{"id":9961,"date":"2011-12-08T00:57:23","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T09:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=9961"},"modified":"2011-12-08T00:57:23","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T09:27:23","slug":"the-china-%e2%80%9cthreat%e2%80%9d-rises-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=9961","title":{"rendered":"The China \u201cThreat\u201d Rises Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

In “The China ‘Treat’ Rises Again,”<\/a> Franklin Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst who exposed corruption within the Pentagon has written an analysis of the U.S. policy ‘pivot’ to Asia as driven by the interests of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC):<\/p>\n

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Military \u2013 Industrial \u2013 Congressional Complex (MICC) was left high and dry, floundering like a beached whale, because there was no superpower threat to sustain its bloated existence.\u00a0 But the MICC is a self-organizing adaptable cultural organism, and when one looks back on the 1990s, it becomes clear that the early 1990s became years of experimentation in the MICC\u2019s struggle to evolve a new threat (what the Pentagon lovingly calls a peer competitor) or a combination of threats (in Pentagonese, \u2018near-peer\u2019 competitors) to justify a continuation of high budgets and hi-tech business as usual.<\/span><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The people are sick and tired of perpetually fighting small hot wars; Syria and Iran are two small and not so small wars \u2018too far;\u2019\u00a0 and there is a real threat of marginal budget reductions is in the offing, but the Pentagon refuses to do rational contingency planning.\u00a0 So what is the MICC to do?<\/p>\n

There is only one answer: Find a peer competitor and start a new Cold War.\u00a0 That would generate the requisite amount of fear to unleash the purse strings, but at the same time, Pentagon could pump more modernization money to defense contractors (the industrial wing of the MICC) without having to pump up the operations budget (which mushrooms in hot wars).\u00a0 But what nation fits the bill?<\/p>\n

Only China \u2014 and it looks like President Obama has swallowed the MICC\u2019s bait.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the objective is to provoke a new cold war with China that will provide the need for increased military spending:<\/p>\n

It is virtually certain that these moves will be perceived by China as a dangerous encirclement, and the will, therefore, trigger some kind of countermoves by China.<\/p>\n

Voil\u00e0!\u00a0With any luck, the MICC will be off to a new cold war arms race, the sequester will be quashed, and increased spending as usual will continue unabated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In “The China ‘Treat’ Rises Again,” Franklin Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst who exposed corruption within the Pentagon has written an analysis of the U.S. policy ‘pivot’ to Asia as driven by the interests of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC): When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Military \u2013 Industrial \u2013 Congressional Complex … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The China \u201cThreat\u201d Rises Again”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[2409],"class_list":["post-9961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movements-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9961"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9963,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions\/9963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}