January 27, 2021
US bombers, says a B-52 pilot at 8:20 of this video, “are what you send over there to change people’s minds when you want to get things done.” He doesn’t say what people’s minds are to be changed to, but there are plenty of indications that “getting things done” means making people ‘over there’ more accommodating to the demands of US investors and corporations. When minds need to be changed to accept unimpeded access to foreign markets by US businesses, protection of US intellectual property, and the opening of strategic industries to US investment, the bomber is a US instrument of choice. [1]
“Basic U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific,” observes Chas Freeman, a retired US diplomat, “remain simple and straightforward:” They are: “Unimpeded access to the region’s markets, products, services, financial resources, and scientific and technological innovations.” [2]
Jacob J. Lew, a former US Treasury Secretary, and Richard Nephew, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, identify fundamental U.S. foreign policy interests as promoting free trade and creating foreign markets for U.S. goods and services. [3]
Which is to say, US foreign policy, backed by B-52 mind-changers, is guided by the goal of securing profit-making opportunities around the world for US investors and corporations. If “people over there” resist, well, the United States has plenty of B-52s to change minds and get things done.
The Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal informs us, plans to rely on B-52s “to prepare for the wars of the future.” [4] This suggests that US planners have already queued up a series of foreign aggressions, calling to mind the future wars once planned in Berlin (against a string of European countries) and Tokyo (against China, as well as the East Asian and Pacific colonial possessions of the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands.) Imagine the outcry, entirely warranted, were China’s Global Times to run a story under the headline, For Wars of the Future, PLA Looks to Hypersonic Missiles. Were China openly planning wars of the future, as the United States is, and crowing about them in its newspapers, it would be marked, quite justifiably, as a menace to humanity. The logic applies no less strongly to the United States.
China, it is no secret, will be the target of, if not a future war, then at least unrelenting US military pressure. True, China is very accommodating of US businesses—to a point. US business people lust after the vast Chinese market and cheap Chinese labor, and Beijing, in large measure, accommodates them. But at the same time, US investors and the CEOs of major US corporations complain bitterly about high Chinese import tariffs, competition from state-owned enterprises, and demands that foreign investors take on Chinese partners. [5] And some strategic industries remain closed to US investment.
In an effort to change minds over there, the United States has, since 2004, maintained a “continuous bomber presence” on the verges of Chinese airspace, including over waters claimed by China. [6]
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal featured a story about a B-52 crew “lumbering 100 miles off China’s coast”—part of the continuous bomber presence Washington maintains to “demonstrate the US military’s long reach.” [7] This is an anodyne way of saying that the Pentagon is the ultima ratio regnum of the United States’ global economic empire, as the historian Arno J. Mayer once put it. When the crew was warned by Chinese air traffic control to turn back, it replied with a scripted response: it was conducting lawful military activities in international airspace. Michael R. Gordon, the author of the piece, explained that one of the goals of the Pentagon’s continuous bomber presence is “to preserve” the US “role as the region’s pre-eminent military power.” Gordon, of course, didn’t tarry over the question of why the United States needs to be the region’s pre-eminent military power, perhaps because asking the question would evoke the parallel questions: Why did Germany feel the need to be the pre-eminent military power in Europe, and why did Imperial Japan, like the United States today, pursue military pre-eminence in the Indo-Pacific region?
One would assume that an 18-year long unending US bomber presence on the margins of Chinese airspace might be considered an act of intimidation. Outside of US doctrine, it clearly is. Inside, it is not. That’s because, as the historian Marilyn B. Young once explained, US doctrine rests on “a set of axioms … as unquestionable as Euclid’s,” that purify every US action, no matter how heinous or despotic, and vilify every enemy action, no matter how benevolent. “We can summarize these axioms as follows,” wrote Young.
“The intentions of the United States are always good. It is possible that in pursuit of good ends, mistakes will be made. But the basic goodness of US intentions cannot ever be questioned. The intentions of the enemies of the United States are bad. It is possible that in the pursuit of bad ends, good things will seem to happen. But the basic badness of enemy intentions cannot ever by questioned.” [8]
Hence, an unremitting US bomber presence over the South China and East China seas, and open discourse in a major US newspaper about future wars, can only be good, because these actions are American. But any action, even remotely similar, carried out by a designated enemy, must be evil.
If proof of this is required, consider that on the same day it ran its jingoist encomium to B-52 warriors and the aircraft they fly, the Wall Street Journal also ran a story under the headline “China Flies Warplanes Near Taiwan in Show of Force, Promoting U.S. Warning.”
The story revealed that:
“China sent strategic bombers, jet fighters and a turboprop on 13 sorties into Taiwan’s southwestern air-defense identification zone on Saturday and followed up with 15 fighter and turboprop sorties into roughly the same area the next day, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. On both days, the Taiwanese military responded by deploying aircraft, issuing radio warnings and tracking the Chinese planes with air-defense missile systems.” [9]
While the newspaper presented the projection of US strategic bombers into China’s air-defense identification zone as a legitimate exercise of “upholding the right of international passage in disputed airspace”—and not an act of intimidation—China’s deployment of strategic bombers within its own sovereign territory elicited implied censure and a rebuke from Washington. “U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price voiced concern over what it called continuing Chinese attempts ‘to intimidate its neighbors, including Taiwan.’” [10] Washington followed up by admonishing Beijing to cease its military pressure against the Chinese island.
Congruent with its role in enforcing an ideological orthodoxy consistent with the interests of the US state’s corporate-based management committee, the Journal described Chinese, but not, US bombers, as warplanes. Instead, B-52s–the instruments by which US imperialism has spread its dark wings over the lands of oppressed people whose minds needed to be changed to accept their continued oppression–were described only in neutral terms; for example, as military aircraft carrying out lawful activities.
The narrative on behalf of US imperial objectives didn’t stop there. Taiwan, in the official discourse of the US state, and the unofficial discourse of its public relations arm, the US news media, is a country separate and sovereign from China, rather than what it truly is: a part of China which has never declared independence. China can’t invade, threaten to invade, intimidate, or exert military pressure on, China.
The Chinese island is important to Beijing for two reasons. Washington intervened in China’s civil war in 1950, to prevent communist forces gaining control of the island and unifying the country. This was an act equivalent to its contemporaneous intervention in the Korean civil war to prevent communist forces there from revolutionizing and unifying that country. China, just as much as Korea, remains divided today, as a consequence of US imperialism.
There is also a strategic motive to recover Taiwan. As the writer John MacDonald explains, the island “sits in the middle of a chain of small islands from Japan in the north to the Philippines in the south.” These islands, referred to by US military strategists as ‘the first island chain,’ are either directly or indirectly under US military control. “Together they block China’s access to the Pacific.” A hostile force—in this case, the United States—through its control of the first island chain, has the capability of bottling up China, denying it access to sea lanes—a capability that would allow the Pentagon to impose a naval blockade on China in a time of war. “Taiwan’s return to the mainland would open a crucial break in the wall.” [11] Today, US Marines train to operate from these islands with the explicit goal of bottling up China’s fleet [12], a malign and destabilizing project which the Wall Street Journal has documented on a number of occasions, but prefers to describe in strictly neutral terms. [13] Malignity and destabilization are terms in US propaganda practice that are reserved to describe the actions of official enemies, in order to justify malign and destabilizing actions against them.
Who, then, is intimidating who? Who is the aggressor, and who is aggressed upon?
In the upside-down world of US doctrine, US acts of intimidation against China are lawful exercises of upholding international law. China’s efforts to recover its territory are acts of intimidating a neighbor.
1. Another method of choice is the use of sanctions, economic warfare, and financial isolation to immiserate foreign populations, with the foreseeable consequence of producing widespread malnutrition and disease.
2. “The United States and a Resurgent Asia,” Remarks prepared for delivery to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.), 14 April 2020.
3. Jacob J. Lew and Richard Nephew, “The use and misuse of economic statecraft: How Washington is abusing its financial might,” Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2018.
4. Michael R. Gordon, “For Wars of the Future, Pentagon Looks to Distant Past: The B-52,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2021.
5. James T. Areddy, “Xi Jinping aims to rebrand China—as an importer,” The Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2018.
6. Jeremy Page and Gordon Lubold, “U.S. bomber flies over waters claimed by China,” The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2015.
7. Gordon.
8. Marilyn B. Young. The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990. Harper Perennial. 1991. p.27.
9. Chun Han Wong, “China Flies Warplanes Near Taiwan in Show of Force, Promoting U.S. Warning,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2021.
10. Ibid.
11. John MacDonald. When Globalization Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. p. 239.
12. Gordon; Page and Gordon.
13. See for example Gordon and Page.
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