Despite all the hype about a possible “breakthrough” in the U.S.’ trade war with China due to Trump’s tariff retreats, the reality is that the movement toward an actual war with China accelerates.
The public, focused on troubles currently upending U.S. politics, does not pay much attention to a war that has actually been on the way for decades.
The watershed moment of course came all the way back in 1949 with the victory of China’s socialist revolution. Amid resurgent anti-communism in the United States, accusations flourished of “who ‘lost’ China.”
Loss in U.S. eyes happened in China with the dawning of national independence and promise of social change. In 1946, a year after the Japanese war ended, U.S. Marines, allied with Chinese Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, were fighting the People’s Liberation Army in Northeast China.
The U.S. government that year was delaying the return home of troops who fought against Japan. Soldier Erwin Marquit, participant in “mutinies” opposing the delay, explained that the U.S. wanted to “keep open the option of intervention by U.S. troops … [to support] the determination of imperialist powers to hold on to their colonies and neocolonies,” China being one of these.
These modest intrusions previewed a long era of not-always muted hostility and, eventually, trade relations based on mutual advantage. The defeated Kuomintang and their leader, the opportunistic General Chiang Kai-shek, had decamped to Taiwan, an island China’s government views as a “breakaway province.”
Armed conflict in 1954 and 1958 over small Nationalist-held islands in the Taiwan Strait prompted U.S. military backing for the Nationalist government that in 1958 included the threat of nuclear weapons.
Preparations
U.S. allies in the Western Pacific—Japan and South Korea in the North, Australia and Indonesia in the South, and The Philippines and various islands in between—have long hosted U.S. military installations and/or troop deployments. Nuclear-capable planes and vessels are at the ready. U.S. Navy and Air Force units regularly carry out joint training exercises with the militaries of other nations.
The late journalist and documentarian John Pilger in 2016 commented on evolving U.S. strategies:
“When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of U.S. naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia,’ announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy…. [Presently] 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops.”
Analyst Ben Norton pointed out recently that, “the U.S. military is setting the stage for war on China. … The Pentagon is concentrating its resources in the Asia-Pacific region as it anticipates fighting China in an attempt to exert U.S. control over Taiwan.”
Norton was reacting to a leaked Pentagon memo indicating, according to the Washington Post, that “potential invasion of Taiwan” would be the “exclusive animating scenario” taking precedence over other potential threats elsewhere, including in Europe.
New reality
Norton suggests that the aggressive trade war launched against China by the two Trump administrations, and backed by President Joe Biden during his tenure in office, represents a major U.S. provocation. According to Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, “Trump’s top military and economic advisers are almost without exception committed to confrontation with China.”
Economic confrontation is only one sign of a drift to a war situation. Spending on weapons also accelerates as U.S. attitudes shift toward a normalization of war. Ideological wanderings, meanwhile, are producing old and new takes on anti-communism.
Money for weapons
The annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, released in April, says that in 2024 the world’s military spending increased by 9.4% in one year to a $2.718 trillion; it increased 37% between 2015 and 2024.
U.S. military spending in 2024 was $997 billion, up 5.9% in a year and 19% since 2015. For China, the comparable figures are $314 billion, 7.0%, and 59%, respectively; for Russia, $149 billion, 38%, and 100%; for Germany, $88.5 billion, 29%, and 89%. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world’s total military spending; China,12 %; Russia, 5.5%; and Germany, 3.3%. They are the world’s top spenders on arms.
In the United States, competition from new weapons manufacturers threatens the monopoly long enjoyed by five major defense contractors. These receive most of the $311 billion provided in the last U.S. defense budget for research, development, and production of weapons. That amount exceeds all the defense spending of all other countries in the world.
A new species of weapons manufacturer appears with origins in the high-tech industry. Important products are unmanned aircraft and surveillance equipment, each enabled by artificial intelligence.
Professor Michael Klare highlights one of them, California’s Anduril Industries, as providing the “advanced technologies…needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.” Venture capital firms are investing massively. The valuation of Anduril, formed in 2017, now approaches $4.5 billion.
Palmer Luckey, the Anduril head, claims the older defense contractors lack “the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need.” Multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, investor in Anduril and other companies, funded the political campaigns of Vice President J.D. Vance and other MAGA politicians. Klare implies that Theil and his kind exert sufficient influence over government decision-making to ensure happy times for the new breed of weapon producers.
Giving up
Waging war looks like a fixture within U.S. politics. Support for war and the military comes easily, while criticism that wars do harm is turned aside. Broadening tolerance of war is now a blight on prospects for meaningful resistance to war against China.
Recent history is not encouraging. After the trauma of the Vietnam War subsided, anti-war resistance in the United States has been unsuccessful in curtailing wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza, despite massive destruction in all of them and more dead and wounded than can be accounted for.
Official language testifies to the routinization of U.S. military aggression. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, visiting the Army War College in Pennsylvania, started with, “Well, good morning, warriors..… We’re doing the work of the American people and the American warfighter. [And] the president said to me, I want you to restore the warrior ethos of our military.”
Hegseth traveled recently in the Pacific region, presumably with war against China on his mind. In the Philippines, he remarked, “I defer to Admiral Paparo and his war plans. Real war plans.” In Guam, he insists, “We are not here to debate or talk about climate change, we are here to prepare for war.” In Tokyo, he spoke of “reorganizing U.S. Forces Japan into a war-fighting headquarters.”
Ben Norton writes that, “In his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Hegseth vowed that, if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, ‘Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years.’”
Ideas as weapons
Proponents and publicists of off-beat ideas have long disturbed U.S. politics. Brandishing fantasies and myths, the Trump administration has fashioned a new brand of resentment-inspired politics. Even so, familiar ideas continue as motivators, notably anti-communism.
Writing in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster recently explored ideology’s contribution to Trump’s hold on power. Much of it, he reports, derives from California’s Claremont Institute, its office in Washington, and Hillsdale College in Michigan. A leading feature is a kind of anti-communism that targets so-called “cultural Marxism,” but China and its Communist Party are not immune from condemnation.
Michael Anton is a “senior researcher” at the Claremont Institute and is now the director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. According to Foster, Anton suggested that “China was the primary enemy, while peace should be made with Russia [which] belonged to the same ‘civilizational sect’ as the United States and Europe, ‘in ways that China would never be.’”
[See also the People’s World article: “Cold Peace with Russia / Cold War with China: Trump’s foreign policy agenda.”]
Former Claremont Institute President Brian Kennedy, quoted by Foster, notes that, “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, … that means to destroy us.”
While the far right has plenty of ideas about foreign policy, the matter of no ideas on the part of others also comes to the fore. Recognized international law authority Richard Falk, writing on May 6, states that, “I am appalled that the Democratic establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to U.S. foreign policy.” Viewing the Democrats as “crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns,” he adds that, “I find this turn from ideas to money deeply distressing.”
The Democrats’ posture recalls a 1948 message from Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican. During congressional debate on President Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan, Vandenberg stated that, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” This U.S. tradition lapses only occasionally.
Will resistance to war against China end up stronger and more effective than earlier anti-war mobilizations in the post-Vietnam War era? A first step toward resisting would be to build awareness of the reality that war with China may come soon. General knowledge of relevant history should be broadened, with emphasis on how U.S. imperialism works and on its capitalist origins. Anyone standing up for peace and no war ought to be reaching out in solidarity with socialist China.
John Pilger, moralist and exemplary documentarian and reporter, died on December 23, 2023. His 60th documentary film, The Coming War on China, first appeared in 2016. Pilger’s website states that, “the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.” In this moment, it’s certainly worth watching if you haven’t seen it already or watching again even if you have. It can be viewed on his website.
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