No one has forgotten about Daniel Ellsberg, even as the Washington Post remains relevant to national defense policy. By 2022 there should be some correction of the disastrous turn in foreign policy created by the previous guy. Only the GOP seems audacious enough to attempt nation-building by means of invasion.
Well, what’s done is done, right? Wrong(!), says 90-year old national treasure activist, scholar, writer, and "patriotic whistleblower” – of Pentagon Papers fame – Mr. Daniel Ellsberg. On the contrary, he recently disclosed an apparently still-classified document, indicating that six years before Beijing’s first bomb test, in response to Communist shelling of islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the US drew up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China.
Parts of that obscene story have been known since the DOD declassified selected portions of the analytical study of the crisis back in 1975, but the government kept-censored certain sections demonstrating that US military leaders had pressed for first-use nuclear strikes on China – despite predicting that the Soviets would likely retaliate in kind. In other words, senior generals and admirals were willing to accept the deaths of millions of people – including Americans – by slaughtering countless citizens of a non-nuclear nation, in defense of a non-essential, non-treaty ally.
Surely that’s grotesque – but why reveal it now? Well, Ellsberg apparently copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time – some 50 years ago – as he did the Pentagon Papers, but is only now highlighting it amid rising "New Cold War" tensions between the United States and China over islands in the South China Sea and notably, once again, Taiwan. With both Uncle Joe and The Donald seemingly trying to "out-hawk” each other on China in the recent election – and with tit-for-tat rhetorical and military show-of-force exercises now the order of the day in both Beijing and Biden’s Washington – Ellsberg is apparently hoping against hope that a radical act of risk-accepting courage could cool heads even just a tad.
That alone would be worth the effort. Yet there’s more continued relevance, and further reasons, to release this analysis of otherwise ancient history at this particular moment. Because the fact is that most past is prologue, and sometimes isn’t even past. Ultimately, what Ellsberg disclosed documents madness – the pervasive madness of American policymakers, and perhaps power more generally. And if we’re to survive as a species, that’s always a subject worth studying.
original.antiwar.com/...
In June 2021, the Biden White House published a “100-day review” entitled “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing and Fostering Broad-based Growth.” It is focused on a very different concept of what the “supply chain” is; the term now encompasses the entire spectrum of upstream production. The Biden review takes these up in four areas: semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals.
One might ask, why these four areas and not others? There is no clear answer, and it may be that choice was mainly bureaucratic. The review was compiled from separate reports by four cabinet departments: Commerce, Energy, Defense, and Health and Human Services. Had the Department of Agriculture been asked, or the Department of Transportation, one might have gotten different choices. Petroleum comes to mind. Or natural rubber – the linchpin of World War II in the Pacific.
If there is an Ariadne’s thread to these four areas, it is the trading and competitive relationship with China. The reports do not focus solely on China and give what is largely a fair-minded and wide-ranging assessment of vulnerabilities in each sector. For the reader not previously immersed in the structures of semiconductor production or the technology of electrical storage, this document, at 250 pages, is a mine of information. But China lurks in each section, sometimes looming large, in other places only in the background.
[...]
So we come to a truly remarkable third conclusion, no less powerful for having been left unstated. It builds on the fact that the integration of the global economy cannot be undone. The division of labor – hence productivity, living standards, and the advance of technologies – is limited by the extent of the market, as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776. China is a now-developed country with about twenty percent of the human population; its advantages are stability and scale, almost exactly as was true in the 18th century. These advantages cannot now be taken away without destroying the world as it is.
To be sure, the Chinese still, in many important advanced areas, draw from and depend on the United States. Certainly, the US can slow the inroads of Chinese firms in some cases, and certainly the US can foster, as this report recommends, its own advantages in new sectors by maintaining and expanding its research and development base. Certainly, there are many things to be done in the United States to meet urgent environmental, public health, and critical social goals.
But the US position, as an economy with only one-fourth the population, equally now depends on the Chinese market, and on downstream Chinese firms supplying applications to the world. While precautions against natural disasters and pandemics can be taken – up to a point – the central unstated message of this 100-day Review is that the greatest risk to the supply chain, in each of the four areas, is disruption of normal trade relations with China. In short, as an objective economic matter, we learn here, the United States has an overwhelming interest in peace.
www.ineteconomics.org/…
Undeniably though, the emergence of "historical nihilism" and "cultural nihilism" in recent years has posed a major challenge to Chinese culture. Therefore, boosting cultural confidence is also an integral part of enhancing cultural identity.
Burying one's head in the sand is not the right way forward. In response to the "clash of civilizations" scenario, China's open and inclusive culture is a solution.
news.cgtn.com/…
Is anti-vaxxing the means by which Trump recruits the insurgent army for his next coup attempt.