US Empire decline

Photo credit: uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu Tom Engelhardt June 10, 2021 Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in Covid-stricken but improving America. Published at juancole.com & Tomdispatch.com 06.07.2021 As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first wildfire near Los Angeles, the intensifying mega-drought across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of hurricane season in the Atlantic and so on. We...

Photo credit: eurasia-news-online.com Tom Fowdy June 2, 2021 A US-led world order is still preferred by more countries than a Chinese one, says a new survey. However, disillusionment with Washington has risen across the globe due to its military adventurism and handling of Covid. One of the dominant themes of the 21st century has been the return of ‘great power’ politics. The contest for global supremacy between the United States and China. This battle heated up under Donald Trump, and has continued under Joe Biden. Both are eager to restore US primacy against the perceived challenge from Beijing. Originally published at eurasia-news-online.com But what do other countries make of it all? Do they prefer an American-led world order, or a Chinese one? Or is the answer more complex, with both countries having appealing qualities? A comprehensive new survey from the Eurasia Group Foundation, ‘Modeling Democracy’ delivers some fascinating insights, with people in...

About a Senate bill enshrining a zero-sum approach to Beijing that will surely set us on a course of escalation. Michael D. Swaine June 14, 2021 This is the first installment in a multi-part Responsible Statecraft series on the Strategic Competition Act (S. 1169), a bill under consideration that would effectively constitute a declaration of cold war on China by the U.S. Congress. We begin with an overview of the bill’s framing of the threat China poses to the United States and other nations and what to do about it. It will be followed by separate essays delving into greater detail analyzing the inaccurate assessments and policy changes suggested in several critical areas: Taiwan, the South China Sea maritime disputes, North Korea, educational exchanges, influence operations, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Originally published at responsiblestatecraft.org The Strategic Competition Act, recently approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, constitutes a de...

Gareth PorterTFF Associate June 1, 2021 A previously censored account of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis that was sponsored by the Pentagon has been published in full by the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. The report provides a hair-raising portrait of a reckless US military leadership relentlessly pressing President Dwight Eisenhower for the authority to carry out nuclear attacks on communist China. After holding the still-classified version of the account in his possession for fifty years, Ellsberg said he decided to release it because of the growing threat of US war with China over Taiwan, and the danger that such a conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange. A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as...

America is a diplomatic fox, while Beijing is a hedgehog fixated on the big idea of reunification. Niall Ferguson June 1, 2021 Editor’s noteThis article was published as an opinion piece by Bloomberg on March 21, 2021. We bring you here the few last paragraphs which, hopefully, will stimulate you to read the whole piece at Bloomberg. The analysis’ central message is what the headline hints at – namely Taiwan as an exceptionally important issue for China that the United States ought not to deal lightly with and provoke (more) conflict around. It is not the style of Bloomberg to publish such pieces with an understanding of Chinese concerns and it is not every day an analysis like this comes out of the Hudson Institute. Perhaps Taiwan will turn out to be to the American empire what Suez was to the British Empire in 1956: the moment when the imperial...

May 23, 2021 Richard Falk, TFF Associate Prefatory Note: The post below is a slightly modified version of Policy Paper #4 RESPONDING TO CHINESE VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, published previously on the website of the Committee for a Sane China Policy. It reflects my view that the protection of human rights is being geopolitically manipulated to mobilize public support for an anti-Chinese foreign policy in the West that risks generating a dangerous geopolitical confrontation. Such a confrontation is costly, amounts to war-mongering, and diverts U.S. attention from self-scrutiny and global peacebuilding. Whether a second cold war is already underway is a matter of interpretation, but even those reluctant to reach such a depressing assessment would have to acknowledge that unless there are strong efforts made to support what I would call ‘inclusive global multipolarity,’ the drift toward such a dismal near-term future will become inevitable. The need to sound the alarm...

Image by Stock File Madison Tang and Jodie Evans May 23, 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year was recently announced, and it requests $715 billion for his first Pentagon budget, 1.6 percent more than the $704 billion enacted under Trump’s administration. The outline states that the primary justification for this increase in military spending is to counter the threat of China, and identifies China as the U.S.’s “top challenge.” Within the proposal is an endorsement of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command head Admiral Philip Davidson’s request for $4.7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” which will increase U.S. military capabilities in Guam and the surrounding region. The Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in additional spending between 2022 and 2027 to build a network of precision-strike missiles along the islands surrounding Beijing. This article was originally published at Pressenza The U.S.’s unilateral aggression toward China—in...

Cyrus Janssen May 19, 2021 Many Americans view China in a completely wrong way. They only view it from the eyes of an American. But how does a Chinese person view China? Is China a threat to the USA? Is China going to overtake the US? In today’s video I break down my thoughts on the America’s foreign policy towards China and reveal the truth about China. This video was posted at Cyrus Janssens Youtube Channel, May 14. 2021 About the author: Cyrus Janssen is an American Expat that has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 14 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing about his travels around the world. Here is his amazing YouTube Channel with 137 000 subscribers. A great example of citizens’ media/reporting – much better informed and free than many Western mainstream media reporters. Please...

Jan Oberg May 15, 2021 The conflict between the US/West and China will shape humanity’s future more than any other conflict. Therefore, it is not a bilateral issue but a global concern. I believe it ought to be on top of the agenda at the peace research institutions that have not turned state-dependent and/or US-mainstreamed.Both the Trump and the Biden Administrations have determined that what is going on in Xinjiang in China is a genocide and lots of mainstream media, editorials, policy statements and experts have spread this ”determination” as the truth. However, not one has checked the accusation’s documentation, the stated “independence” of the producing institutes or the experts’ ideological connections. This was originally posted as an editorial on Transcend Media Service, TMS, on May 3, 2021 here The world has a right to expect that the extremely serious genocide accusation is based on rock-solid evidence. To find out...

William Astore May 6, 2021 Introduction to the article Once upon a time, the Europeans had the copyright on naming lengthy wars: the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War. I suspect, however, that it’s past time for the U.S. to enter that competition. After all, soon after we arrive at September 11, 2021, barring a genuine surprise, this country will have been fighting its twenty-first-century wars unsuccessfully for two decades. In other words, the conflict launched as the Global War on Terror in the days after the 9/11 attacks (the one that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld imagined targeting terror networks in up to 60 countries) has never either faintly succeeded or ended. It’s only spread to ever newer realms of death and disaster in distant lands (while bouncing back on this country in ever stranger ways), even as trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars went down the drain. Shouldn’t the increasingly riven citizens of...

Photo taken on April 17, 2021 shows the Boao Forum for Asia International Conference Center in Boao Town, South China’s Hainan province. [Photo/Xinhua] Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 At the Boao Forum for Asia, a regional summit for government, business and academia typically hosted in Hainan province, China said that it does not seek hegemony and that it does not strive to displace the United States, only seeking fairness and justice in the international system. This came amid the Western mainstream media repeatedly framing Washington and Beijing as being in a competition for global dominance. Unfortunately, this view is shared by many politicians in the United States increasingly depicting China as a threat and a strategic competitor – espousing the language of the Cold War. Originally published at china.org.cn What is hegemony? In international relations, a hegemon is a state that wields so much undisputed power that has almost complete...

File photo. A portrait of China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China © AFP / Wang Zhao Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 Chinese- and Russian-funded journalism is ‘disinformation,’ but when Washington spends millions on ‘independent’ news outlets and buying journalists to get favourable coverage of its policies, it’s called ‘spreading information.’ The US Senate last week passed a bumper anti-China bill titled the S.1169 – Strategic Competition Act of 2021  Backed by Chuck Schumer (Dem, New York) as one of his biggest priorities since becoming the Majority leader, the 270+ page document contains scores of recommendations and provisions on formalizing America’s “geopolitical competition” against Beijing, including in the fields of military, diplomacy, technology, trade and more. There’s little question it will be passed into law, having already cleared the Senate and with the anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington being routinely bipartisan.  Originally published at rt.com The bill also notably pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in various...