By Caitlin Johnstone
November 07, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- A new Bloomberg
article titled "‘Sloppy’
US Talk on China’s Threat Worries Some Skeptical
Experts" discusses the dangerous cycle in
which pressures in the US political
establishment to continually escalate
hostilities with Beijing provokes responses that
are then falsely interpreted as Chinese
aggression.
Bloomberg's Iain Marlow writes:
The hawkish narrative “limits room for
maneuver in a crisis,” said M. Taylor Fravel,
director of the Security Studies Program at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Any effort to defuse tension could be
characterized as “conciliatory or not tough
enough,” he said.
China has been consistent on Taiwan and
there’s little public evidence to suggest
it’s sped up the timeline to take Taiwan,
said a former senior US official who worked
on China policy but asked not to be
identified.
The former official said the hawkish tone
in DC has contributed to a cycle where the
US makes the first move, interprets Chinese
reactions as a provocation, and then
escalates further.
Bloomberg quotes Bonnie Glaser, director of
the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund,
who says this cycle of self-reinforcing
escalation could “end up provoking the war that
we seek to deter."
We just saw this same self-perpetuating cycle
of military escalation exemplified against North
Korea, where tensions have again been flaring
after a long pause. The US and South Korea
initiated a provocative military drill designed
to menace the DPRK, Pyongyang responded by
launching missiles in its own show of strength,
and the Pentagon announced an extension of the
drills in response to that response.
Antiwar's
Dave DeCamp explains:
The US and South Korea are extending
massive aerial war games after North Korea
put on a massive show of force in response
to the drills.
Washington and Seoul started their
Vigilant Storm exercises on Monday, which
were initially scheduled to run 24 hours a
day for five days. This year’s Vigilant
Storm is the largest-ever iteration of the
drills, involving nearly 100 American
warplanes and 140 South Korean aircraft, and
about 1,600 planned sorties.
Pyongyang made it clear it would respond
to the Vigilant Storm drills, and it
launched 23 missiles on Wednesday, which is
said to be the most North Korea has fired in
a single day. North Korea also fired over
100 artillery rounds on the same day
and launched six more missiles on Thursday.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd
Austin announced the extension of Vigilant
Storm after a meeting with his South Korean
counterpart, Lee Jong-sup. “I’ve consulted
with Minister Lee and we’ve decided to
extend Vigilant Storm, which is our
long-scheduled combined training exercise,
to further bolster our readiness and
interoperability,” Austin said.
"So they launch these war games, provoke a
bunch of North Korean missile launches and then
say they have to extend the war games because of
the missile launches,"
tweeted DeCamp.
DeCamp quotes another DPRK official who warns
that the extension of the US-ROK war games may
provoke further escalations, saying “The
irresponsible decision of the US and South Korea
is shoving the present situation, caused by
provocative military acts of the allied forces,
to an uncontrollable phase.”
We've been seeing this same cycle repeated
year after year: US military expansionism and
aggression in a given part of the world receives
pushback from the people who live there, and the
US responds to that pushback with more military
expansionism and aggression. The official
narrative is that the US is responding to
unprovoked aggressions from the other side,
conveniently omitting its own antecedent
aggressions and provocations — a manipulation
tactic the western media are always
happy to facilitate.
In reality it's not hard to determine who the
aggressor is when one party is flying to the
other side of the planet to menace the borders
and security interests of the other, especially
when ramping up militarism in more and more
parts of the world facilitates both the US
military-industrial complex and
the unipolarist objectives of US empire
managers. But because the US empire has the most
sophisticated
narrative control system ever devised,
enough people in enough places that matter
swallow the official story despite its
self-evident absurdity.
A system which perpetuates and exacerbates
itself while pretending to solve the problems it
creates is often called a
self-licking ice cream cone. Because that
type of system is promoted by those serving the
most powerful and belligerent power structure on
earth, one might call US militarism a
self-licking boot.
We've been watching the self-licking boot of
US militarism exemplified for decades in the
"war on terror" scam, where US military
interventionism destabilizes geostrategically
crucial parts of the world and makes the locals
who've suffered under US bombings want to harm
their persecutors, and the response is to ramp
up military expansionism in those parts of the
world in the name of fighting terrorists and
protecting US troops.
We been watching it in Ukraine, where US
aggressions
provoked an invasion by a government the US
empire has
long targeted for destruction, and that
invasion is now
being
used to advance longstanding US
strategic
objectives while continually
expanding US
military involvement in the region.
And we'll be sure to see more and more of it
as the US
accelerates toward global conflict on two fronts
simultaneously while mainstream media pundits
cheer it on, despite all available evidence
indicating that we are witnessing something
profoundly stupid and crazy. The US will
continue ramping up aggressions against Moscow
and Beijing, those governments will respond, and
we will be told that the US must respond to
these outrageous provocations by ramping up
aggressions.
Repeat ad nauseum.
Lick, lick.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com
Views expressed in this article are
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
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