https://radio.cgtn.com/podcast/news/1/Panel-Who-is-making-trouble-in-the-Taiwan-Straits/433725
RE: China/Taiwan/US
Building a Taiwan/Purdue University Relationship:
On United States Policy Toward China:
Diary of a Heartland Radical: "PLAYING THE CHINA CARD" (Differently): 2022 Update
Diary of a Heartland Radical: US-China Relations and Global Empire
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2023/02/imperial-decline-and-threat-of-new-cold.html
Harry Targ,
As the short video below points out the production of weapons is intimately connected to foreign policy. And as President Eisenhower warned a long time ago the military/industrial complex would be penetrating, shaping, and distorting every institution and policy in the United States. And, as the essay below suggests, this penetration includes universities and local communities. May 12, 2022.
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“Purdue is advancing a broad defense innovation capability, distinguished by its depth, breadth, and speed, with the goal of contributing to our nation’s third offset strategy of innovation by integration of existing strengths and forming new partnerships. The depth in quality and creativity of Purdue research centers is, and will remain, our strongest asset. The breadth responds to the need expressed by multiple DoD customers for a ‘total package’: new, integrated solutions (technologies, transition), new talent (graduates highly trained in relevant problems), and new modes of knowledge access (personnel exchange, training, distance education)."
Purdue University researchers conducted over $40M of
sponsored research in the 2014-2015 academic year and, in doing so,
educated hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students in cutting
edge technologies.” https://www.purdue.edu/research/defense-innovation/
“NDIA, in partnership with Purdue University, will host a
comprehensive program on hypersonic systems. Together with government,
industry, and academia, NDIA will present the technical foundations of
hypersonic systems, the current approach to rapidly developing hypersonic
capabilities, and the warfighter, policy, and acquisition perspectives on
delivering a sustainable operational capability” "2019 Hypersonics
Capabilities Conference," NDIA 100, ndia.org.
The National Defense Industry Association NDIA is an
association of defense industry contractors who lobby for increased military
expenditures. Its members are described as “informed opinion leaders” dedicated
to improved national security.
Purdue
launching center to advocate for Taiwan
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Purdue’s Discovery Park launched in 2001 with a grant from the state of Indiana and expanded by a $25 million Lilly Endowment as a nanotechnology center. Today it is a $1.15 billion research and learning complex that combines Purdue’s expertise in science, engineering, technology, and biology, with connections to the corporate world. As its website suggests: “Leveraging Lilly Endowment’s investment, Discovery Park has created an innovative environment where major global challenges are examined objectively, generating new ideas and directions for future generations.”
One of Discovery Park’s core strengths
is “Global Security.” Key research on this subject is designed to respond to
security threats, global instability, defense needs, terrorism, nuclear deterrence
and proliferation, basically responding to “the most pressing security and
defense challenges facing the nation and the world.”
Chief Discovery Park scientist,
Professor Tomas Diaz de la Rubia posted an essay entitled “The New Future of
Warfare” (Purdue University Discovery Park Vice President’s Blog, (October 1,
2018). In it he addressed the emerging salience of new military technologies
based on artificial intelligence (AI) and war. De la Rubia speculated that
future wars will not be fought on battlefields but rather in cities or in
cyberspace. New AI weapons of war in the hands of presumed enemies could
constitute an existential threat to the survival of the United States.
Discovery Park, he indicated, is already engaged in vital research on biomorphic
robots, automatic target recognition for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, automatic
targeting for drones, and other technologies. In short, a core Discovery Park
mission includes the preparation for and implementation of war. And this is
necessary because as Professor de la Rubia argued:
“It has become apparent that the U.S.
is no longer guaranteed top dog status on the dance card that is the future of
war. In order to maintain military superiority the focus must shift from
traditional weapons of war to advanced systems that rely on A.I.-based
weaponry. The stakes are just too high and the prize too great for the U.S. to
be left behind. All the more reason to call upon Purdue University and its
inestimable capacity to weave together academia, research, and industry for the
greater good. We’re stepping up to secure our place in the future of our
country, and there’s much more to come!” He warned that China had announced
that it would overtake the US by 2030 in the global artificial intelligence
market.
These statements illustrate that Purdue University, a large land-grant university, increasingly is committing its skills to research, development, training, and the production of the instruments of war. Such commitments have been made with little discussion in the broader university community.
President Eisenhower in 1960 warned
about an unwarranted growth of the influence of the military/industrial complex
in American society. Today he would characterize the danger as the
military/industrial/academic complex. It includes the shifting of the research
and education missions of higher education away from human development to
war-making.
These qualitative changes in
university priorities are being made largely in non-transparent decision-making
ways. But when challenged, the military/industrial/academic complex tends to
defend its existence by claiming war is inevitable. And to secure support, when
questioned, self-identified experts construct narratives of enemies; whether
they be the Communists, the terrorists, China, the Cubans, the Venezuelans,
artificial intelligence, or all of the above. As Andrew Bacevich so
compellingly has argued, ever since the end of World War Two, the United States
has created a “permanent war economy.” Given the increasing financial
challenges universities face in the twenty-first century, collaboration with
this permanent war economy becomes attractive to university administrators.
For more on the concept of the military/industrial complex see:
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2010/12/speeches-that-speak-to-our-times.html
And the military/industrial/academic complex:
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-militaryindustrial-academic-complex.html
For a discussion about competing paradigms in the study of international relations see:
On July 26, 1953,… a small band of courageous and principled young Cubans stormed the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago, in Eastern Cuba. Though that uprising failed to dislodge the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, it was the beginning of a movement that has changed the world forever. (Peoples World, July 25, 2014) https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/movement-that-changed-the-world-began-in-cuba-july-26-195/
And yet Americans are more ignorant of the nature of the Cuban Revolution and U.S.-Cuban relations than are the people of almost any other country in the world. Except for those few Americans with access to a handful of liberal and radical publications the people of this country have been subjected to an unrelieved campaign of distortion, or outright slander of Fidel Castro and the revolution he leads. The determined hostility of American leaders to the Cuban Revolution, the implementation of a system of economic harassment, and the threat of military intervention, not only endanger the Cuban Revolution, but increase the tempo of the cold war at home and abroad (Editors, “The Cuban Revolution: The New Crisis in Cold War Ideology,” Studies on the Left, Volume 1, Number, 1960, 1).
Cuban Revolutionaries, inspired by visionary poet Jose Marti, were on the verge of defeating Spanish colonialism in the 1890s. The United States sent armies to the island to defeat the Spanish and establish a puppet government to insure its economic and political control. To secure support for the war at home the American media and popular music were filled with images of Cuba as the “damsel in distress” and bungling Afro/Cuban revolutionaries. The dominant ideology of the United States, manifest destiny and white Christian duty, drove the argument for war on Spain.
After the 1898 war, the United States military, with the support of small numbers of compliant Cubans, created a government that would open the door completely for United States investments, commercial penetration, an externally-controlled tourist sector, and North American gangsters. The U.S. neo-colonial regime on the island stimulated pockets of economic development in a sea of human misery. Responding to grotesque economic suffering in the 1950s a band of revolutionaries (led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sanchez, and Haydee Santamaria) defeated the U.S. backed military regime of Fulgencio Batista.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 began in the nineteenth century and was driven by 400 years of nationalism, a vision of democracy, and a passion for economic justice. This vision was articulated in Fidel Castro’s famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech presented before being sentenced to prison after a failed military action against Batista in 1953. He spoke of five goals of his revolution: returning power to the people; giving land to the people who work it; providing workers a significant share of profits from corporations; granting sugar planters a quota of the value of the crop they produce; and confiscating lands acquired through fraud. Then he said, the Revolution would carry out agrarian reform, nationalize key sectors of the economy, institute educational reforms, and provide a decent livelihood for manual and intellectual labor.
The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people’s health: these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy (Fidel Castro, “ History Will Absolve Me,” Castro Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm
Almost immediately the revolutionaries who had seized power in January, 1959 began to implement the program envisioned by the Castro speech. Over the next fifty years, with heated debates inside Cuba, experiments--some successful, some failed--were carried out. Despite international pressures and the changing global political economy, much of the program has been institutionalized to the benefit of most Cubans.
Education and health care are free to all Cubans. Basic, but modest, nutritional needs have been met. Cubans have participated in significant political discussion about public policy. And Cuban society has been a laboratory for experimentation. In the 1960s Cubans discussed whether there was a need for monetary incentives to motivate work or whether revolutionary enthusiasm was sufficient to maintain production. Debates occurred over the years also about whether a state-directed economy, a mixed one, or some combination would best promote development; how to engage in international solidarity; and whether there was a need to affiliate with superpowers such as the former Soviet Union. Central to the Cuban model is the proposition that when policies work, they get institutionalized; when they fail, they get changed.
The United States reaction to the Cuban Revolution has been as the Studies on the Left article warned in 1960. U.S. policy has included military invasions, sabotage, assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, an economic blockade, subversion including beaming propaganda radio and television broadcasts to the island, efforts to isolate Cuba from the international system, restrictions on United States travelers to the island, listing Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, and in the long-run most importantly portraying in government statements and the mass media the image of Cuba as a totalitarian state that oppresses its people.
The U.S. economic embargo has not been lifted. The Helms-Burton Act, which prohibits foreign companies from having commercial relations with the island and then the United States, has not been repealed. And in 2015 the House of Representatives passed a resolution that challenged President Obama’s executive authority to expand the categories of U.S. citizens who can travel to Cuba without applying for a license from the Treasury Department. In addition, many issues of relevance to the two countries such as those involving immigration, control of drug trafficking, and cooperation on disaster relief are yet to be resolved.
Most Americans, including Cuban/Americans, support the full normalization of relations. But a small number of politicians from both political parties who oppose normalization of relations are using their legislative and public political leverage to reverse the will of the American and Cuban people. One example is the misrepresentation of the case of Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba for over thirty years. Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party was tried and convicted on dubious grounds of murdering a police officer in New Jersey and who fled to Cuba in 1984, is being used by anti-Cuban activists to resist the normalization of relations, claiming that Cuba is harboring “terrorists.”
The dramatic gestures by Presidents Obama and Castro in 2015 set the stage for the normalization of diplomatic relations but Presidents Trump and Biden reversed the modest progress in US/Cuban relations that had begun. Therefore, activists in 2023 need to expand their demands.
First, they must continue to pressure their legislators to repeal the Helms-Burton Act and oppose any efforts by their peers to re-impose legislation that will stop the process of change. Cuba must be taken off the list of State Department terrorist states which imposes even more draconian sanctions on the island. Lobbying should be complemented by rallies and marches. Support should be given to those organizations which have been in the front lines of Cuba Solidarity for years such as Pastors for Peace. In addition, people to people exchanges, community to community outreach, and high school and university study abroad programs should be encouraged.
Second, those in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution should support economic reforms being introduced on the island that reflect the best principles of the Cuban Revolution: independence, democracy, and human well-being. The clearest manifestation of these principles is reflected in the development of workplace cooperatives in both cities and the countryside. Cubans are being encouraged to engage in work that produces goods and services for their communities in ways that empower workers and decentralize production and decision-making. Educating the American public to the fact that Cuba is embarking on new economic arrangements that encourage workplace democracy contradict the media image that the people are embracing entrepreneurial capitalism.
Third, the solidarity movement should continue the process of public education about Cuba, explaining the realities of Cuban history, celebrating Cuban accomplishments in health care and education, and recognizing the richness and diversity of Cuban culture. Ironically, despite the long and often painful relationship the Cuban people have had with the United States, the diversity of the two nation’s cultures are inextricably connected. That shared experience should be celebrated.
Finally, solidarity with the Cuban people provides an opportunity to educate Americans to the reality that the United States is not “the indispensable nation,” but one among many with virtues and flaws. Cubans have celebrated their own history and culture but have done so without disrespecting the experiences of other nations and peoples. We in the United States could learn from that perspective.
Harry Targ
Socialism and Democracy
A Book Review:
John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale,
with an introduction by Vijay Prashad, Washington’s New Cold War: A
Socialist Perspective, Monthly Review Press, 2023, 99 pp.
The authors of this volume describe in vivid detail
the role United States militarism is playing in leading the world down the path
to nuclear and environmental destruction. Vijay Prashad, in his brief
introduction reports on a conversation he had in 2003 with a US State
Department spokesman who reported that US policy is based on “short-term pain
and long-term gain.” In sum, Prashad says, the spokesperson was suggesting that
the United States was prepared to inflict pain and suffering on victims in other
nations and among the working class in the United States in exchange for the
long-term revitalization of US hegemony abroad and at home. Prashad reports
that this comment was made at the outset of the war in Iraq and two years after
the US attacked Afghanistan.
Then John Ross, in a lengthy and comprehensive essay
describes the “increasing international
military aggression” of the United States characteristic of the recent past. He
points out that before Ukraine, US military action primarily targeted poor
and/or non-nuclear countries such as Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and
Libya. Now, Ross warns, the US is engaged in a war against Russia, a nuclear
state.
He describes compellingly the thirty-year escalation
of US involvement in Ukraine; the expansion of NATO, participation in the
Maidan coup, the funding and training of the Ukrainian military, the dismissal
of the provisions of the Minsk Accords, and the transferring billions of
dollars to Ukraine to fight the Russian armies. He suggests that the Ukraine
model is being used against China, by escalating tensions over Taiwan. The
author concludes that the Ukraine War and the provocations toward confrontation
with China are manifestations of the US project of reestablishing hegemony in a world in which China and the
rest of the Global South are seen as challenges to US economic and political dominance.
To use Ross’s words the US;
“ relative economic position has weakened
tremendously, but its military power is great. Therefore, it attempts to move
issues to the military terrain, which explains its escalating military
aggression and why this is a permanent trend.”
And he warns us: “This means that humanity has entered
a very dangerous period. (21-22).
In the second essay, Deborah Veneziale examines the
domestic actors in the United States that are leading the way down a war path.
She interrogates for 2023 what has been called the “military/industrial
complex.” She demonstrates how once competing factions of the foreign policy
elite have come together to advocate a policy of return to US global hegemony,
particularly targeting China as the bulwark of opposition to the project.
Essentially, she suggests that the controversial document prepared by former
defense official Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 calling for the US “to maintain a
permanent unipolar position” has been embraced by all major parties to the
foreign policy-making process. Second, these elites have decided that China is
the main enemy. And third, she describes “the merging of belligerent foreign
policy elites” which include influential think tanks, military contractors, big
tech corporations, and elite decision-makers circulating from military
corporations to governments and back to the corporations again. As she writes:
“The military-industrial complex, composed
of generals, politicians, tech companies, and private military contractors, is
pursuing a massive expansion of U.S. military capacity. Today, nearly all in
Washington use China as well as Russia as their pretext for this build up”
(54).
Finally, John Bellamy Foster raises the specter of the
inextricable connections between the danger of nuclear war and environmental
collapse. He uses E. P. Thompson’s 1980s discussion of “exterminisms” to link the
danger of nuclear war with the danger of “nuclear winter.” In other words, the
escalating tensions described in the other essays could lead along with death
and destruction by nuclear war to a radical elimination of the viability of the
planet due to fire, smoke, dramatic declines in the earth’s temperature, and
the end to the capacity of survivors to redevelop agriculture. We, he claims,
are playing with the dangers of the two “exterminisms,” killing of people and
the destruction of the planet. And, ultimately these potential life destroying
crises, the New Cold War, have their roots in the logic of capitalism.
After summarizing some of the science that has led to
the confirmation of the likelihood of a “nuclear winter” coming from nuclear
war, Foster described the dangerous shift in US military policy from a strategy
of deterrence (“counter value” or “counter city”), with the former Soviet
Union, to a “counterforce” strategy.
The earlier nuclear strategy of the United States and
the Soviet Union, MAD, or mutually assured destruction, was based on the
proposition that the US (and the former Soviet Union) would maintain enough
nuclear capacity to survive a first strike from their enemy and respond in
kind. This second-strike capacity would insure that neither side would strike
first, knowing that their own society would be destroyed.
In the Reagan period US military doctrine shifted to a “counterforce” strategy, that is
billions of dollars are being invested in developing the capacity to destroy a
potential enemy’s second strike capacity, by hitting their military targets
first. This counterforce strategy, most theorists have argued, makes nuclear
war more likely. Some of this fear might have been behind the Russian assault
on Ukraine.
In sum the authors portray a contemporary reality that
includes the US drive to recreate global hegemony in a more multipolar world
and dramatically escalated tensions among nations with nuclear weapons. US
policy is rationalized by white supremacist ideology. Finally, enormous profits
are derived from dramatically increased military spending.
The small size of the volume, the richness of the
data, and the enormity of the warnings make this an important volume for use in
classrooms and study groups.
While accessible for discussion, shortcomings remain:
1.The volume does not address or evaluate the
intentions of key adversary actors. Particularly, not enough attention is given
to the fact that Russia did invade Ukraine, in a sense precipitating the global
crisis the authors address.
2.The authors give insufficient attention to
contradictions: disagreements within the US foreign policy elite (such as among
the so-called “realists” and the influential role of the Quincy Institute as an
example), debates among the military, the role (insufficient though it is) of
the so-called Squad in Congress, and perhaps most importantly the US and the
global peace movement.
3.The authors do not address adequately “what is to be
done.” Foster’s compelling linkage of the “exterminisms” of nuclear war and
nuclear winter could/should be a centerpiece of peace and environmental
movements coming together more effectively. And surely, now, in the midst of
the so-called deficit debate the connections between growing economic
immiseration, rising healthcare costs, homelessness, and, on the other hand
military spending, close to a trillion dollars, should be the basis for
rebuilding a unified mass-based movement that sees the connections between
United States foreign and domestic policy
