And none of this is out of the ordinary. In his late April address to Congress, for instance, President Biden anxiously told the assembled senators and congressional representatives that "we're in a competition with China and other countries to win the twenty-first century" China and other countries are closing in fast" - and in his own strange way, Donald Trump exhibited similar worries.
What Aren't We Guarding?
Now, here's the one thing that doesn't seem to strike anyone in Congress, at the Coast Guard Academy, or at the New York Times as particularly strange: that American ships should be protecting "maritime freedom" on the other side of the globe, or that the Coast Guard should be partnering for the same. Imagine, just for a second, that Chinese naval vessels and their Coast Guard equivalent were patrolling our coasts, or parts of the Caribbean, while edging ever closer to Florida. You know just what an uproar of shock and outrage, what cries of horror would result. But it's assumed that the equivalent on the other side of the globe is a role too obvious even to bother to explain and that our leaders should indeed be crying out in horror at China's challenges to it.
It's increasingly clear that, from Japan to the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, Washington is pushing China hard, challenging its positions big time and often in a military fashion. And no, China itself, whether in the South China Sea or elsewhere, is no angel. Still, the U.S. military, while trying to leave its failed terror wars in the dust, is visibly facing off against that economically rising power in an ever more threatening manner, one that already seems too close to a possible military conflict of some sort. And you don't even want to know what sort of warfare this country's military leaders are now imagining there as, in fact, they did so long ago. (Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame only recently revealed that, according to a still-classified document, in response to the Chinese shelling of Taiwan in 1958, U.S. military leaders seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against mainland China.)
Indeed, as U.S. Navy ships are eternally sent to challenge China, challenging words in Washington only escalate as well. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks put it in March, while plugging for an ever larger Pentagon budget, "Beijing is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system" Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin and I believe that the [People's Republic of China] is the pacing challenge for the United States military."
And in that context, the U.S. Navy, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard are all "pacing" away. The latest proposed version of an always-rising Pentagon budget, for instance, now includes $5.1 billion for what's called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, "a fund created by Congress to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region." In fact, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in extra spending between 2022 and 2027 for "new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region."
And so it goes in the pandemic world of 2021.
Though seldom asked, the real question, the saddest one I think, the one that brings us back to my conversation with my friend about the world we may leave behind us, is: What aren't we guarding on this planet of ours?
A New Cold War on a Melting Planet?
Let's start with this: the old pattern of rising and falling empires should be seen as a thing of the past. It's true that, in a traditional sense, China is now rising and the U.S. seemingly falling, at least economically speaking. But something else is rising and something else is falling, too. I'm thinking, of course, about rising global temperatures that, sometime in the next five years, have a reasonable chance of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius limit (above the pre-industrial era) set by the Paris Climate Accords and what that future heat may do to the very idea of a habitable planet.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the U.S., the Atlantic hurricane season is only expected to worsen, the mega-drought in the Southwest to intensify (as fires burn ever higher in previously wetter mountainous elevations in that region), and so on. Within this century, major coastal cities in this country and China like New Orleans, Miami, Shanghai, and Hong Kong could find themselves flooded out by rising sea levels, thanks in part to the melting of Antarctica and Greenland. As for a rising China, that supposedly ultimate power of the future, even its leadership must know that parts of the north China plain, now home to 400 million people, could become quite literally uninhabitable by century's end due to heat waves capable of killing the healthy within hours.
In such a context, on such a planet, ask yourself: Is there really a future for us in which the essential relationship between the U.S. and China - the two largest greenhouse gas emitters of this moment - is a warlike one? Whether a literal war results or not, one thing should be clear enough: if the two greatest carbon emitters can't figure out how to cooperate instead of picking endless fights with each other, the human future is likely to prove grim and dim indeed. "Containing" China is the foreign-policy focus of the moment, a throwback to another age in Washington. And yet this is the very time when what truly needs to be contained is the overheating of this planet. And in truth, given human ingenuity, climate change should indeed be containable.
And yet the foreign-policy wing of the Biden administration and Congress (where Democrats are successfully infusing money into the economy under the rubric of a struggle with China, a rare subject the Republicans can go all in on) seem focused on creating a future of eternal Sino-American hostility and endless armed competition. In the already overheated world we inhabit, who could honestly claim that this is a formula for "national security"?
Returning to the conversation with my friend, I wonder why this approach to our planet doesn't seem to more people like an obvious formula for disaster. Why aren't more of us screaming at the top of our lungs about the dangers of Washington's urge to return to a world in which a "cold war" is a formula for success? It leaves me ever more fearful for the planet that, one of these days, I will indeed be leaving to others who deserved so much better.
Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt
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