JUNE 18, 2023
Top Ten China Hawks Most Likely to Start a War with Beijing
War between China and the U.S. would spell doom for humanity. That’s because once the Chinese sink those sitting ducks called U.S. aircraft carriers, hotheads in the pentagon will want to bomb Chinese cities. No one will stop them. And then things turn nuclear. To those geniuses who say, well, we’ve basically been fighting Russia for 15 months and it hasn’t gone radioactive, I have only four words: it ain’t over yet.
Official Washington regards China as Enemy Numero Uno, and war fever has addled our rulers’ brains. You doubt our pentagon contains nitwits who believe we can bomb Chinese cities with impunity? Well look no farther than a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins back in November, citing military sources. That was when president Joe Biden tamped down war hysteria by meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali and openly reconfirming U.S. support of the One China policy.
That’s the policy that has, to the annoyance of first-class dingbat warmongers everywhere, kept the peace since the 1970s, one that Biden had previously undermined with his four pronouncements that the U.S. would support Taiwan militarily, should its possible declaration of independence cause a hullaballoo with Beijing. Fortunately, back then while at the G20, Biden appeared not to have been reading the New Yorker, for if he had, he would have encountered Filkins’ long takeout on Taiwan, of the sort that could encourage the president’s worst instincts, a summary in which military sources were quoted, discussing possible U.S. bombings of Chinese cities.
Such assaults would quickly involve nuclear weapons, but the article omitted that. Indeed, the report reflected the delusion of military planners that they could perpetrate such a monstrosity with impunity. Nowhere did Filkins mention that war with China over Taiwan entails tens of millions of dead Americans and the same number of dead Chinese. The article did not even discuss a nuclear contretemps, reflecting the wishful belief of its official U.S. sources that they could contain a fight with Beijing, and any resort to nuclear war would be limited. This, in turn, reflects the hallucination that limited nuclear wars are possible and winnable and that low-yield nuclear devices would not lead AT ONCE to the high-yield variety. Thus readers ingested a deadly concoction of mendacious omissions and outright untruths and could have come away thinking, yes, maybe we could beat China – when in reality there would be nothing but losers on both sides.
Happily, the U.S. president didn’t appear to have read that issue of the New Yorker, but things have only slid downhill since November. The ridiculous spy balloon hubbub derailed U.S. diplomacy, while its idiotic grandstanding by American politicos profoundly offended Beijing. Despite minor breakthroughs here and there since, we’re still in a deep, dark morass, where the Chinese defense chief, Li Shangfu won’t answer U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s phone calls. Given how crowded the China Sea is with American and Chinese battleships and the good chance of hostile encounters, this is a recipe for disaster.
Adding to this cloud of gloom, came the horrific news in March from former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien, that the U.S. might bomb Taiwan’s semi-conductor factories rather than let them fall into Beijing’s hands. O’Brien’s hints at such an attack, bolstered by a Massachusetts Dem House member Seth Moulton also hypothesizing it in May and by Trump defense official Elbridge Colby mentioning it to Filkins, thus verified Henry Kissinger’s alleged quip, “To be an enemy of the U.S. is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Needless to say, Taiwan expressed unhappiness about this threat to wipe out its vital industry, but still didn’t nix the Biden regime’s plan in May to send it $500 million-worth of weapons.
Throughout all of this, pentagon generals and congressional China hawks beat the drums for war. As Kentucky GOP senator Rand Paul lamented in June at an American Conservative conference, much of the GOP wants war with the 5000-year-old Asian civilization. If this article seems to put Republicans under a microscope that’s because, where China’s concerned, the GOP is most outlandish. Democratic Sinophobia generally pales by comparison, but don’t think they lack gusto for war. It’s just Ukraine where they want a no-fly zone, not Taiwan – yet. And there is one glaring exception, but we’ll get to her later.
As for military jingoism, many high-ranking officers have taken to the media of late to rattle their sabers at China. We had admiral John Aquilino in The Hill June 6 saying regarding China that “For the United States it’s the synchronization integrated efforts of the entire joint force under sea, on the sea, above the sea in space and cyberspace. So if anyone were to choose to take on the United States, they’re going to get the full Monty.” If China attacked Taiwan, it would be “taking on the United States,” and get “the full Monty.” We also had a four-star, Mike Minihan, writing his subordinates on January 27, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
On the civilian side, we had the GOP’s creation of the House Select Committee on China, majority leader Kevin “Free Taiwan” McCarthy’s baby and a forum for spreading delusions about the communist menace – from phony alarms about being spied on via weather balloons and Cuban command centers, to Beijing sending vast numbers of its citizens across the border, fifth columnists, along with fentanyl, no doubt to dope up unsuspecting Amuricans. Then, rubbing more salt in the gaping U.S.-China wounds, McCarthy met April 5 with Taiwan president Tsai In-wen in Simi Valley, California. Beijing protested, to no avail.
But McCarthy is by no means the worst of the China hawks. Back in March, the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, Wisconsin Republican Mike “Sinophobic Fever” Gallagher, described U.S.-China relations as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.” Existential? Well, if we go to war, then yes, it sure will be existential, but barring that, China remains our chief trading partner, well ahead of the second and third ranked ones, Canada and Mexico, no matter how much hogwash the dimwits on the select committee parrot about fentanyl, human rights abuses (this from a country with over two million people incarcerated and that made torture its explicit policy during the Bush years), trade theft and whatever else their fertile though meager brains can come up with.
Beijing is also Washington’s second biggest creditor, holding over $800 billion in U.S. Treasuries – though China moved swiftly to remedy that once U.S. insults heated up in 2022, by dumping them as fast as possible and buying gold. China’s holding of U.S. Treasuries shrank last year by $175.85 billion. That’s a lot of Treasuries to ditch. “Demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing,” wrote Pepe Escobar in the Cradle April 27. “Trillions of U.S. dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.” In other words, we Americans could wind up in boiling hot, hyper-inflationary water.
Part of this threat to the American standard of living (ho, ho! That’s the standard that ignores the two in three Americans who could not cough up $400 for an emergency), is China’s de-dollarization. But it’s not just China. Everybody’s doing it, because the imbeciles in the white house, going back to the Clinton years, weaponized the dollar by sanctioning 29 percent of the global economy. China, Russia and the Global South are desperate to shed dollars and have begun trading in their own currencies. Indeed, the reason Beijing currently snubs defense secretary Austin is U.S. sanctions on China’s defense secretary, Li Shangfu. Beijing says no meeting between the two will happen until those sanctions go away. How do the great minds in the Biden white house respond to this life-and-death dilemma? With stubborn, macho stupidity. Sanctions are sacred. They will never be lifted! You think “never” sounds unconvincingly long? Ask a Cuban.
The Top Ten
So who are the top ten China hawks most likely to get us into a war with Beijing? (Actually, there are lots more than ten, but space is limited.) Well, clearly Gallagher is one. Beijing has already expressed its intense displeasure with his committee’s Sinophobic antics. GOP senator Ted “Pop the Spy Balloon” Cruz is another. On Face the Nation, “Cruz suggested that swifter and more decisive action [on the so-called spy balloon] would have sent a stronger message to Chinese president Xi Jinping and the Peoples Republic of China,” CBS reported February 5. What could have been more decisive than shooting that menacing balloon down off the coast of South Carolina was left unclear. Maybe Cruz meant the air force should have scrambled fighter jets when this wayward weather balloon first floated over Montana. Or maybe Cruz thought we should have launched a fleet of our own balloons to assault Chinese airspace. Never-mind that both Washington and Beijing have all the space spy satellites they need to see everything each other does, or that the U.S. first launched spy balloons back under Eisenhower. “More broadly,” Cruz pontificated, “I think this entire episode telegraphed weakness to Xi and the Chinese government.” Well, if Cruz ever makes it into the white house, God help us, because this trigger-happy senator won’t be telegraphing anything like reasonableness, consdiering that could be taken for weakness. If any spy balloons menace Amuricans on his watch, a Cruz white house will likely launch something and it won’t be peaceful.
Another menace is Florida GOP senator Marco “Capitalism Didn’t Change China” Rubio. I guess if you ignore the nearly 850 million people China lifted out of poverty in 25 years, the biggest such eradication of misery in human history, you could say that Chinese use of capitalistic tools (in tandem with communist ones) didn’t change it. But nearly 850 million people is kinda a lot. Especially considering that here in the U.S., the opposite has been going on, with $50 trillion transferred from ordinary people to the top one percent in recent decades. As our middle-class standard of living collapsed, China was busy eradicating poverty.
On March 2, Rubio spoke on the senate floor on the weighty theme of the continuing communist apostasy of China, droning on at length, accusing China of becoming a superpower at U.S. expense. This charge, beloved by China hawks, of course ignores the simple truth that decades ago U.S. corporations salivated at the prospect of cheap Chinese labor and couldn’t wait to shift production out of the U.S. with its more expensive workers. Nary a peep from Rubio about that inconvenient fact, because mentioning it would, by Rubio’s logic, entail accusing corporate America of treason – something no self-preserving, donor-dependent politico wants to do.
Instead, Rubio bloviated that China is “far more dangerous than the Soviet Union ever was,” because of its influence in American society. “They have an army of unpaid lobbyists,” he said. Well, those lobbyists better get off their behinds and do some work, ‘cause last I checked, China’s getting bashed on the regular in the U.S. media and by self-promoting U.S. politicians. The anti-China atmosphere has become so poisonous that ethnic Chinese scientists are abandoning their American citizenship and moving to China in surprising numbers. We can thank the mighty intellects in congress for this brain-drain.
Missouri GOP senator Josh “Fist-Bump” Hawley puts up stiff competition for Rubio in the rage-against-Beijing escapades. On June 2, ahead of the senate vote on his amendment to the debt deal, to raise tariffs on Chinese imports, he ranted about the jobs lost to China. So it’s logical that this senator, who did not see fit to lay blame where it was due – on corporate America – which can only be called the mission of a nincompoop, had introduced a bill in March called “Ending Normal Trade Relations with China.” Just what we don’t need here in Amurica, an end to the few things resembling normalcy – though what would you expect from an ambitious, far-right senator who gave a fist-bump to the January 6 rioters at the capitol? Normal is not something people like Hawley appreciate or aspire to. Higher office is what they aspire to and if they can get there by stirring up hysteria over the yellow peril, they will do so.
Then there’s Arkansas GOP senator Tom “Invade Mexico!” Cotton, given to speeches about sending drones into Russian airspace and waging war on Mexico or its drug cartels, whichever, I suppose, we can bomb first. Back on March 30, Cotton introduced the “Not One More Inch or Acre Act,” a bill aiming to prevent any Chinese citizen or company from owning American land. This odd focus on Chinese land purchases is something of a GOP fixation. It’s quite the bugaboo. Radical right-wing Florida governor Ron DeSantis maunders on about it too, and how the Chinese Communist Party is not welcome in the Sunshine State. But Cotton puts up stiff competition regarding who can froth most insanely about this hooey.
“For decades the Chinese Communist Party has been gobbling up American farmland and real-estate,” Cotton hyperventilated in March, not too subtly stoking cow country terror of devious Reds. “These purchases serve as outposts for Chinese espionage campaigns against American businesses and military bases…everything they [the CCP] do is as our adversary.” Did you get the message? Those commies have bought up half the country, are snooping around our bases, have installed espionage tech in our horse barns and if you don’t stand up to them now, like Cotton is doing, in a few months they could have all of us singing the Internationale.
And don’t forget Florida GOP senator Rick “Ditch Social Security!” Scott. Back in June 2020 he jumped on the bash-China bandwagon with quite a thud, claiming China tried to sabotage a covid vaccine. When Beijing demanded proof, Scott, quite uncomfortably, had nothing to say. Fast forward to March 16, 2023, and we have Scott introducing a package of five bills “to hold Communist China accountable.” On April 27, Scott, rolling out his package aimed at China, thumped his chest and squawked “We know Communist China will stop at nothing to exploit American markets…its top targets are our investors, markets, supply chains and jobs. I continue to strongly advocate…to cut ties with Communist China.” If that doesn’t convince Beijing its dealing with hostile half-wits and that it better take its business elsewhere, nothing will. Incidentally this same press release brags – without a single word about American corporate culpability for sending millions of jobs to China – that Scott has been verbally assaulting China since 2018. Although total decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies would sink both nations, somehow this realization has not penetrated the very scanty gray matter in Scott’s skull.
So that’s a small, representative gang of Sinophobes from the senate. Don’t worry, there are many more. But it’s time to move on to the House, where we got lotsa GOP members riding the “Attack China” hobby-horse. Indeed, Indiana’s Jim “Super Tweeter” Banks boasted back in March that he has tweeted about China 585 times. And no, for this article I did not go back and read them all. That is a level of masochism to which no journalist should be asked to stoop. Just reading his press releases was enough.
Naturally, Banks is on the China select committee, pontificating on March 31 that “Democrats are afraid to stand up to China on twitter…Their fake China bill doesn’t just fail to counter China…when Chairman Xi read the bill, he breathed a sigh of relief.” Banks’ familiarity with Xi’s breathing may strike some as peculiar, but never-mind, you get the picture. Those limp, Democratic chickens aren’t pulling the wool over Banks’ eyes when it come to the wily, nefarious Chinese and their sighs of relief. Nor would they have to; those eyes are firmly shut, the better to make stuff up about what Chairman Xi is doing.
Proving yet again that female representatives can emit as much rubbish as their male counterparts, there was New York’s Elise “From Moderate to MAGA” Stefanik on Hannity radio last fall, intoning that containing China is our generation’s greatest geopolitical challenge. “$28 million of funds we know of went through NIH, CDC and DoD to Chinese Communist entities for research and development,” the GOP representative hyperventilated. Well duh. This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a nine-year-old’s familiarity with history over the past three decades. After all, the U.S. and China are trading partners and as such have engaged in many fraternal exchanges, which now, these GOP congressional opportunists paint in alarming, sinister colors. “China is not a partner,” Stefanik instructed us. “They are not an ally. They are not a friend. This is an adversary.” Well, if Beijing wasn’t before reading this list of insults, it sure would be afterward. The GOP’s policy of constant threats and affronts directed at China may or may not get them votes. That is debatable. But it most certainly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then on April 26, Stefanik and Gallagher introduced the Countering CCP Drones Act, which prohibits Da-Jiang Innovations from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure. “DJI drones pose the national security threat of TikTok, but with wings,” Stefanik informed us. For those who were skeptical of the TikTok fulminations to begin with, this is not the most convincing argument, but it shows, yet again, that these congress critters never stop and that if the next president is a Republican, it will be a miracle if we avoid nuclear war with China. (We’re not doing too well with the current white house resident either, but that’s another story. Let’s just leave him for now, coping with a supposed, secret Chinese spy base in Cuba, a fiction reported by the Wall Street Journal June 8, but denied by Havana’s vice minister of foreign affairs, Carlos F. de Cossio and indeed even by the pentagon and white house.)
Another GOP member of the House select committee to maul China is Andy “Shoot that Commie Balloon” Barr from Kentucky. On March 23, he took secretary of state Antony Blinken and by extension the entire Biden administration to task over the terrifying mission of a Chinese weather balloon. “Talk is cheap. Deterrence requires force,” Barr railed. Shortly after this, Blinken cancelled his trip to China, so one could argue that the absurd balloon fracas took U.S.-Chinese diplomacy hostage at the precise moment when we, and the world, need it more than ever. As aforementioned, currently defense secretary Austin can’t even get his Chinese counterpart on the phone. That’s also related to the precipitous decline in diplomacy, since the Biden gang no doubt fears that dropping sanctions on Li Shangfu would make it look weak. The GOP would go ape if a Dem president rescinded sanctions on a Chinese bigwig. But being scared to end sanctions is a lot weaker than failing to what diplomacy requires. So sanctions are a big stumbling block, but they occur in a diplomatic ecosystem rendered toxic by the ravings of congressmen like Barr.
Lastly, let us not forget Washington Republican Dan “Stop Socialism” Newhouse, also on the select committee, who back in February announced that he “led his House colleagues in the introductions of the Prohibition of Agricultural Land for the People’s Republic of China Act.” In his press release, Newhouse cited the Chinese “threat to American democracy” and our “great power struggle with the CCP.” Numerous other legislators were quoted, all backing Newhouse that the CCP’s sneaky, previously cited plot to buy Amurican land is the first step in threatening the U.S. food supply. Can’t get much more malicious than that, can you? But Newhouse is on the case: he’s yammered about protecting the American food supply from Chinese influence literally for years.
But what is this so-called “great power struggle?” The U.S. has roughly 800 foreign military bases. China has one. In recent decades the U.S. has started numerous wars. China has not started any. In its history, the U.S. has conquered territory and countries from Cuba to Hawaii to the Philippines. China has not done so. Washington conducts much of its foreign policy at gunpoint. Beijing does not. In other words, the U.S. is warlike and China is peaceful. But this, as Chinese leaders have noted, does not mean Beijing won’t defend itself – which is precisely what the American weapons manufacturing oligarchs who own the congress and white house want to compel China to do, thus provoking a war. And who are the useful idiots in this particular provocation? GOP lawmakers and white house neoconservatives.
Ror how we got into this mess, you can thank the…
China Hawks Emeritus (Still Able to Inflict Much Damage)
Of course, any bash-Beijing list must include former House speaker and China Hawk Emerita Nancy “My Husband’s Stocks Are His Business” Pelosi, whose ground-breaking work preparing the world for terminal nuclear war over Taiwan we must never forget. Back in August, Pelosi made her Freedom Flight to Taiwan, a shameless stunt that poisoned the already toxic relations between Beijing and Washington. It may have bamboozled credulous ignoramuses back in the so-called homeland, but originally the pentagon didn’t want her to go. The biggest backers for this idiotic adventure were – you guessed it – congressional Republicans. Pelosi amped up her supposedly heroic defiance by speculating that military chieftains didn’t want her to go because the People’s Liberation Army might shoot down her plane. More likely, sane pentagon officials foresaw nothing but headaches as a result of this unseemly performance, though just to be cautious, Pelosi arrived in Taipei in the dead of night – slipping in and out of the country in a surreptitious manner befitting one well aware of doing something wildly inflammatory, and, to understate it massively, irresponsible.
Pelosi’s rabid hostility to China has deep roots. She called the quite bloody, brutal and violent Hong Kong riots of 2020 “beautiful.” But long before that, she supported the failed Tiananmen square color revolution very aggressively. In 1991, she visited the square and, in an act of brazen provocation and hypocrisy, unfurled a banner that read: “To those who died for democracy in China.” I say hypocrisy because, while some died at Beijing’s hands when suppressing the protest, that’s a minute portion of the multitudes killed by Washington across the globe, explicitly to stifle democracy – as it did with coups and slaughters in Chile in 1973, Indonesia in 1965-66, Iran in 1953 and other nations too numerous to list here.
If a Chinese-American war does break out, its few, desperate, irradiated, cave-dwelling survivors across the globe can take solace from the thought that a U.S. congresswoman thought it was worth risking starving five billion people to death via nuclear winter, just to make a point about her so-called democracy.
Any list of China Hawks Emeritus must also include former Trump secretary of state Mike “Sinophobic Rampage” Pompeo. The former CIA director and non-presidential candidate (phew!) pontificated some months back that the Biden regime’s hesitation to shoot down the so-called spy balloon showed weakness and “encouraged bad guys.” That would be balloons from Russia and Iran, I guess. In any event, Pompeo is no slouch in the provoke-China department. Just look at his March 2022 visit to Taiwan. Pompeo jetted into the island presumably to show solidarity with separatists, thus dousing the U.S.-Chinese diplomatic dumpster fire with gasoline. He followed up this little tourist stop with another in September 2022 – where provoking China’s concerned, I guess Pompeo just couldn’t get enough of it and its headlines – in which he hectored listeners about how “China’s aggressive conduct, diplomatically, militarily, economically…brought those who prefer peace and commerce even more closely together.” Who prefer peace? Ho, ho. Pompeo may preen that he’s a peacemaker, but then you, reading this, may also be the king of England.
Lastly, let us not forget two deceptively minor figures who did so much to get us into the current mess and who could return to power, should an indicted Trump win the white house in 2024: Former Trump national security advisor Matt Pottinger, now at the Hoover Institution and former Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro. Pottinger, a little-known former Wall Street Journal reporter was intimidated as a journalist, according to the Washington Post in April 2020, by the Chinese police – arguably one of the worst mistakes they ever made. It could easily have contributed to his rabid hatred of the 5000-year-old civilization. Indeed, Trump’s national security advisor, H.R. McMasters said of Pottinger that he is “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the cold war, which is the competitive approach to China.” In short, Pottinger bequeathed us policies that envenomed relations with China, whose leaders “Pottinger believed, were engaging in a massive cover-up and a ‘psychological warfare’ operation to obscure the origins of the virus and deflect blame.” Covid, according to Pottinger, was likely a Chinese creation. Navarro concurred, claiming that it was an “open question” whether China had deliberately created Covid-19 and that the “virus was a product of the Chinese Communist Party.”
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So there you have it – a mere sampling of the politicians loony enough to get us into a war with China. In fact, such a terminal war is GOP policy, which has Republicans marching in lockstep toward nuclear Armageddon. You think this is hyperbole? Hello? Hostile rhetoric leads to hostile action, action leads to attacks, attacks lead to counter-attacks – and then we’re all sunk. Just like our great big aircraft carriers will be, in the Pacific, if someone doesn’t put the brakes on Washington’s misbegotten approach to Beijing.
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