Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
It’s somewhat reassuring that Donald Trump vows to make peace between Russia and Ukraine pronto, upon becoming president. But it will all be absolutely for naught if Washington then pivots to war with Beijing, a war that will quickly become nuclear. And not just because of an Atomic Apocalypse – if Trump thinks Russian troops won’t flood to China’s aid, he is sorely mistaken. That’s because Moscow and Beijing have a de facto mutual aid military pact. Or is it de jure? To judge from the presence as recently as July 19 of Chinese soldiers in Belarus, where over the course of a week they executed military maneuvers with Belorussian troops on the Polish border, the answer may very well be that the current Washington regime’s imbecilic bellicosity toward both superpowers led Moscow and Beijing to sign an ACTUAL mutual defense pact. So yes, Russian soldiers will very likely assist Chinese ones in the event of a U.S. war in East Asia. And those Russians are some of the most battle-hardened troops on the planet.
The lousy idea of war with the five-thousand-year-old civilization, cherished by the American right, stinks for a multitude of reasons. Following the bleak, hypothetical scenario that pentagon and also China expert David Goldman tweeted June 18, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would end the island’s gas supplies in three weeks, leaving it without power. Then “the U.S. blockades Chinese trade via the Strait of Malacca…China blockades South Korea and Japan (which import virtually all energy).” Unlike those nations, China produces 80 percent of its energy, and Russia can replace half its food imports by rail.
“Japan and South Korea shut down. China tightens its belt but keeps functioning: World stock markets crash, etc…China can conduct its blockade using nothing but missile launchers on the mainland.” Since there’s no way to disable these, “1) The U.S. sends F-18s to hit mainland targets and China destroys the Okinawa and Guam airbases. 2) The U.S. sends carriers to attack China, and China sinks them. 3) The U.S. fires missiles at China from the Philippines, and Chinese missiles obliterate the Philippines. 4) We go straight to a nuclear exchange. Meanwhile the world economy shrinks by 20 percent to 30 percent.”
That sound bad enough for you? Apparently not to rabid GOP congressional China hawks and the likes of Elbridge Colby, whom Trump is considering for a cabinet position. These warmongers actually flirt with policies that will cause this catastrophe, and catastrophe it is, because what Goldman omits is that Moscow and Tehran would likely rush to aid their ally China and pile on – and with Russia in the fight, it becomes incandescently nuclear, with cities in the U.S., Russia, Europe and China incinerated.
Though fanatics like erstwhile GOP representative Mike “Sinophobic Rampage” Gallagher have left the House, plenty of maniacs remain, who appear to think war with China is “winnable” and hunky dory, and they’re bolstered by Dr. Strangeloves in the pentagon. This is a real danger. Could Trump contain it? Unlikely. Could Joe Biden? Not to judge from the dismal trajectory of Biden’s pet Ukraine proxy war, a trajectory on which western escalation has followed escalation like night follows day. And with a Trump white house, the prospect darkens considerably with the likes of Colby waiting – with all his ferocious anti-China lunacy – in the wings.
Meanwhile rhetoric and actions heat up. On June 21, Beijing sanctioned Lockheed Martin over another Taiwan arms sale. Congress is all for these provocative sales to the island, in case you didn’t know, and China has made its anger known. “The sanctions will target Lockheed Martin ceo James Teclit, chief operating officer Frank St. John, chief financial officer Jesse Malefe, and others,” RT reported June 21, including subsidiaries such as “Lockheed Martin Missile Systems Integration Laboratory, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technologies Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Ventures.” For those morons who poo-poohed these moves, please remember that China is an economic behemoth, and an industrial giant that controls many of the supply chains on which our insanely over-priced defense industry depends. These arms sales to Taiwan are, besides dangerous, profoundly stupid.
The sale that caused the latest sanctions is worth $360 million and includes hundreds of armed drones and missiles. It follows China’s May sanctions “on 12 American defense contractors, including subsidiaries of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as well as ten executives.” This was Beijing’s counterattack to Washington arming Taiwan. Lots of tit for tat here. Remember, “the U.S. Treasury had previously slapped restrictive measures on more than a dozen Chinese entities for allegedly supplying military-related goods to Russia.” Incidentally, American weapons sales to Taiwan scored another grotesque casualty, as Beijing ended nuclear non-proliferation talks with Washington July 17. Why? Because of U.S. arms inundating Taiwan.
But here and there hope glimmers on a dark horizon, though only faintly and at a great distance. Back on October 15, Goldman published an opinion piece in Newsweek, headlined, “China Isn’t Going To War Because It Doesn’t Have To,” in which he argued that the prospect of combat between Beijing and the west over Taiwan is “a scam, a goof, a Muppet show, whose point is to cover up the incompetence and corruption which led the Pentagon to spend trillions on obsolete weapons. We lost the South China sea years ago…and we know it. We just can’t admit it.”
Goldman notes that the U.S. defense department recognized since at least 2012 “that Chinese surface-to-surface (STS) missiles can destroy U.S. aircraft carriers, or any other military asset that isn’t submerged.” According to Goldman, there will be no war between Beijing and Washington, and China will simply wait to absorb Taiwan peacefully, as was always the plan. Also, complicating Washington’s insane pow wows over war with China is Taiwan’s reluctance to shoulder the military burden, despite Beltway cajoling, and its alarm that acceding to China-hawk fanaticism could crater the island’s economy and population, leaving it like Ukraine, i.e. destroyed. Kiev is a byword among nations. No one in their right mind wants to end up like Ukraine.
This is welcome news, but it doesn’t make the more recent saber-rattling any less unnerving. On July 15, RT reported that another round of Russian-Chinese joint naval maneuvers kicked off in the Pacific, near the city of Zhanjiang. Beijing’s defense ministry announced that “the fourth joint maritime patrol in the western and northern Pacific Ocean did not target a third party and had nothing to do with the current international and regional situation.”
There have also been joint naval maneuvers with Russia, China and Iran over the past year. And don’t forget the Kremlin’s shiny new defense pact with North Korea. Suffice it to say that in three short years, team Biden succeeded in creating a Eurasian Gargantua, united in its opposition to western aggression. There is no turning back the clock. This eastern alliance is here to stay. And as military experts like Will Schryver have observed, the U.S. and NATO would fare poorly against it.
Why? Well, for starters, Russia and China are industrial giants who avoided the hubristic mistake of privatizing their defense industries and who have beefed their weapons production up to altitudes the west simply can’t reach. Washington and NATO could not long withstand this new alliance, and that’s before things go nuclear. Then, once it does, it’s curtains for the west, and the east. Moscow has more nukes that Washington, as well as technology the west lacks, like hypersonic missiles. China and Iran now have ‘em too. And that’s before you even consider the problem of air defense. The continental United States doesn’t have it. (Russia has the best in the world.) So we’re defenseless when it comes to missile attacks and under-equipped, and the geniuses in the white house forged us a frighteningly powerful enemy. Good going, American war party. You really shot the west in the head with your latest idiocies. Peace talks anyone?
