Bipartisan Suicide

These days, political discourse consists mostly of barely intelligible strife, disputes over arcane excuses to “own the libs” or to sneer at the dumb bubbas, respectively. But on more important, even existential matters, our “leaders” are in full agreement: life on earth is dull and should end.

The long-term means of getting there—climate-based destruction—is now being shoved aside in favor of a prompter and more straightforward alternative: war, either with China or, failing that, with Russia, or perhaps—why not? —both.

On this issue, Democrats, if anything, are more insistent than the laggard Trumpians. Biden, his top officials, and his party’s congressional barking dogs in the pro-war camp now daily carry flammable liquids to the diplomatic table in eager expectation of the appearance of matches, firmly believing that America’s pansy enemies will immediately retreat shaking in fear at the sight of big, scary us.

Or perhaps they just want to ramp up worldwide tensions so that no one will notice that our dwindling national treasure is being eaten up by the war profiteers and their Pentagon-congressional allies, in which case let’s hope they’re luckier than most everyone else in human history and can calibrate their provocations short of catastrophe.

The latest sticking point chosen by the Biden team is Taiwan, the island whose status has been left conveniently ambiguous for 50 years. It is part of China, all have agreed, and yet operated for decades with considerable autonomy as long as no one uses the I-word (“independence”) or claims that it is a “state” or a “nation.” Avoiding that red line, all is well, or well enough, and things were allowed to muddle along. Taiwanese businesses do a lot of trade with China, and getting rich kept everyone modestly content.

Biden let the cat out of the bag that this status quo was to be jettisoned on Oct. 22 by answering a question at a CNN event that the U.S. would indeed come to the “defense” of Taiwan. Not only did Biden say it would, but he added “Taiwan” to a list of similarly defended nations, South Korea and Japan as if Taiwan was their equivalent, i.e., an independent state. 

The original Biden statement was at first considered another one of the old duffer’s gaffes, quickly corrected by his handlers. However, since then, a steady accumulation of unmistakably policy-shifting statements by members of his team means Biden did not goof at all but rather knew exactly what he was saying. It is now clear that the U.S. has embarked on a new confrontational attitude toward China by threatening it over the status of a piece of what it considers its national territory.

The final confirmation came just days after Biden’s comments when the U.S. announced its support for Taiwan’s return to full membership in various UN bodies. While getting Taiwan a seat at, say, the World Health Organization might be reasonable in other times, the current push from Washington is all about poking the Chinese in the face and making Taiwan look like an independent state. 

The new belligerence has been eagerly taken up by members of Congress, including plenty of Democrats, who seem just as inclined to beat the war drums than Trump’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy team. Elaine Luria, a member from the uniform-heavy Tidewater area of Virginia, went so far as to propose that the president be given the green light to launch military action over Taiwan without prior congressional approval. Luria endorsed the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act, which is a Republican brainchild, proving that on the issue of suiting up for battle, there is zero culture war in America today—everyone fer it, no one agin’ it. 

The practical consequences of Luria’s idea are minimal as anyone not living under a rock can see that the presidency is already far too empowered to go to any war its occupant fancies. The point is to gin up bipartisan clamor for a more threatening posture against China.

No one seems terribly bothered that this proposal encourages the president to launch hostilities with a foreign nuclear power without so much as a brief stop by Congress to see if it’s okay. The 330 million of us who might have other ideas are to be cut out of that rather major decision entirely.

The GOP-Luria bill also calls for a resumption of full U.S.-Taiwan military relations and military exercises with the island’s forces, topped off with a presidential visit to Taiwan. None of this is likely to happen, but it is a sign of the growing detachment from reality that this sort of loose talk is popular in Washington.

Reading what passes for analysis among the foreign policy Blob on Taiwan (and other issues—more below) requires that one enter into a magical land of adult make-believe. (I hope to post this on Hallowe’en, which, come to think of it, is perfect.) The Blobians insist that the decision to throw over 50 years of a peaceable status quo and put up the national dukes will work because the Chinese are sure to back down once their bluff is called. Biden himself referred to the U.S.’s massive war machine that will surely intimidate anyone paying attention. The possibility that foreign nuclear powers might have their own red lines is dismissed as weak-kneed groveling unworthy of Real Men.

Meanwhile, in Europe we have even more demented displays of war-posturing glee. The outgoing German Defense Minister recently called for NATO to get ready for “non-conventional warfare, including nuclear weapons, cyber-attacks, and space military technology. “‘This is the way of deterrence,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told a German radio station, repeating her threat of first use of nukes in Europe in defense of the Baltic states. “We must make it very clear to Russia that we are ready to use such measures,” she insisted. 

No doubt the geniuses behind NATO are desperate to drum up some way to convince their populations that that tottering entity still has a raison d’etre of some sort, but ratcheting up talk of a nuclear weapons toss around Europe seems a bit over the top. Given the tone of such statements, the Russian response has been admirably measured, along the lines of “Perhaps you’ve forgotten how that ended last time around. We haven’t.”

A lot of the commentary around all this war talk tends toward reassurances based on the assumption that threat exaggeration is a long-standing tactic of the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank (MICIMATT) complex [hat tip Ray McGovern], whose ultimate goal is merely more cash for their boondoggles. As Gary Brecher puts it in The eXiled,

No one who matters in the defense business wants total war with China. They just want to keep those trash fires burning, hoping one of them will blaze up big, like a gender-reveal wildfire. And even if none of them do, it’s good for business, because most war scares are about funding. 

But history also has plenty of examples of how provocatively wagging one’s missile at the enemy can lead to an actual war. Pumping up the populace over real or imagined slights can let loose uncontrollable social forces as the Argentine generals learned to their dismay when they let the Falklands/Malvinas genie out of that bottle.

On a deeper level, however, I believe there is a moment of truth approaching about how our species has handled its affairs for many thousands of years, namely, the ingrained assumption that relations among polities is inevitably a zero-sum game in which the mighty dictate and the subordinate obey. The corollary is that if one isn’t up, then one is necessarily down. The idea of simply getting along and working out differences as equals seems foreign to our human consciousness, and it might just be time to evolve to something more intelligent given that the capacity to blow ourselves up once and finally has been in human hands for a while.

Daniel Larison at Antiwar.com calls that attitude the “bankruptcy of Great Power Competition,” and I believe he is on to something crucial about why and how opposition to the madness could mobilize: 

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union split Europe down the middle, but it was in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that massive bloodletting took place. During the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, huge numbers of people were reduced to collateral damage, far away from famous First World flashpoints such as Berlin, their deaths seen as acceptable, if not celebrated,” including genocides in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia. 

Once major powers have decided on a militaristic, confrontational course, it becomes extremely easy for their political leaders to justify any number of atrocities against innocent people in neutral or contested countries in the name of preventing the rival from advancing. [Therefore,] it is not surprising that almost all states in Southeast Asia want nothing to do with the militarized anti-China coalition that the U.S. is trying to assemble. The nations of Southeast Asia do not want to be forced to choose sides or to become pawns in someone else’s struggle yet again.

The whole article is worth a read. It is a much-needed reminder that the Democrats now in power will have to be completely discredited if the human race is to stand a chance, followed by the complete discrediting of the Republicans who will surely inherit the bipartisan mess.

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