Archive for the ‘New cold war of the 21st century’ Category


Political Photo-Poems

French-Nuclear-Sub-1024x681
Nuclear weapons do not
make war between states
impossible, implausible, or unwinnable
They only make wars
between Great Powers ‘cold’
rather than ‘hot’ shooting wars
Even if ‘cold’,
a cold war is a war
just the same!
Cold wars kill
they maim and silence
they produce orphans
and widows and refugees
They are uber-expensive
They are a great waste
They should be stopped even
if states want to wage them
just the same!
©bongmallongamendoza 28/30 jul 2018

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Trump trade war: May and China fire warning shots
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-trade-war-may-china-fire-warning-shots-1665117?utm_source=email

 

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I thought Trump just wants to make a deal, not make war!

So what gives?

Methinks, the merchants of death are making Trump do this.

But this is self-defeating and counter-productive!

Since the truckers of death are not necessarily independent of, or far removed from, the merchants of innocuous commodities!

Take McDonell Douglas Corporation, an American company, which later on gobbled by The Boeing Company.

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McDonnell Douglas Corporation | American company | Britannica.com
https://www.britannica.com/to…/McDonnell-Douglas-Corporation

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So McDonnell (as Douglas Aircraft) produced the famous DC series of commercial aviation planes, used its expertise to convert the DC-3, the world’s first commercial airliner, into military use as the C-47.

This should not come as a surprise since Donald W. Douglas (1892-1981), Douglas Aircraft’s founder, designed the Cloudster, the first aerodynamically streamlined plane, and founded his company to fill an order for three of the planes for the U.S. Navy.

During the war Douglas contributed 29,000 warplanes, one-sixth of the U.S. airborne fleet. After the war the company continued to dominate the commercial air routes with its new DC-6 and in 1953 brought out its most advanced piston-engined airliner, the DC-7, whose range made possible nonstop coast-to-coast service. With the development of commercial jets, however, Douglas began to lag behind Boeing. It was because of its deteriorating financial condition in the 1960s that it sought a merger with McDonnell.

Under its founder James S. McDonnell (1899–1980), that company grew up quickly during World War II and became a major defense supplier. It designed the world’s first carrier-based jet fighter and went on to produce such widely used jet fighters as the F-4 Phantom, the A-4 Skyhawk, the F-15 Eagle, and the F-18 Hornet. The company also manufactured launch vehicles and cruise missiles. In 1984 it purchased Hughes Helicopters Inc. from the estate of Howard Hughes. In the 1970s the company began diversifying with the acquisition of companies engaged in data processing, satellite communications, information services, and the manufacture of electronic devices.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s resulted in a major contraction of U.S. defense industries. In the wave of business consolidations and mergers that followed, McDonnell Douglas was acquired by The Boeing Company.

And what does The Boeing Company produce?

AeroWeb | Boeing (Rockwell) B-1B Lancer

AeroWeb | Boeing CH–47/MH-47 Chinook

AeroWeb | Boeing P–8A Poseidon

But not only those nasty things that help politicians and military leaders command their underlings to kill people especially from afar and with almost no warning.

What else does The Boeing Company produce and sell?

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boeing-Company

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Boeing Company, American aerospace company—the world’s largest—that is the foremost manufacturer of commercial jet transports. It is also a leading producer of military aircraft, helicopters, space vehicles, and missiles, a standing significantly enhanced with the company’s acquisition of the aerospace and defense units of Rockwell International Corporation in 1996 and its merger with McDonnell Douglas Corporation in 1997. Formerly Boeing Airplane Company, the firm assumed its current name in 1961 to reflect its expansion into fields beyond aircraft manufacture. Headquarters were in Seattle until 2001, when Boeing relocated to Chicago.

Boeing Company’s constituent business units are organized around three main groups of products and services—commercial airplanes, military aircraft and missiles, and space and communications.

Boeing manufactures seven distinct families of commercial aircraft, which are assembled in two facilities—Renton and Everett—in Washington state and one facility in California. The Renton plant builds the narrow-body Boeing 737 and formerly built the 757 aircraft (discontinued in 2004), while the wide-body Boeing 767 and 777 aircraft and a limited number of the largely discontinued 747s are assembled at the Everett plant. The 787 aircraft are assembled at the Everett plant and at a facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Boeing Business Jets, a joint venture of Boeing and General Electric Co., makes and markets business jets based on the 737-700 airliner as well as VIP versions of the 747, 777, and 787 airliners.

The company’s military-related activities are centred on the design, manufacture, and support of fighter aircraft, bombers, transports, helicopters, and missiles. Its products include, among others, the F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet, and AV-8 Harrier fighters; the C-17 Globemaster III airlifter; the AH-64 Apache series of attack helicopters; the CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter; and the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft, based on the 767. Boeing contributes to the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air-superiority stealth fighter and the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

In partnership with Bell Helicopter Textron, it builds the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, and, with United Technologies’ Sikorsky division, it made the RAH-66 Comanche armed reconnaissance helicopter.

The company also builds the Harpoon antiship missile, the air-launched Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM), and the air-launched cruise missile (ALCM).

In the space and communications sector, Boeing produces the Delta family of launch vehicles; the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS), an in-space solid-rocket booster; and rocket engines for Delta launchers and other vehicles. It participates in processing, ground operation, and training activities for the U.S. space shuttle fleet through United Space Alliance, a joint venture with Lockheed Martin Corporation.

As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) prime contractor for the International Space Station, Boeing leads an industry team comprising most major U.S. aerospace companies and hundreds of smaller suppliers and integrates the work of ISS participants from non-U.S. countries. Its involvement in commercial space development includes partnerships in the multinational Sea Launch Company and in the Teledesic consortium formed to build a satellite-based, Internet-like telecommunications service.

It also makes satellites for the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS).

In 2016 Boeing employed a workforce of about 150,500 people in 65 countries and 27 U.S. states.

1FireandFury

It seems that many modern-day technologies started as death technologies.

But not so!

The spear, a weapon that kills, is also the javelin thrown by well-contured athletes of the ancient Olympic Games, the Panhellinic Games of Ancient Greece, originally a festival in honor of Zeus.

It appears that human beings have been producing dual purpose tools since then.

What is quite different now is that the weapons of death have been developing across the centuries to enable alleged combatants in the comfort of airconditioned ‘fortresses’ thousands of miles away to kill other people, designated as adversaries or enemies, without warning and without the normal declaration of war.

I admire the bravery and courage of these arm-chair warriors!

But wait, the merchants of death need to wrack up more sales to keep the economy going, to keep people employed, to get representatives of the people elected and re-elected because they keep on bringing home the bacon by way of more defense contracts for the home district.

So why limit warfare against pip-squeak non-state actors like al-Qaeda and IS?

Why not bring the war to the rogue states: Iran, Iraq, Taliban’s Afghanistan, Yemen, North Korea, and the like?

But that still be inadequate for the merchants’ purposes.

So bring the war to the doorsteps of the great powers like China…and the Russian Federation!

Meanwhile, the same merchants of death will continue to produce and improve and innovate on innocuous products like commercial ailiners and GPS.

What else is new then?

What would be new is if the TRUMPy gets his way.

Everybody makes a deal to make money.

Nobody makes war.

I therefore nominate the Orange Clown in the North for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Further on, I propose that the Nobel Committee revoke the same award from former US President Barack Obama, for being a peace hypocrite and a murderous war-monger!

 

Barack Obama


During the first day of the 3rd Katipunan Conference sponsored by the Strategic Studies Program (with which I am a fellow) yesterday, I asserted that a new cold war is on in the Indo Asia Pacific Theater.  And in fact, I am just echoing the views of very young and very junior scholars I have read way back in 2015 like Hendricks (2015)

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What was a Chinese military plane doing in South Korea’s special air defence zone for 4 hours?
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-was-chinese-military-plane-doing-south-koreas-special-air-defence-zone-4-fours-1664076?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=%2Fwhat-was-chinese-military-plane-doing-south-koreas-special-air-defence-zone-4-fours-1664076

 

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What’s going on in our neck of the woods?

A new cold war, that is!

In the Indo Asia Pacific theater with China and the US as the main protagonists.

 

An appropriate (even if old) theory that could help better understand the new East Asian strategic environment exists.  The Power Transition theory is a theory about the cyclical nature of war, in relation to power (of states) in international relations.   Created by A.F.K. Organski, and originally published in his textbook, World Politics (1958), contemporary power transition theory describes international politics as a hierarchy, with different degrees of power between states. The objective of the theory is to investigate the cyclic condition of wars, and how transition of power in terms of machtpolitik affect the occurrence of these wars.

 

The principal predictive power of the theory is in the likelihood of war and the stability of alliances.  War is most likely, of longest duration and greatest magnitude, when a challenger (a revisionist power; one of the great powers) to the dominant power (the global hegemon) enters into approximate parity with the dominant state and is dissatisfied with the existing system. Similarly, alliances are most stable when the parties to the alliance are satisfied with the system structure. This leads to the view that when the balance of power is unstable (i.e. one or two nations have taken a dominant role in geopolitics), the likelihood of war is greater.

 

According to Organski:

 

An even distribution of political, economic, and military capabilities between contending groups of states is likely to increase the probability of war; peace is preserved best when there is an imbalance of national capabilities between disadvantaged and advantaged nations; the aggressor will come from a small group of dissatisfied strong countries; and it is the weaker, rather than the stronger; power that is most likely to be the aggressor.

 

 

Using Organski’s theory, China can be characterized as a ‘revisionist’ power dissatisfied with the existing balance of forces in the world as well as in Asia.  Meanwhile, the United States is a ‘status quo’ power (or a stand patter) working to preserve its hegemony.  It is joined by other status quo powers like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Since it does not share US interests and preferences, the Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin is China’s natural ally.[1]  The same is true with Pyongyang since Seoul is on the opposing side.  India is in a predicament since it shares a land border with China and fought a brief border war with the latter in the 1960s.  Geopolitical realities may force India to either align with China or opt for neutrality in the conflict.

 

Thus, a new cold war is afoot in East Asia (or the eastern Pacific rim) involving great powers (both status quo and revisionists) plus their allies.

Note that Russia had agreed to sell its most advanced S-400 missile systems to China.  Please see   <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/china-and-russia-sign-contract-for-s-400-missile-systems/519010.html&gt;.

 

A similar cold war is fought between the US and the Russian Federation in, as usual the European and MENA theater.

Of course, they have proxies.

But this new cold war is quite different, qualitatively different than the Cold War between the US and the USSR that ended in 1989-1991.

China and US are not starightfoward enemies.

The US and the Soviet Union were.

China and the US are, in millenial speak, “frenemies”.

They are enemies and rivals in the strategic realm.

But even in the strategic realm, they need to cooperate so as not to blow the world up in smoke and cinders.

They are friends in the economic realm sharing interest in keeping the world economy an open one.

However, as economic powers, they also compete and rival each other.

China was and is the biggest beneficiary of contemporary globalization, of the liberalization of the world’s financial markets and FDI rules.

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Want to escape poverty? Replace pictures of Jesus with Xi Jinping, Christian villagers urged | South China Morning Post
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2119699/praise-xi-jinping-not-jesus-escape-poverty-christian

 

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In the process, the US steadily lost jobs and this gave (or gives) a fillip to protectionist sentiments exploited by Trump and his kind specially among blue collar workers and within the Rust Belt and the South.

The war is fought because of the steady undermining of the post-World War II world order.

 

1FireandFury

The war is fought while the 4th Industrial Revolution is disrupting our lives, our economies, our ways of life, our politics, and our consciousness.

Fortunes are being made while misery and mayhem are widespread.

For this reasons, all gaps seem to be widening.

There is a great disconnect between competing truths. There is mass confusion, disaffection, and tumult.

The world is poised for a major shift.