'LET'S TAKE OUT CHINA!'
John Laughland finds tough talking about
the Chicoms among the right-wing think-tanks in America
Washington, DC IT was when he started thumping the table and jabbing the air with his finger that I looked up. 'Take 'ern out,' he said quietly but menacingly. 'Take 'em out! We took down the Soviets, we can take out the Chicoms.'
The scene was the lunch-table at an international conference hosted by a leading right-wing think-tank. The speaker was a highly influential American policymaker; in fact, it said 'Distinguished Scholar' on his business card. As a United States spyplane had just crash-landed in China, the communist leaders of that country were much on people's minds.
'I want people to remember that Reagan crushed the Ruskies,' he went on. 'What we need is a strategic response to this crisis. If we're gonna have a war with China, we'd better do it sooner than later. In five years' time, they'll be much more powerful.' Seeming to recall that the Kaiser and his general staff used to clank around Berlin saying much the same thing about the Royal Navy in about 1912, I ventured timidly. 'Don't you think a war with China would be rather risky? I mean, they could take a million casualties and still have 999
more millions where that million came from.' Like Dr Strangelove. the Distinguished Scholar had a German accent underneath his American one. 'Jahn,' he said, looking at me pityingly, 'if we launch a thermonuclear attack on China, we would take out hundreds of millions, not just one.' I quietly chewed on my bagel.
Think-tanks such as this flourish like exotic plants all over the political hothouse of the American capital. Usually located in sumptuous suites, and invariably a long elevator ride away from terra firma, their influence on beltway policy is enormous. For much of the time they perform a valuable service by bringing public attention to specific policy proposals in Congress. But they also have a tendency, like the philosopher-kings of Laputa, to distribute military advice from a great height, allowing the world below to come into view only to the extent that each week different parts of it should, they affirm, be bombed.
On the walls of this institute, a clock with an AK-47 for hands and real bullets showing the minutes marked time silently. Posters in the corridors displayed aircraftcarriers, nuclear submarines and fighter aircraft, with belligerent captions like The
Steel in the Sword of Freedom' or '90.000 tons of diplomacy'. Meanwhile, down in the Washington underground, commercial advertisements for heavy military hardware are common. One shows a huge Apache helicopter with the jokey comment. It keeps the peace — in a dominating, intimidating sort of way,' The United States may not be a welfare state but it is coming perilously close to being a warfare state. Think-tanks play a key role in the money-go-round which links arms contractors, policy wonks and Congress. Often paid for by defence contractors, the think-tanks threaten to tar every new administration with the brush of treachery if it does not pour money into the Pentagon; they also point out to the relevant congressmen that any cuts in defence spending might impact on jobs in their own districts. The result is that American spending on defence is now higher per combat unit than it was at the height of the Cold War and, as such, a byword for fantastic levels of waste. Countless millions are spent on helicopters which do not fly and on weapons which are so smart that they destroyed every chicken-coop in Kosovo because the heat generated by chicken shit shows up as a large square on their infra-red detectors.
The role of these think-tanks, in short, is to maintain a continuous production-line of weapons of mass distraction from the reality that the world is, in fact, a peaceful place, and that the United States is already unassailable. Instead, they professionally produce for their paymasters a lurid picture of a world lurking with bogey-men, rogue states and other threats to the American bambi. The threats they find are internal as well as external and so, naturally, the response has to be both. 'They're trying to create a police state,' one congressman told me, commenting on plans to set up a national counter-terrorist force. All these plans share with the ideology of European integration the false assumptions that, in the new world, borders and states are of decreasing importance and that 'global problems demand global solutions'.
We are used to hearing such ideas from the Clintonite Left. However, the neo-conservative Right marches in lock-step with liberal imperialists. Both visions of the world are incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty — except for American sovereignty, to be sure. One of the neocons' leading lights, Joshua Muravchik, has written that the role of world policeman is not enough for America. 'A policeman gets his assignments from higher authority,' he explains. 'But, in the community of nations, there is no higher authority than America.'
Any other nation which believes in its own sovereignty is therefore a psychiatric ease. Last week the right-wing Wall Street Journal explained at length how the standoff with China revealed how that country was in hock to its 'psyche' and 'tortured past'. These psychological disorders manifest themselves in the antiquated Chinese belief that borders are paramount and that territory should be defended. According to the Journal. the Chinese cannot understand that spyplanes are an integral part of the New World Order: 'In today's world, instead of absolute sovereignty, countries nose into each others' business all the time.'
For a large segment of the neocon establishment, it seems, foreign policy is now the continuation of psychotherapy by other means, helping or coaxing backward nations like the Chinese to 'come to grips' with the modern world and abandon their '19th-century perspective'. But psychotherapy works both ways. The main purpose of disbursing fantastic sums on the Pentagon also seems to be to fuel the American national delusion that warfare can be costfree in human terms. This is deeply corrosive both of any realistic assessment of the horrors of war and of the American nation's true readiness to fight if anyone hits back. As soon as the airmen were detained in China, the American nation rushed collectively to feel their pain and that of their families; supplies of yellow ribbon ran out at the town near their airbase in Washington state as little knots were tied all over the town in sympathy. What an appropriate colour! The US airforce wives have evidently not been brought up on the quiet heroism of Mrs Miniver, a fact which will not have escaped the attention of the somewhat less sentimental Chinese.
Although vigorously supported by many on the Right, this mentality of '90,000 tons of diplomacy' — the US state department is now headed by an army general as if to emphasise the point — is the polar opposite of conservative. It notably lacks those key concepts which should form the basis of the diplomacy of any civilised nation: the notions of reciprocity and of respect for the rights of other nations. The neocons foam at the mouth whenever it is suggested that the Chinese might have had enough of America's little 'accidents' — the bombed embassy in Belgrade, the fighter downed over the South China Sea — and that therefore the correct response should precisely be diplomatic instead of strategic.
Paradoxically, the neocon view also encourages the application of socialist principles to foreign policy, for it fuels the fantasy that every problem around the globe necessarily has a solution, and an American one at that. It is anathema to suggest that evil can, at best, be kept at bay. 'What should we be doing in Macedonia, John?' my lunch neighbour inquired after he had finished with the Chicoms. When I replied 'Nothing', he turned away to speak to someone else, his hitherto glinting expression having crumpled in a mixture of keen disappointment and sheer incomprehension.
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