Saturday, June 13, 2009

The big guy on the block: a recipe for eternal war?



It is the nature of defense establishments to conjure up enemies to justify healthy funding of military budgets.

Still every so often a real enemy does appear. If not, history shows, governments go out to make one. There is nothing like an external threat to justify a buildup of national power.

Fortunately for our military, America is the big guy on the block. "We" have plenty of enemies to challenge our power, to shelter our terrorist enemies, to develop nuclear weapons to oppose us, to thumb their noses in our face.


No need to make up enemies, as the above images of fighting in Iraq show.

Indeed it may be wise to avoid more shooting wars, for example against Iran and/ or North Korea....

Afghanistan and the remnants of Iraq should do nicely.

At least for now.....

While it can be great to have a weak enemy, such as Cuba under Castro or Panama under Noriega, four toughies at once can be a bit much.

Who knows? If we use our heads, two more wars might just be avoided. Some enemies can be isolated -- or even enticed into a dialogue.

But maybe not.

Being the world's only superpower can be a recipe for eternal war.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Tiananmen : seeing close how distant people hurt



The suffering at Tiananmen was brutal.

But limited compared to the vast violence and sufferings of China's people both before and during communism.

Still it was the first time the technology of modern international media made China's suffering so immediate, so close, so graphic. Perhaps it was the first truly globalized, video enshrined human rights tragedy.

And now, some 20 years after the "Tiananmen Square Massacre," both the US and China struggle with similar problems.

America's rust belt finally crumbles some ten years after China's uncompetitive state industries were put out to pasture.


China's pensioners were unpensioned...amid fresh competition from the coastal
special export zones and the blooming of private hinterland industry.

Ironically the American auto industry finally collapses as free enterprises threatened by overseas competition seek a hope of rebirth under bankruptcy and government bailout.

America returns to regulation as China struggles with the consequences of letting the capitalist tiger out of its cage. China, too, has its re-regulation to do.

Despite its rapid modernization, China is plagued by unemployment, uneven development, uprooting of established communities, migrant workers, poor medical services, an aging population, corruption and environmental degradation
. Not exactly a mirror image of the U.S., but with problems hardly unfamiliar.

Both nations boast an expanding gap between the rich and poor. Both pump in their "stimulus packages." Both face growing political instability if deep problems stay out of control.

Two nations locked in a needy financial embrace.
Wealth, growth, boom and bust. And how to deal with possibly explosive frustration, discontent.

China bails out the American budget deficit by investing in U.S. bonds even as the prospect of declining American demands for Chinese imports potentially threatens China's economy. Even as each prepares for possible cyberwar against the other.

The United States is dragged down by its overseas military campaigns -- and by its runaway deficit expenditures, in part to please unhappy voters.

China rises as a world power but seems determined not to follow the American example of entanglement in costly military adventures.


Determined not to follow the path of decline set by
Gorbachev's liberalizations and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.


The United States has its free and increasingly wild media which encourages a fiery exaggeration of every nuance of difference. Whether it be on internet, TV or radio screaming is the order of the day.

China keeps cracking down on free expression, keeping the lid on public argument.
To damp down the resentments which massive change can exacerbate. America's model of polemical media has little appeal to an insecure government sitting on a mountain of potential public discontent.

Tiananmen Square's victims -- they died in part because China's government was determined to protect itself from the spread of both American and Soviet diseases.

Yes, in today's world "no nation is an island." We see how other people hurt.

And viruses still tend to spread.