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Michael Klare, Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This will be the last TomDispatch piece until September 7th. As always, I’m taking these two weeks off.  I hope, in the (quite literal) heat of the moment, some of you get a break, too. As always, I urge TD readers to do what you’ve done so movingly all these years: visit our donation page and consider contributing something to the site so that it can continue to wander into our ever-stranger future. Tom]

Think of it as an irony of the first order that Joe Biden’s foreign-policy team came into office promoting new cold-war policies against the rising power on this planet, China. After all, even if it is that, it’s rising in a world that only recently experienced its warmest month on record. The very term “cold war,” in fact, seems like an artifact of ancient history at a time when, among other places, the U.S., Europe, and Canada have all been setting new heat records and experiencing fires of a sort seldom seen before. In this sense, the Biden foreign-policy team and the Pentagon, as they maneuver to confront the Chinese Navy not off the California coast but from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait, couldn’t seem more out of touch with the deeper realities of our world.

I guarantee you one thing: at the moment, they’re doing their planning for forming alliances against a rising China in air-conditioned rooms, because it’s been hot as hell in Washington — or by Zoom because it’s still a pandemic country. Yes, against all reason and sense, the U.S. continues to build ultra-expensive new nuclear weapons (having in recent years dumped several nuclear treaties), while fretting eternally about China’s upgraded but still relatively modest nuclear arsenal. As it happens, though, the future “battles” the U.S. and China might find themselves in, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, writes today, could be of a very different, even if still world-endangering nature. To be won, they would have to be fought not against each other, but together.  Welcome to a new-style hot-war world.  Tom

China, 2049

A Climate Disaster Zone, Not a Military Superpower

In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country's current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry.

“China has invested heavily in new technologies, with a stated intent to complete the modernization of its forces by 2035 and to field a ‘world-class military’ by 2049,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified in June. The United States, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee, continues to possess “the best joint fighting force on Earth.” But only by spending countless additional billions of dollars annually, he added, can this country hope to “outpace” China's projected advances in the decades to come.

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Karen Greenberg, Will the Forever Wars Become Forever Policy?

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If it hasn’t been forever, it’s certainly felt like it. Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the American-installed government there collapsed, its leader fled the country, and its American-trained military (already well staffed with plenty of “ghost” troops) evaporated. Many of the government soldiers and police who remained officially on duty hadn’t been paid for months, amid massive corruption and a staggering expenditure of American taxpayer dollars. Four administrations had spent at least $2.26 trillion fighting the war itself and more than $88 billion arming and supplying a military that, in the end, wouldn’t fight. It should be the ultimate lesson in forever disaster, but don’t count on the U.S. military learning much from it.

After all, the very generals who, year after endless year, oversaw such disasters, while lauding “progress” in Afghanistan and Iraq, were almost inevitably promoted or sent via golden parachute into the other half of the military-industrial complex. Lessons? Us? If anyone in Washington was into such lessons, the Pentagon might have learned something from the 2014 collapse of the Iraqi military that it also funded, organized, and trained in the face of the relatively modest forces of the Islamic State. But no such luck, as recent events in Afghanistan suggest.

Yes, the blame game is now on here at home and the insults are being hurled, but a serious reconsideration of the last 20 years of forever wars? Don’t count on it. Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, whose new book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump is being published this week, suggests: if you think it’s been forever and a day so far, just wait.

True, no one talks about the “war on terror” anymore. Even its proprietors now tend to refer to it by what was once a phrase used by its critics, “the forever war.” As Greenberg makes clear, however, whatever they may or may not be called, don’t be surprised when, in some fashion, they prove ongoing. No less sadly, the world of power and privilege they created in this country won’t be ending either. As former Yankee catcher and manager Yogi Berra might have put it, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” When it comes to forever disaster and this country in the twenty-first century, it’s a reasonable bet that you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Donald Trump.) Tom

The Endless Shadow of the War on Terror

Living With It Forever and a Day

It ended in chaos and disaster.  Kabul has fallen and Joe Biden is being blamed (by congressional Republicans in particular) for America's now almost-20-year disaster in Afghanistan.  But is the war on terror itself over? Apparently not. 

It seems like centuries ago, but do you remember when, in May 2003, President George W. Bush declared “Mission accomplished” as he spoke proudly of his invasion of Iraq? Three months later, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed, “We are winning the war on terror.” Despite such declarations and the "corners" endlessly turned as America's military commanders announced impending successes year after year in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, abroad and on the home front, has been never-ending, as the now-codified term “forever wars” suggests.

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Patterson Deppen, America as a Base Nation Revisited

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In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet. He began it this way:

“As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire — an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.”

Seventeen years have passed since then, years in which the U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan, across the Greater Middle East, and deep into Africa. Those wars have all been — if you’ll excuse the use of the term this way — based on that very “empire of bases,” which grew to a staggering size in this century. And yet most Americans have paid no attention to it whatsoever.  (Remind me of the last time any aspect of that Baseworld featured in a political campaign in this country.) And yet it was a historically unique (and expensive) way of garrisoning the planet, without the bother of the sort of colonies older empires had relied on.

At TomDispatch, however, we’ve never taken our eyes off that strange global imperial edifice. In July 2007, for instance, Nick Turse produced his first of many pieces on those unprecedented bases and the militarization of the planet that went with them. Citing the gigantic ones in then-U.S.-occupied Iraq, he wrote: “Even with the multi-square mile, multi-billion dollar, state-of-the-art Balad Air Base and Camp Victory thrown in, however, the bases in [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates’ new plan will be but a drop in the bucket for an organization that may well be the world’s largest landlord. For many years, the U.S. military has been gobbling up large swaths of the planet and huge amounts of just about everything on (or in) it. So, with the latest Pentagon Iraq plans in mind, take a quick spin with me around this Pentagon planet of ours.”

Similarly, eight years later, in September 2015, at the time of the publication of his then-new book Base Nation, David Vine took TomDispatch readers on an updated spin through that very planet of bases in “Garrisoning the Globe.” He began with a paragraph that could, sadly enough, have been written yesterday (or undoubtedly, even more sadly, tomorrow):

“With the U.S. military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of U.S. bases and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.”

Today, even more sadly, Patterson Deppen offers the latest look at that global imperial structure, still standing despite the recent American disaster in Afghanistan, and for so many on this planet (as it isn’t for Americans), symbolic of the nature of the U.S. presence globally.  His piece is based on a brand-new count of the Pentagon’s bases and reminds us that, since Johnson wrote those words about our Baseworld 17 years ago, remarkably little has changed in the way this country approaches much of the rest of the planet. Tom

The All-American Base World

750 U.S. Military Bases Still Remain Around the Planet

It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”

“What are freedom fries?” we demanded to know.

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