redress for people of African descent found its way onto the local government agenda. (I participated in this effort as a researcher, examining town history and writing reports about what I found.) Last December, Amherst’s town council passed a proclamation “Affirming the Town of Amherst’s Commitment to End Structural Racism and Achieve Racial Equity for Black Residents,” and this spring, in a historic move whose implications have yet to be determined, the council voted in favor of establishing a reparations fund.

It’s worth noting that the people who initially brought the idea of reparations to Amherst’s nearly all-white council were themselves white. Meanwhile, a committee composed almost entirely of residents of color have been in ongoing negotiations with the same body in an effort to modify local policing practices to address concerns about basic physical safety.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time” For years, I didn’t understand this line: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Those words are from Lilla Watson, an Australian Aboriginal elder and activist, and I see now that they have everything to do with making reparations. But I always thought: I can’t come to help you? Why not?

In the early 1970s, Watson was a leader in protests against colonialism and the Australian version of apartheid, a time when some white Australians did indeed approach Aboriginal people to ask how they could help. Watson and others felt frustrated because those folks wanted to be given the answers rather than doing the hard work of coming up with answers themselves. For me, it took about 37 years (I recently turned 38), but eventually I saw that an inclination to “help” can be a way for would-be helpers to feel invulnerable — a way of saying, “I’m fine. It’s these other people who need help.” Well, let me say this now: I’m not fine.

The particular white culture in which I was born and raised is riddled with heart-splitting depression and, amid substantial affluence, a gripping fear of still not having enough. My father, who passed away suddenly when I was 20, used to only half-jokingly say, “Money is how you keep score.” Dad was also an avid community servant. But if a stubborn part of you believes money is the measure of life, even a great deal of community service won’t be enough to make you feel whole. On my maternal side, my mom grew up in a house with a wall-sized case displaying trophies she and her siblings won — part of an unspoken family understanding that a way to earn love was to be very, very good at tennis.

My dad hardly invented the idea that money is life’s scorecard, a belief at the heart of the European-American origin story and a powerful motivation for imperialist plunder, past and present. Today, in this age of billionaires, it’s quintessentially American to link your value as a human being to your job title, salary, or net worth. No surprise, then, that such insecurity lives and seethes in me.

My own European ancestors came to America in poverty, fleeing persecution because they were Jewish. Keep in mind that Jews were not considered whites by many in this country until after World War II. Then, they were allowed to merge into the morphing concept of American whiteness in part thanks to public programs like the G.I. Bill and federal home loans granted to white people in Evanston and elsewhere (from both of which African Americans were largely excluded). In my own family, material success in America was first about survival, only later becoming a matter of affluence. Think of our story, in other words, as moving from poverty to imperialist scorekeeping in three generations.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that giving away even modest sums of money brings me a sense of relief. Yet I still feel so resistant to doing so! As a European-American, I’ve thoroughly absorbed the idea that security comes from hoarding resources. The truth seems to be the opposite: such hoarding makes me feel dead inside.

A different kind of treasure The city of Evanston is dedicating a new form of revenue, the sales tax on recreational marijuana, to funding its reparations program. And that’s just the beginning of a long process, as significantly more resources will be needed to make meaningful redress to eligible families.

Robin Rue Simmons is now in talks with several financial institutions about developing a new type of home loan (with low interest rates or other benefits) that could be part of reparative justice in Evanston and, ultimately, elsewhere. She points out that such institutions profited from anti-Black practices that contributed to today’s racial wealth gap and she says she’s optimistic that at least one bank “will take the bold first step and be the example to their colleagues in the financial industry.” She’s right that this would represent a striking new direction for American capitalism. Or put another way, I’m not the only one who has to learn how to give money away.

Some people cling to wealth far beyond what’s necessary for material security for the same reason that my mom, as a child, learned to slay her opponents on a tennis court and win trophies she could take home to her parents. It’s protection against the worst of all possible fates: being inadequate, worthless, unloved. In Brené Brown’s bestseller Dare to Lead, which she penned as a resource for building more courageous institutional cultures, she writes: “At the center of all our elaborate personal security measures and protection schemes lies the most precious treasure of the human experience: the heart.”

It makes sense that an investigation of local harms and local repair possibilities comes down to that. After all, you can’t get much more local than your own heart.

Redressing the harms of yesterday and today requires opening not just coffers but also hearts, while letting go of strategies for defense and deflection. It requires realizing that what’s imperial is also local. Little will happen, after all, until a great many of us actually begin to feel the pain of our collective history. Only in experiencing the fullness of what’s wrong can we possibly discern the fullness of what’s needed to make it right.

Simmons has now founded a nonprofit called First Repair, to help bring the lessons of Evanston to other cities and towns. So many municipalities (including Amherst) have contacted her about the possibility of local reparations that she’s lost count. And when it comes to H.R. 40, two years ago it had fewer than 70 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. Today, it has 194. This should be cause for optimism, however modest.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Yet the curvature of that arc is not a foregone conclusion. How slowly history moves (or doesn’t) in the direction of justice depends on the hearts of ordinary people.

Mattea Kramer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is at work on a novel about a waitress’s love affair with a prescription pill.

Copyright ©2021 Mattea Kramer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2021
Word Count: 2,001
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As an eyewitness, I can recall the events of January 6th in Washington as if they were yesterday. The crowds of angry loyalists storming the building while overwhelmed security guards gave way. The slavishly loyal vice-president who would, the president hoped, restore him to power. The crush of media that seemed confused, almost overwhelmed, by the crowd’s fury. The waiter who announced that the bar had run out of drinks and would soon be closing…

Hold it! My old memory’s playing tricks on me again. That wasn’t the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. That was the Manila Hotel in the Philippines in July 1986. Still, the two events had enough similarities that perhaps I could be forgiven for mixing them up.

I’ve studied quite a number of coups in my day, yet the one I actually witnessed at the Manila Hotel remains my favorite, not just because the drinks kept coming, but for all it taught me about the damage a coup d’état, particularly a political coup, can do to any democracy. In February 1986, a million Filipinos thronged the streets of Manila to force dictator Ferdinand Marcos into exile. After long years of his corruption and callous indifference to the nation’s suffering, the crowds cheered their approval when Marcos finally flew off to Hawaii and his opponent in the recent presidential election restored democracy.

But Marcos had his hard-core loyalists. One Sunday afternoon, four months after his flight, they massed in a Manila park to call for the restoration of their beloved president. After speakers had whipped the crowd of 5,000 into a frenzy with — and yes, this should indeed sound familiar in 2021 — claims about a stolen election, thousands of ordinary Filipinos pushed past security guards and stormed into the nearby Manila Hotel, a storied symbol of their country’s history. Tipped off by one of the Filipino colonels plotting that coup, I was standing in the hotel’s entryway at 5:00 p.m. as the mob, fury written on their faces, surged past me.

For the next 24 hours, that hotel’s marbled lobby became the stage for an instructive political drama. From my table at the adjoining bar, I watched as armed warlords, ousted Marcos cronies, and several hundred disgruntled soldiers paraded through the lobby on their way to the luxury suites where the coup commanders had checked themselves in. Following in their wake were spies from every nation — Australian secret intelligence, American defense intelligence, and their Asian and European counterparts — themselves huddled in groups, whispering mysteriously, trying (just like me) to make sense of the bizarre spectacle unfolding around them.

Later that same evening, Marcos’s former vice-president, the ever-loyal Arturo Tolentino, appeared at the head of the stairs flanked by a security detail to announce the formation of a “legitimate” new government authorized by Marcos who had reportedly called long-distance from Honolulu. As the vice president proclaimed himself acting president and read off the names of those to be in his cabinet, Filipino journalists huddling nearby scribbled notes. They were furiously trying to figure out whether there was a real coalition forming that could topple the country’s democracy. It was, however, just the usual suspects — Marcos cronies, leaders largely without followers.

By midnight, the party was pretty much over. Our waiter, after struggling for hours to maintain that famed hotel’s standard of five-star service, apologized to our table of foreign correspondents because the bar had been drunk dry and was closing. Sometime before dawn, the hotel turned off the air conditioning, transforming those executive suites into saunas and, in the process, flushing out the coup plotters, their hangers-on, and most of the soldiers.

All day long, on the city’s brassy talk-radio stations and in the coffee shops where insiders gathered to swap scuttlebutt, Marcos’s loyalists were roasted, even mocked. The troops that had rallied to his side were sentenced to 30 push-ups on the parade ground — a source of more mirth. For spies and correspondents alike, the whole thing seemed like a one-day wonder, barely worth writing home about.

But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. A coterie of colonels deep inside the Defense Ministry, my source among them, had observed that comedic coup attempt all too carefully and concluded that it had actually been a near-miss.

A year later, I found myself standing in the middle of an eight-lane highway outside the city’s main military cantonment, Camp Aguinaldo, ducking bullets from rebel soldiers who had seized the base and watching as government Marines and dive bombers attacked. This time, however, those colonels had launched a genuine coup attempt. No drinks. No waiters. No wisecracks. Just a day of bombs and bullets that crushed the plotters, leaving the country’s military headquarters a smoking ruin.

Two years later, the same coup colonels were back again for another attempt, leading 3,000 rebel troops in a multipronged attack on a capital that trembled on the brink of surrender. As a cavalcade of rebel armor drove relentlessly toward the presidential palace with nothing in their way, American President George H.W. Bush took a call aboard Air Force One over the Atlantic about a desperate request from his Philippine counterpart and ordered a pair of U.S. Air Force jet fighters to make a low pass over the rebel tanks and trucks. They got the message: turn back or be bombed into extinction. And so Philippine democracy was allowed to survive for another 30 years.

Message from the Manila Hotel The message for democracy offered from the Manila Hotel was clear — so clear, in fact, that it helps explain the meaning of tangled events in Washington more than 30 years later. Whether it’s a poor country like the Philippines or a superpower like the United States, democracy is a surprisingly fragile construct. Its worst enemy is often an ousted ex-president, angry over his humiliation and perfectly willing to destroy the constitutional order to regain power.

No matter how angry such an ex-president might be, however, his urge for a political coup can’t succeed without the help of raw force, whether from a mob, a disgruntled military, or some combination of the two. The Manila Hotel coup teaches us one other fundamental thing: that coups need not be carefully planned. Most start with a handful of conspirators plotting some symbolic attack meant to shake the constitutional order, while hoping to somehow stall the security services for a few critical hours — just long enough for events to cascade spontaneously into a desired government collapse.

Whether in Manila or Washington, coup plotting usually starts right at the top. Just after the news networks announced that he had lost the election last November, Donald Trump launched a media blitz with spurious claims of “fraud on the American public,” firing off 300 tweets in the next two weeks loaded with false charges of irregularities and sparking loud, long protests by his loyalists at vote-counting centers in Michigan and Arizona.

When that response got little traction and Biden’s majority kept climbing, Trump began exploring three alternate routes, any of which might have led to a constitutional coup — manipulating the Justice Department to delegitimize the election, rigging the ratification of electoral votes in Congress, and the paramilitary (or military) option. At a White House meeting on December 18th, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, urged the president to “invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election” and accused his staff of “abandoning the president,” sparking “screaming matches” in the Oval Office.

By January 3rd, rumors and reports of Trump’s military option were circulating so credibly around Washington that all 10 living former defense secretaries — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Mark Esper, among them — published a joint appeal to the armed forces to remain neutral in the ongoing dispute over the election’s integrity. Reminding the troops that “peaceful transfers of power… are hallmarks of our democracy,” they added that “efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes” would be “dangerous, unlawful, and unconstitutional.” They warned the troops that any “military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be… potentially facing criminal penalties.” In conclusion, they suggested to Trump’s secretary of defense and senior staff “in the strongest terms” that “they must…refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election.”

To legitimate his claims of fraud, according to the New York Times, the president also tried — on nine separate occasions in December and January — to force the Justice Department to take actions that would “undermine an election result.” In response, a mid-ranking Trump loyalist at Justice, a nonentity named Jeffrey Clark, began pressuring his boss, the attorney-general, to write Georgia officials claiming they had found “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” But at a three-hour White House meeting on January 3rd, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen balked at this evidence-free accusation. Trump promptly suggested that he could be replaced by that mid-ranking loyalist who could then send the fraud letter to Georgia. The president’s own top appointees at Justice, along with the White House counsel, immediately threatened to resign en masse, forcing Trump to give up on such an intervention at the state level.

Next, he shifted his constitutional maneuvering to Congress where, on January 6th, his doggedly loyal vice president, Mike Pence, would be presiding over the ratification of results from the Electoral College. In this dubious gambit, Trump was inspired by a bizarre constitutional theory advanced by former Chapman University law professor John Eastman — that the “Constitution assigns the power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter.”

In this scenario, Pence would unilaterally set aside electoral votes from seven states with “ongoing disputes” and announce that Trump had won a majority of the remaining electors — making him once again president. But the maneuver had no basis in law, so Pence, after scrambling desperately and unsuccessfully for a legal justification of some sort, eventually refused to play along.

A political coup With the constitutional option closed, Trump opted for a political coup, rolling the dice with raw physical force, much as Marcos had done at the Manila Hotel. The first step was to form a crowd with some paramilitary muscle to stiffen the assault to come. On December 19th, Trump called on his hard-core followers to assemble in Washington, ready for violence, tweeting: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Almost immediately, the Internet’s right-wing chat boards lit up and indeed their paramilitaries, the Proud Boys and Three Percenters militia, turned up in Washington on the appointed day, ready to rumble. After President Trump roused the crowd at a rally near the White House with rhetoric about a stolen election, a mob of some 10,000 marched on the Capitol Building.

Starting at about 1:00 p.m., the sheer size of the crowd and strategic moves by the paramilitaries in their ranks broke through the undermanned lines of the Capitol Police, breaching the building’s first-floor windows at about 2:10 p.m. and allowing protesters to start pouring in. Once the rioters had accomplished the unimaginable and seized the Capitol, they were fresh out of plans, reduced to marching through the corridors hunting legislators and trashing offices.

At 2:24 p.m., President Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.” On the far-right social media site Parler, his supporters began messaging the crowd to get the vice president and force him to stop the election results. The mob rampaged through the marbled halls shouting “Hang Mike Pence.” Hunkered down inside the Capitol, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) tweeted: “This is a coup attempt.”

At 2:52 p.m., Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), a former CIA agent, tweeted from inside the barricaded House chamber: “This is what we see in failing countries. This is what leads to the death of democracy.”

At 3:30 p.m., a small squad of military police arrived at the Capitol, woefully inadequate reinforcements for the overwhelmed Capitol Police. Ten minutes later, the D.C. Council announced that the Defense Department had denied the mayor’s request to mobilize the local National Guard. While the crowd fumbled and fulminated, some serious people were evidently slowing the military’s response for just the few critical hours needed for events to cascade into something, anything, that could shake the constitutional order and slow the ratification of Joe Biden’s election.

In nearby Maryland, Republican Governor Larry Hogan had immediately mobilized his state’s National Guard for the short drive to the Capitol while frantically phoning Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who repeatedly refused him permission to send in the troops. Inside the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Charles Flynn, the brother of the same Michael Flynn who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law, was participating in what CNN called those “key January 6th phone calls” that refused permission for the Guard’s mobilization.

Following a phone call from the mayor of Washington and its police chief pleading for help, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy “ran down the hall” of the Pentagon to get authorization for the Guard’s mobilization. After a crucial delay of 90 minutes, he finally called the Maryland governor, outside the regular chain of command, to authorize the Maryland Guard’s dispatch. Those would indeed be the first troops to arrive at the Capitol and would play a critical role in restoring order.

At about 4:30 p.m., Trump finally tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home in love & peace.”

Ten minutes later, at 4:40 p.m., hundreds of riot personnel from the D.C. police, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security arrived, along with the Maryland Guard, to reinforce the Capitol Police. Within an hour, the protesters had been pushed out of the building and the Capitol was declared secure.

Just five days later, Dr. Fiona Hill, a senior Russia expert on the National Security Council under Trump, reviewed these events and concluded that President Trump had staged a coup “in slow motion… to keep himself in power.”

History’s lessons Beyond all the critical details of who did what and when, there were deeper historical forces at play, suggesting that Donald Trump’s urge for a political coup that would return him to power may be far from over. For the past 100 years, empires in decline have been roiled by coup attempts that sometimes have overturned constitutional orders. As their military reverses accumulate, their privileged economic position erodes, and social tensions mount, a succession of societies in the grip of a traumatic loss of global power have suffered coups, successful or not, including Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, the Soviet Union, and now the United States.

Britain’s plot was a bit fantastical. Amid the painful, protracted dissolution of their empire, Conservative leaders plotted with top generals in 1968 to oust leftist Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson by capturing Heathrow airport, seizing the BBC and Buckingham Palace, and putting Lord Mountbatten in power as acting prime minister. Britain’s parliamentary tradition simply proved too strong, however, and key principals in the plot quickly backed out.

In April 1974, while Portugal was fighting and losing three bitter anticolonial wars in Africa, a Lisbon radio station played the country’s entry in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest (“After the Farewell”) just minutes before midnight on an evening that had been agreed upon. It was the signal to the military and their supporters to overthrow the entrenched conservative government of that moment, a success which became known as the “Carnation Revolution.”

However, the parallels between January 6th and the fall of France’s Fourth Republic in the late 1950s are perhaps the most telling. After liberating Paris from Nazi occupation in August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle headed an interim government for 18 months. He then quit in a dispute with the left, launching him into a decade of political intrigue against the new Fourth Republic, whose liberal constitution he despised.

By the mid-1950s, France was reeling from its recent defeat in Indochina, while the struggle against Muslim revolutionaries in its Algerian colony in North Africa turned ever more brutal, marked as it was by scandals over the widespread French use of torture. Amid that crisis of empire, an anti-elite, anti-intellectual, antisemitic politician named Pierre Poujade launched a populist movement that sent 56 members to parliament in 1956, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, later founder of the far-right National Front.

Meanwhile, a cabal of politicians and military commanders plotted a coup to return General de Gaulle to power, thinking he alone could save Algeria for France. After an army junta seized control of Algiers, the capital of that colony, in May 1958, paratroopers stationed there were sent to capture the French island of Corsica and to prepare to seize Paris should the legislature fail to install de Gaulle as prime minister.

As the country trembled on the brink of a coup, de Gaulle made his dramatic entry into Paris where he accepted the National Assembly’s offer to form a government, conditional upon the approval of a presidential-style constitution for a Fifth Republic. But when de Gaulle subsequently accepted the inevitability of Algeria’s independence, four top generals launched an abortive coup against him and then formed what they called the Secret Army Organization, or OAS. It would carry out terror attacks over the next four years, with 12,000 victims, while staging three unsuccessful assassination attempts against de Gaulle before its militants were killed or captured.

The coup of 2024? Just as the Filipino colonels spent five years launching a succession of escalating coups and those French generals spent four years trying to overthrow their government, so Trump’s Republicans are working with ferocious determination in the run-up to the 2022 and 2024 elections to ensure that their next constitutional coup succeeds. Indeed, if you look back on events over the past year through the prism of such historical precedents, you can see all the components for a future political coup falling into place.

No matter how improbable, discredited, or bizarre those election fraud claims are, Republican loyalists persist in endless ballot audits in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Texas. Their purpose is not really to find more votes for Trump in the 2020 election, but to maintain at least the present level of rage among the one-third of all Americans and more than half of all Republicans who believe that Joe Biden’s presidency is fraudulent.

Since the 2020 election coincided with the new census, Republicans have been working, reports Vox news, to “gerrymander themselves into control of the House of Representatives.” Simultaneously, Republican legislators in 19 states have passed 33 laws making it more difficult for certain of their residents to vote. Driven by the white nationalist “replacement theory” that immigrants and people of color are diluting the pool of “real American” voters, Trump and his Republican loyalists are fighting for “ballot integrity” on the principle that all non-white votes are inherently illegitimate. As Trump put it on the stump in 2016:

In case all that electoral manipulation fails and Trump needs more muscle for a future political coup, right-wing fighters like the Proud Boys are still rumbling away at rallies in Oregon, California, and elsewhere across America. Just as the Philippine government made military rebels do a risible 30 push-ups for the capital crime of armed rebellion, so federal courts have generally been handing out the most modest of penalties to rioters who attempted nothing less than the overthrow of U.S. constitutional democracy last January 6th.

Among the 600 rioters arrested as of August, dozens have been allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors and only three had been sentenced to jail time, leaving most cases languishing in pretrial motions. Already Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz have rallied to their defense, writing the U.S. attorney general to complain about an “unequal administration of justice” with “harsher treatment” for Capitol defendants than those arrested in Black Lives Matter protests.

So, in 2024, as the continuing erosion of America’s global power creates a crisis of confidence among ordinary Americans, expect Donald Trump to be back, not as the slightly outrageous candidate of 2016 or even as the former president eager to occupy the White House again, but as a militant demagogue with thundering racialist rhetoric, backed by a revanchist Republican Party ready, with absolute moral certainty, to bar voters from the polls, toss ballots out, and litigate any loss until hell freezes over.

And if all that fails, the muscle will be ready for another violent march on Washington.  Be prepared, the America we know is worsening by the month.

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

Copyright ©2021 Alfred W. McCoy — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 October 2021
Word Count: 3,510
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This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century’s end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far, the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it’s too late.  

For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most forceful and persuasive voices confronting injustice, inequity, and the threat posed by human-caused climate chaos to civilization and the Earth. I was eager to know Professor Chomsky’s views on the roots of our current dire predicament and on humanity’s prospects for emerging from this crisis into a livable future. He very graciously agreed to speak with me by way of a video chat. The text here is an abridged version of a conversation we had on October 1, 2021.

Professor Chomsky, now 92, is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. His critiques of power and advocacy on behalf of the political agency of the common person have inspired generations of activists and organizers. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.

— Stan Cox

Stan Cox: Most of the nations that will be meeting in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference on October 31-November 12, 2021, have made emissions-reduction pledges. For the most part, those pledges are wholly inadequate. What principles do you think should guide the effort to prevent climate catastrophe?

Noam Chomsky: The initiators of the Paris Agreement intended to have a binding treaty, not voluntary agreements, but there was an impediment. It’s called the Republican Party. It was clear that the Republican Party would never accept any binding commitments. The Republican organization, which has lost any pretense of being a normal political party, is almost solely dedicated to the welfare of the super-rich and the corporate sector, and cares absolutely nothing about the population or the future of the world. The Republican organization would never have accepted a treaty. In response, the organizers reduced their goal to a voluntary agreement, which has all the difficulties that you mentioned.

We’ve lost six years, four under the Trump administration which was openly dedicated to maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that, to some extent, had limited their lethal effects.  To some extent, these regulations protected sectors of the population from pollution, mostly the poor and people of color. But they’re the ones who, of course, face the main burden of pollution. It’s the poor people of the world who live in what Trump called “shithole countries” that suffer the most; they have contributed the least to the disaster, and they suffer the worst.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As you write in your new book, The Path to a Livable Future, there is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It’s up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing.

Other countries have their own things to answer for, but the United States has one of the worst records in the world. The United States blocked the Paris Agreement before Trump eventually got into office. But it was under Trump’s instructions that the United States pulled out of the agreement altogether.

If you look over at the more sane Democrats, who are far from guiltless, there are people called moderates like Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV), the leading recipient of fossil-fuel funding, whose position is that of the fossil-fuel companies, which is, as he put it, no elimination, just innovation. That’s Exxon Mobil’s view, too: “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you,” they say. “We’re a soulful corporation. We’re investing in some futuristic ways to remove from the atmosphere the pollution that we’re pouring into it. Everything’s fine, just trust us.” No elimination, just innovation, which may or may not come and if it does, it will probably be too late and too limited.

Take the IPCC report that just appeared. It was much more dire than previous ones and said we must eliminate fossil fuels step by step, every year, and be free of them completely within a few decades. A few days after the report was released, Joe Biden issued a plea to the OPEC oil cartel to increase production, which would lower gas prices in the United States and improve his position with the population. There was immediate euphoria in the petroleum journals. There’s lots of profit to be made, but at what expense? It was nice to have the human species for a couple of hundred thousand years, but evidently that’s long enough. After all, the average lifespan of a species on Earth is apparently around 100,000 years. So why should we break the record? Why organize for a just future for all when we can trash the planet helping rich corporations get richer?

SC: Ecological catastrophe is closing in on us largely because, as you once put it, “the entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.” However, it seems that only state authority can implement the necessary changes in ways that are equitable, fair, and just.  Given the emergency we face, do you think that the U.S. government would be able to justify imposing national-resource constraints like rules for resource allocation or fair-shares rationing, policies that would necessarily limit the freedom of local communities and individuals in their material lives?

NC: Well, we have to face some realities. I would like to see a move towards a more free and just society — production for need rather than production for profit, working people able to control their own lives instead of subordinating themselves to masters for almost their entire waking life. The time required for succeeding at such efforts is simply too great for addressing this crisis. That means we need to solve this within the framework of existing institutions, which can be ameliorated.

The economic system of the last 40 years has been particularly destructive. It’s inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment.

A livable future is possible. We don’t have to live in a system in which the tax rules have been changed so that billionaires pay lower rates than working people. We don’t have to live in a form of state capitalism in which the lower 90% of income earners have been robbed of approximately $50 trillion, for the benefit of a fraction of 1%. That’s the estimate of the RAND Corporation, a serious underestimate if we look at other devices that have been used. There are ways of reforming the existing system within basically the same framework of institutions. I think they ought to change, but it would have to be over a longer timescale.

The question is: Can we prevent climate catastrophe within the framework of less savage state capitalist institutions? I think there’s a reason to believe that we can, and there are very careful, detailed proposals as to how to do it, including ones in your new book, as well as the proposals of my friend and co-author, economist Robert Pollin, who’s worked many of these things out in great detail. Jeffrey Sachs, another fine economist, using somewhat different models, has come to pretty much the same conclusions. These are pretty much along lines of proposals of the International Energy Association, by no means a radical organization, one that grew out of the energy corporations. But they all have essentially the same picture.

There’s, in fact, even a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey which outlines proposals that are pretty close to this. And I think it’s all within the range of feasibility. Their cost estimates of 2% to 3% of GDP, with feasible efforts, would not only address the crisis, but would create a more livable future, one without pollution, without traffic jams, and with more constructive, productive work, better jobs. All of this is possible.

But there are serious barriers — the fossil-fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else. After all, that was the announced slogan of the neoliberal period — the economic guru Milton Friedman’s pronouncement that corporations have no responsibility to the public or to the workforce, that their total responsibility is to maximize profit for the few.

For public-relations reasons, fossil-fuel corporations like ExxonMobil often portray themselves as soulful and benevolent, working day and night for the benefit of the common good.  It’s called greenwashing.

SC: Some of the most widely discussed methods for capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would consume vast quantities of biomass produced on hundreds of millions or billions of acres, thereby threatening ecosystems and food production, largely in low-income, low-emissions nations.  A group of ethicists and other scholars recently wrote that a “core principle” of climate justice is that “the urgent, basic needs of poor people and poor countries ought to be secured against the effects of climate change and of measures taken to limit” climate change. That would seem to clearly rule out these “emit carbon now, capture it later” plans, and there are other examples of what we might call “climate-mitigation imperialism.” Do you think that the world may be faced with more and more of this sort of exploitation as temperatures rise? And what do you think about these proposals for bioenergy and carbon capture?

NC: It’s totally immoral, but it’s standard practice. Where does waste go? It doesn’t go in your backyard, it goes to places like Somalia that can’t protect themselves. The European Union, for example, has been dumping its atomic wastes and other pollution off the coast of Somalia, harming the fishing areas and local industries. It’s horrendous.

The latest IPCC report calls for an end to fossil fuels. The hope is that we can avert the worst and reach a sustainable economy within a couple of decades. If we don’t do that, we will reach irreversible tipping points and the people most vulnerable — those least responsible for the crisis — will suffer first and most severely from the consequences. People living in the plains of Bangladesh, for example, where powerful cyclones cause extraordinary damage. People living in India, where the temperature can go over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer.  Many may witness parts of the world becoming unlivable.

There were recent reports by Israeli geoscientists condemning its government for not taking account of the effect of the policies they are pursuing, including developing new gas fields in the Mediterranean. They developed an analysis that indicated that, within a couple of decades, over the summer, the Mediterranean would be reaching the heat of a Jacuzzi, and the low-lying plains would be inundated. People would still live in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but flooding would impact much of the population. Why not change course to prevent this?

SC: The neoclassical economics underlying these injustices lives on in economic climate models known as “integrated assessment models,” which come down to cost-benefit analyses based on the so-called social cost of carbon. With these projections, are economists seeking to gamble away the right of future generations to a decent life?

NC: We have no right to gamble with the lives of the people in South Asia, in Africa, or people in vulnerable communities in the United States. You want to do analyses like that in your academic seminar? OK, go ahead. But don’t dare translate it into policy. Don’t dare to do that.

There’s a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don’t say, hey, let’s try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Carter, and accelerated with Reagan and Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been, “Government is the problem.”

That doesn’t mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they’re not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.

Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn’t bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don’t. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there’s some trouble.  The rich have to have the powerful state — as well as its police powers — to be sure nobody gets in their way.

SC: Where do you see hope?

NC: Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they’re doing. “How dare you,” she said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone’s consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.

We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be. If we’d come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the U.S. hadn’t been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don’t have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.

Stan Cox, senior scientist at The Land Institute, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, just published, and The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, featuring a forward by Noam Chomsky.

This article originated at TomDispatch

Copyright ©2021 Stan Cox — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 October 2021
Word Count: 2,602
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Before it’s too late, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question: Do we really — I mean truly — want a new Cold War with China?

Because that’s just where the Biden administration is clearly taking us. If you need proof, check out last month’s announcement of an “AUKUS” (Australia, United Kingdom, U.S.) military alliance in Asia. Believe me, it’s far scarier (and more racist) than the nuclear-powered submarine deal and the French diplomatic kerfuffle that dominated the media coverage of it. By focusing on the dramatically angry French reaction to losing their own agreement to sell non-nuclear subs to Australia, most of the media missed a much bigger story: that the U.S. government and its allies have all but formally declared a new Cold War by launching a coordinated military buildup in East Asia unmistakably aimed at China.

It’s still not too late to choose a more peaceful path. Unfortunately, this all-Anglo alliance comes perilously close to locking the world into just such a conflict that could all too easily become a hot, even potentially nuclear, war between the two wealthiest, most powerful countries on the planet.

If you’re too young to have lived through the original Cold War as I did, imagine going to sleep fearing that you might not wake up in the morning, thanks to a nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers (in those days, the United States and the Soviet Union). Imagine walking past nuclear fallout shelters, doing “duck and cover” drills under your school desk, and experiencing other regular reminders that, at any moment, a great-power war could end life on Earth.

Do we really want a future of fear? Do we want the United States and its supposed enemy to once again squander untold trillions of dollars on military expenditures while neglecting basic human needs, including universal health care, education, food, and housing, not to mention failing to deal adequately with that other looming existential threat, climate change?

A U.S. military buildup in Asia When President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared their all-too-awkwardly named AUKUS alliance, most of the media focused on a relatively small (though hardly insignificant) part of the deal: the U.S. sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and that country’s simultaneous cancellation of a 2016 contract to buy diesel-powered subs from France. Facing the loss of tens of billions of euros and being shut out of the Anglo Alliance, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the deal a “stab in the back.” For the first time in history, France briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington. French officials even cancelled a gala meant to celebrate Franco-American partnership dating back to their defeat of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War.

Caught surprisingly off guard by the uproar over the alliance (and the secret negotiations that preceded it), the Biden administration promptly took steps to repair relations, and the French ambassador soon returned to Washington. In September at the United Nations, President Biden declared that the last thing he wants is “a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.” Sadly, the actions of his administration suggest otherwise.

Imagine how Biden administration officials would feel about the announcement of a “VERUCH” (VEnezuela, RUssia, and CHina) alliance. Imagine how they’d react to a buildup of Chinese military bases and thousands of Chinese troops in Venezuela. Imagine their reaction to regular deployments of all types of Chinese military aircraft, submarines, and warships in Venezuela, to increased spying, heightened cyberwarfare capabilities, and relevant space “activities,” as well as military exercises involving thousands of Chinese and Russian troops not just in Venezuela but in the waters of the Atlantic within striking distance of the United States. How would Biden’s team feel about the promised delivery of a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to that country, involving the transfer of nuclear technology and nuclear-weapons-grade uranium?

None of this has happened, but these would be the Western Hemisphere equivalents of the “major force posture initiatives” U.S., Australian, and British officials have just announced for East Asia. AUKUS officials unsurprisingly portray their alliance as making parts of Asia “safer and more secure,” while building “a future of peace [and] opportunity for all the people of the region.” It’s unlikely U.S. leaders would view a similar Chinese military buildup in Venezuela or anywhere else in the Americas as a similar recipe for safety and peace.

In reaction to VERUCH, calls for a military response and a comparable alliance would be rapid. Shouldn’t we expect Chinese leaders to react to the AUKUS buildup with their own version of the same? For now, a Chinese government spokesperson suggested that the AUKUS allies “should shake off their Cold War mentality” and “not build exclusionary blocs targeting or harming the interests of third parties.” The Chinese military’s recent escalation of provocative exercises near Taiwan may be, in part, an additional response.

Chinese leaders have even more reason to doubt the declared peaceful intent of AUKUS given that the U.S. military already has seven military bases in Australia and nearly 300 more spread across East Asia. By contrast, China doesn’t have a single base in the Western Hemisphere or anywhere near the borders of the United States. Add in one more factor: in the last 20 years, the AUKUS allies have a track record of launching aggressive wars and participating in other conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines, among other places. China’s last war beyond its borders was with Vietnam for one month in 1979. (Brief, deadly clashes occurred with Vietnam in 1988 and India in 2020.)

War trumps diplomacy By withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the Biden administration theoretically started moving the country away from its twenty-first-century policy of endless wars. The president, however, now appears determined to side with those in Congress, in the mainstream foreign policy “Blob,” and in the media who are dangerously inflating the Chinese military threat and calling for a military response to that country’s growing global power. The poor handling of relations with the French government is another sign that, despite prior promises, the Biden administration is paying little attention to diplomacy and reverting to a foreign policy defined by preparations for war, bloated military budgets, and macho military bluster.

Given the 20 years of disastrous warfare that followed the George W. Bush administration’s announcement of a “Global War on Terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, what business does Washington have building a new military alliance in Asia? Shouldn’t the Biden administration instead be building alliances dedicated to combating global warming, pandemics, hunger, and other urgent human needs? What business do three white leaders of three white-majority countries have attempting to dominate that region through military force?

While the leaders of some countries there have welcomed AUKUS, the three allies signaled the racist, retrograde, downright colonial nature of their Anglo Alliance by excluding other Asian countries from their all-white club. Naming China as its obvious target and escalating Cold War-style us-vs.-them tensions risk fueling already rampant anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism in the United States and globally. Belligerent, often warlike rhetoric against China, associated with former President Donald Trump and other far-right Republicans, has increasingly been embraced by the Biden administration and some Democrats. It “has directly contributed to rising anti-Asian violence across the country,” write Asia experts Christine Ahn, Terry Park, and Kathleen Richards.

The less formalized “Quad” grouping that Washington has also organized in Asia, again including Australia as well as India and Japan, is little better and is already becoming a more militarily focused anti-Chinese alliance. Other countries in the region have indicated that they are “deeply concerned over the continuing arms race and power projection” there, as the Indonesian government said of the nuclear-powered submarine deal. Nearly silent and so difficult to detect, such vessels are offensive weapons designed to strike another country without warning. Australia’s future acquisition of them risks escalating a regional arms race and raises troubling questions about the intentions of both Australian and U.S. leaders.

Beyond Indonesia, people worldwide should be deeply concerned about the U.S. sale of nuclear-propelled submarines. The deal undermines efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons as it encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, which the U.S. or British governments will need to provide to Australia to fuel the subs. The deal also offers a precedent allowing other non-nuclear countries like Japan to advance nuclear-weapons development under the guise of building their own nuclear-powered subs. What’s to stop China or Russia from now selling their nuclear-powered submarines and weapons-grade uranium to Iran, Venezuela, or any other country?

Who’s militarizing Asia? Some will claim that the United States must counter China’s growing military power, frequently trumpeted by U.S. media outlets. Increasingly, journalists, pundits, and politicians here have been irresponsibly parroting misleading depictions of Chinese military power. Such fearmongering is already ballooning military budgets in this country, while fueling arms races and increasing tensions, just as during the original Cold War. Disturbingly, according to a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, a majority in the U.S. now appear to believe — however incorrectly — that Chinese military power is equal to or greater than that of the United States. In fact, our military power vastly exceeds China’s, which simply doesn’t compare to the old Soviet Union.

The Chinese government has indeed strengthened its military power in recent years by increasing spending, developing advanced weapons systems, and building an estimated 15 to 27 mostly small military bases and radar stations on human-made islands in the South China Sea. Nonetheless, the U.S. military budget remains at least three times the size of its Chinese counterpart (and higher than at the height of the original Cold War). Add in the military budgets of Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other NATO allies like Great Britain and the discrepancy leaps to six to one. Among the approximately 750 U.S. military bases abroad, almost 300 are scattered across East Asia and the Pacific and dozens more are in other parts of Asia. The Chinese military, on the other hand, has eight bases abroad (seven in the South China Sea’s Spratley Islands and one in Djibouti in Africa), plus bases in Tibet. The U.S. nuclear arsenal contains about 5,800 warheads compared to about 320 in the Chinese arsenal. The U.S. military has 68 nuclear-powered submarines, the Chinese military 10.

Contrary to what many have been led to believe, China is not a military challenge to the United States. There is no evidence its government has even the remotest thought of threatening, let alone attacking, the U.S. itself. Remember, China last fought a war outside its borders in 1979. “The true challenges from China are political and economic, not military,” Pentagon expert William Hartung has rightly explained.

Since President Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” the U.S. military has engaged in years of new base construction, aggressive military exercises, and displays of military force in the region. This has encouraged the Chinese government to build up its own military capabilities. Especially in recent months, the Chinese military has engaged in increasingly provocative exercises near Taiwan, though fearmongers again are misrepresenting and exaggerating how threatening they truly are. Given Biden’s plans to escalate his predecessors’ military buildup in Asia, no one should be surprised if Beijing announces a military response and pursues an AUKUS-like alliance of its own. If so, the world will once more be locked in a two-sided Cold-War-like struggle that could prove increasingly difficult to unwind.

Unless Washington and Beijing reduce tensions, future historians may see AUKUS as akin not just to various Cold-War-era alliances, but to the 1882 Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. That pact spurred France, Britain, and Russia to create their own Triple Entente, which, along with rising nationalism and geo-economic competition, helped lead Europe into World War I (which, in turn, begat World War II, which begat the Cold War).

Avoiding a new Cold War? The Biden administration and the United States must do better than resuscitate the strategies of the nineteenth century and the Cold War era. Rather than further fueling a regional arms race with yet more bases and weapons development in Australia, U.S. officials could help lower tensions between Taiwan and mainland China, while working to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In the wake of the Afghan War, President Biden could commit the United States to a foreign policy of diplomacy, peace-building, and opposition to war rather than one of endless conflict and preparations for more of the same. AUKUS’s initial 18-month consultation period offers a chance to reverse course.

Recent polling suggests such moves would be popular. More than three times as many in the U.S. would like to see an increase, rather than a decrease, in diplomatic engagement in the world, according to the nonprofit Eurasia Group Foundation. Most surveyed would also like to see fewer troop deployments overseas. Twice as many want to decrease the military budget as want to increase it.

The world barely survived the original Cold War, which was anything but cold for the millions of people who lived through or died in the era’s proxy wars in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Can we really risk another version of the same, this time possibly with Russia as well as China? Do we want an arms race and competing military buildups that would divert trillions of dollars more from pressing human needs while filling the coffers of arms manufacturers? Do we really want to risk triggering a military clash between the United States and China, accidental or otherwise, that could easily spin out of control and become a hot, possibly nuclear, war in which the death and destruction of the last 20 years of “forever wars” would look small by comparison.

That thought alone should be chilling. That thought alone should be enough to stop another Cold War before it’s too late.

David Vine writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is professor of anthropology at American University, is the author most recently of The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, just out in paperback. He is also the author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, part of the American Empire Project.

Copyright ©2021 David Vine — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 October 2021
Word Count: 2,327
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