Nick Beams — US “Grand Strategy” for war against China laid out

Getting close to the definition of "kooky." Any wonder why a global coalition against the US is building?

The advanced stage of discussions in US foreign policy circles over the pursuit of an ever-more aggressive policy toward China has been revealed by the recent release of a chilling report under the auspices of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. 

Entitled “Revising US Grand Strategy Toward China,” the report is nothing less than an agenda for war. It is authored by Robert D. Blackwill and Ashley J. Tellis, both of whom have close connections to the US State Department and various American foreign policy think tanks.

And the Council on Foreign Relations is considered centrist in comparison with the neocons. whom even signer of the original PNAC document Francis Fukuyama abandoned after Iraq.

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This is where the really hardliners are going.

First up is Dr. Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (Henry Holt and Co., 2015). Let me begin by noting that this is a highly engaging and thought-provoking read. It does what few books do well, and that is to mix scholarship, policy, and memoir-style writing in an accessible but still intellectually rich fashion. Pillsbury, senior fellow and director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, presents a straightforward thesis. In its most bald form, he argues that China has a long-term marathon strategy to supplant the United States as the sole superpower by 2049. If successful, Pillsbury argues that China will reshape the world into one that will “nurture autocracies,” “rewrit[e] history to defam[e] the West and prais[e] China,” sell its own highly polluting development model to other countries, and constrain the political space for international organizations (195).

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The predictable reaction, which will just increase US paranoia and aggressiveness. This is spiraling downward fast.

If Moscow and Beijing have taken the extraordinary step of organizing live-fire exercises off the coast of Europe, however, this is to send Washington and its European allies a political signal. US-led policies of strangling Russia’s economy with financial sanctions and seeking to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin, or isolating China through the US “pivot to Asia,” pose the threat of all-out war.

Chinese commentators indicated the Mediterranean exercises were also Chinese President Xi Jinping’s response to US-Japanese military deals in the Asia-Pacific, agreed between Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during Abe’s visit to Washington this week.

“Russia wants to show the United States it is not isolated and can launch exercises near Eastern Europe. And as a result of Abe’s visit to the United States and the upgraded Japan-American military relationship, Xi wants to show the United States he has good relations with Russia,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

James Hardy, Asia-Pacific editor of IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, said the exercises marked a new stage in the development of the Chinese navy’s fighting capabilities and would be seen as a challenge by ruling elites in the NATO countries.

“The geopolitical significance of its exercising along Russia will not be lost on the US and NATO, although it would be churlish of anyone in the West to complain about it, given the number of joint drills the US and its allies conduct in China’s near seas,” he told the New York Times .

The greatest danger facing the world’s population is that the risk of world war is largely hidden from the working class internationally. However, military standoffs such as the US threat to arm the far-right regime in Kiev against pro-Russian forces in east Ukraine, or the Japanese standoff with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islets, could erupt into all-out wars threatening the very survival of humanity

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