Make a deal, not war!

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

 

_____________________________________

 

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.

_________________________________________________________

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

________________________________________________________

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?

__________________________________________

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

__________________________________________

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.

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!

 

No Russia policy

 

Prof. Andrei Tsygankov

 

 

Andrei Tsygankov, a professor of political science and international relations at the San Francisco State University, believes Obama does not have a Russia policy. “That US strategic thinking is impotent;” the world has changed since the end of the Cold War but US thinking has not.

Tsygankov argues that the US cannot return to Cold War strategies of containment and ideological struggle. He believes the proper approach is to help Russia become stronger in a future and a more secure multipolar world. Otherwise, the alternative is a dangerous bipolar world dominated by US and China with Russia firmly on China’s side.

The confluence of events after the end of the Cold War had led to Obama’s current predicament. Russia became so weak and supine the West almost got everything from it thanks to the drunkard Yeltsin.

 

Russian President Boris Yeltsin

 

And yet, the West did not give anything of consequence to Russia. Instead, it brought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an anti-Soviet military alliance that should have disbanded after the Cold War’s end, right up to Russia’s doorsteps and subverted pro-Moscow regimes through the so-called color revolutions.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin

 

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that post-Yeltsin leaders of a different breed like Putin cannot accept such further diminution of Russian power and the embedding of existential threats at its very borders. Looks like the American have not heard of Napoleon and a guy named Adolf Hitler.

 

China President Xi Ping

 

 

At this point, China found it opportune to repair its relations not only with Russia through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) but also with India. If the US is dreaming of containing China in the East Asian littoral through another containment strategy, the SCO may make it easier said than done. China’s cultivation of Thailand and Myanmar and normalized relations with India can afford it access not only to the Indian Ocean but to new sources of energy.

 

 

Furthermore, the ASEAN connectivity projects specially in mainland Southeast Asia will have positive spillover effects for China’s economy.

 

 

Putin can then decide which state will butter the Russian bread. Or could even have both buttering up to the Russian bear. And supply the bread to boot!

 

 

Of course, in some way, an incoherent power is more harmful than one with a carefully crafted strategy.