12/02/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is John Glazer from AntiWar.com, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Times.
Ain't that good, libertarian, left and right all together, working that realignment.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
I'm very good, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And now listen, mostly I want to talk with you about the Asia pivot and what all is going on there.
It seems extremely important, even a little bit scary, and I don't try to scaremonger too much.
But first of all, I've got to just make sure that this goes down in the history of the show in interview format here, too, and not just my ranting and raving.
Did you see what Ehud Olmert had to say about Benjamin Netanyahu's America policy over the weekend?
I saw some reference to it.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, you didn't really want to get this in, but I actually didn't focus on it too much.
Ah, rats, all right.
Well, he made fun of him for picking fight with America and asking what madness is this and that kind of thing, so, oh well.
Anyway, Asia pivot.
You know, I read a thing that made sense to me in my brain, and it said that, you know, what's happening here is the Navy and the Air Force have the Asia pivot, but the Army and the Marine Corps have the Africa pivot, and that's sort of their compromise.
You guys get to do this if we get to do that kind of a thing, and that's why they're doing both pivots at once.
But I guess actually, though, first question, are they pivoting away from the Middle East at all, or do they just like to say pivot when they mean invade something?
Yeah, no, it's not a pivot away from anything, and that's obviously true.
I mean, even if the Obama administration wanted somewhat to pivot away from the Middle East and towards Asia, maybe even if it's just sort of marginal in terms of the difference, they keep getting sucked into perennial problems like Iran and Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and it's sort of a quicksand type of thing when it comes to diplomacy and the media and all that stuff.
Those are issues that everybody has more of a bearing on, and the issues in the Asia Pacific are a little bit more foreign to Americans, I think, and so, you know, it's much less of a pivot, especially in terms of resources.
We're still putting tons of resources into the Middle East.
It's just that we're putting more resources, in addition, into the Asia Pacific, and that involves, really, a military and economic shift in which we are sort of surging the military presence with the Navy and the Air Force, and even with ground troops with regard to new basing rights in the Philippines, which we're in the process of obtaining new basing rights for drones in Japan, you know, we're working on new bases in Australia, which will hold a couple thousand U.S. troops, you know, Singapore and Indonesia and Guam and all this.
We're refurbishing old Air Force bases that would help...they're meant as a deterrence thing, but they're really about...it's called an air-sea war, in which we might have a conflict with China, but they would see all these bases and know that we could eliminate them in a rapid fashion, and so we're basically threatening military force against China for the crime of becoming a greater power in its own region.
You see, the American policy, especially since World War II, has been basically one of world domination, and any rival state, any competing country that says, no, we're going to actually gain some of our own power, and whenever anyone thinks about that, I'm all happy to criticize the Chinese state.
It's a horrible state in a lot of ways, but my primary concern is my own government and what we've been doing.
And so, you know, this...as you said at the outset, this actually is kind of scary, because it could...there's a lot of reason to believe that these disputes that are sort of internal to the Asia-Pacific region could inflame tensions and end up leading to some kind of conflict.
If it's not between the United States and China, it could be between China and one of our client states, or some other kind of mix, but it really is kind of dangerous.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's funny.
It reminds me of the book, The War State, by Michael Swanson, where he talks all about...
Ike Eisenhower saw all of international affairs as a card game.
He was a master bridge player, and everything is all just a hand of cards and this and that, but the thing about playing cards that way is you can make a really bad bluff and a really bad bet, and it sounds like in this case, what they're basically trying to do is say that the odds are so far in favor of the house that you're not even going to think about trying it.
The only problem is, I mean, that's a huge bluff, which means anybody tries it, now what are you going to do, right?
We will not tolerate the rise of any near-peer competitor or even the possibility that an alliance of separate states could ever combine to amount to a near-peer competitor to us.
We'll kill you long before you're even in a position to defend yourself if you even think about trying it, and then so what do the Chinese do?
They go, well, alright, we're making a military no-fly zone thingamajig over here around these islands that we want back, and what are you going to do about that?
And so the Americans, with their bluff called, they start flying nuclear bombers through the no-fly zone.
What in the hell?
I guess bridge is a lot of fun to play for people who are into it, but dang, you think you can just give these Democrats an Xbox and get them to leave the rest of us alone?
Yeah, this is what realists call a security dilemma, in which two competing states start to beef up their military budgets and surge their military presence in the other's arena of influence, and then the response from the opposing state is to do exactly the same, to try to deter the other people, and this rising sort of competition of deterrence really leads to a dangerous confrontation, and that's what we might be seeing, and it's really not an exaggeration.
Just like you, I'm weary of fear-mongering, but it was reported in the Washington Post that some analysts told this reporter that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a nuclear war.
There's people at the Council on Foreign Relations, like Elizabeth C. Economy, which she says, my biggest fear is that a small mishap is going to blow up into something much bigger.
Another person, Sheila A. Smith, also at the Council on Foreign Relations, says if there's a use of force between China and Japan, for example, this could be an all-out conflict between these two Asian giants, and of course, we are allied with Japan, we have a security defense treaty with them, which says that we'll go to war on their behalf if it ever comes to that, and that will automatically involve the United States.
This would be a great power war, something we haven't seen since World War II, of course.
So it could be incredibly dangerous.
And as we're getting involved in these disputes, like over the unpopulated islands of what China calls Diaoyu and Japan calls Senkaku, you know, this is a dispute that just has nothing to do with us, and it shouldn't have anything to do with us.
You know, competing claims for the islands go back a long ways.
China claims that they owned them back during the Qing Dynasty, and you know, in 1895, if you fast forward a long way, Japan annexed the islands because Japan was an imperial state back then.
But after World War II, when Japan was defeated, you know, it sort of gave back a lot of the land that it had annexed.
And so, you know, it's been this competing thing for a long time.
It was actually very dormant until, you know, scientists started to say, oh, these areas are probably very rich in oil, gas, and mineral deposits, as well as being valuable fisheries.
And that means they're important in a geopolitical sense.
So now that China has a rising economy and a bigger military, it's sort of saying, well, we're going to pull our weight just as much as every other state is.
And if you get really, really tense, what would be less tense is if the United States stopped saying to Japan, hey, we'll protect you and your interests in the islands.
Or if the United States stopped saying to the Philippines, hey, we'll protect you and go to war for you and protect your interests in the islands.
We're sort of inflating the tensions that otherwise would probably be a lot more dormant, given that China is a bigger power than these states and has a bigger military.
So it's not just that the Philippines and Japan are talking tougher than they would because they know that we have their back.
It's that we're telling them to go ahead and puff yourself up and talk as much smack as you want, because we've got your back.
That's right.
There was an interview with the Chinese foreign minister, I believe, which he told the I think it was the the what the foreign policy magazine that, hey, we we know that the United States is behind us.
And so we're not very scared that China is going to do anything out of the ordinary.
Of course, that's not what China is thinking.
You know, but the whole thing is ridiculous.
I mean, the alternative to all of this mess, all of these entangling alliances that might lead to war is simply for the United States to stay out of it.
I mean, it wouldn't affect our national security.
It really wouldn't affect our economy.
Even the fact that China is a growing economy is a good thing for people like you and me.
Free trade is very good, very helpful, it's very nice, it's very peaceful most of the time.
It's only a zero sum game when states get involved.
They want to say, no, we want the biggest economy in the world and we want protectionism for our economy as opposed to yours and all this kind of stuff.
They're the ones that fight it out.
But free people can get along great with trading economies.
And the whole thing is ridiculous.
I mean, what if we just stayed back instead of saying what we're saying, which is China can't use any coercion or force to change the status quo?
Well, yeah, that's rich coming from the United States, who very explicitly operates on the basis of force and coercion as a means to an end.
And we see that with Iran.
After every statement, after every official statement that's ever said about Iran, what you hear is we reserve the right to defend ourselves or use all options on the table.
During the Syria debate, it was very clear that we were saying force is a viable option for us to clear this up and stop the war or to at least address the alleged use of chemical weapons.
So China just uses us as a total hypocrite, which of course we are.
Yeah, well, we being our government.
And that's the other thing here, too, is that there's no such thing as Japan's national interest or America's national interest or China's national interest or the Philippines' national interest.
Or if there is one, it certainly cannot be ascertained by the politicians who lead it.
All they know is what's good for them.
So if being a tough guy serves the Democrats right now, then that's what Obama's going to do.
And if acting like a tough guy is what's good for Abe's politics there in Japan, then that's the course he's going to follow.
And I'm trying to remember what it was I read, John, where they speculated that this was a very hasty decision creating this, I called it an no-fly zone.
It's not.
But whatever it is, this little extra military air patrol zone that they've created there, that this looks like a very hasty decision and probably one that the Chinese didn't red team.
They didn't ask, OK, well, wait a minute.
So what's the most likely response by the Japanese and the Americans to this?
And then what might we do?
Whatever.
And so, in other words, in China there are politicians too, and their leadership has apparently painted themselves into a little bit of a corner here.
And this is what we're really dealing with, right, is a handful of jackasses in capital cities here or there or the other place who could get cities full of us real people nuked to death.
Right, because of their stupid calculations.
You know, everyone sort of assumes they put these politicians on these great pedestals, and they think that they have wonderful strategic vision, and that they'll just take care of us and they'll follow our strategic interests and everything.
But it's a load of crap.
I mean, the Chinese are going to make mistakes in this security dilemma, in this competition, and the United States is going to.
What's even more likely, I think, is that one of these smaller states like, say, the Philippines, which has been outright threatening China in the international waters, or close to their naval ports with their navy, that could really, they're probably more willing to go ahead and do some damage because they feel like they have the big guy in the United States behind them.
So it's not only the mistakes of the two big players.
It's also the mistakes or the bullheadedness of our smaller allies.
And maybe even the captains of certain ships out there on the waters who can make their own decisions and bad ones.
Exactly.
There's so many variables here that could go wrong and really lead us down to a very dangerous spot.
And it's all because politicians want to play chess with the world.
Yeah, you know, I don't know how many people would agree with everything in there, but I think that this is an important part of Pat Buchanan's revisionism of the Second World War and how it started, is that when Neville Chamberlain was embarrassed by his failure at Munich and when Hitler went into Czechoslovakia anyway, that in his emotional fit, Chamberlain gave the war guarantee to Poland.
And when he did so, I think it was Lord Gray and some of the others, the defense ministers and the others in the British cabinet said, you did what?
Oh my God, somebody call the insane asylum for Neville Chamberlain.
Not over his failure at Munich, but over his war guarantee to Poland.
Because where he was thinking, this will be the ultimate warning to Hitler, that you better stop here and you better not go on to Poland.
What he was really doing was he was outsourcing the decision about whether the British Empire was going to go to war with Germany or not to the Polish colonels who were themselves a bunch of Nazis too.
And then because they had the British promising to back them up and maybe they wouldn't have negotiated with Hitler anyway, I don't know.
But they certainly did not negotiate over Danzig.
And the war guarantee, in fact, is what encouraged Hitler to make the deal with Stalin, let's half Poland and then that'll buy me a couple of years to fight the democracies in the West before I turn east and betray you, Stalin.
So, you know, terrible things can happen.
And again, it wasn't that Neville Chamberlain wanted to have a war with Germany and saw Poland as a great way to get into it.
He thought that if he gave the war guarantee that that would be enough to convince Hitler to stay out.
But without gaming the possibility of, well then, so what if he doesn't?
And that's the kind of thing we're doing here.
We're letting not just the Prime Minister of Japan, but any number of people outside of our own state, which is bad enough, decide on whether America ought to go to war.
And a real one, as you said, against a major power that has H-bombs and, thanks to Bill Clinton, the means to deliver them.
That's right.
You're right to reference World War II because the world kind of looks a little bit more like World War II, especially compared to how it looked in the Cold War, where it was a bipolar sort of a system.
Now it's a lot more multipolar.
It's still unipolar, and the United States spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.
But it seems like it's moving in the direction of a more multipolar world, and that can tend to be a little bit less stable.
It could go that way, or it could go the way of a greater sort of bipolarity, and China could really rise, and it could just be the United States and China.
And maybe we have a new Cold War on our hands.
Maybe we get involved in a new Vietnam, and we invent new domino theories to justify, you know, expensive quagmires in foreign lands that really don't have anything to do with our security, just as a means of competition with another state that we don't want to get rich or a military prowess.
I mean, it's extremely dangerous.
All right.
Here's the thing that you're not addressing, John.
They're evil, and they're yellow, and they're red, and they're coming for us.
China has no desire to really get involved with the United States militarily.
They're looking to sort of defend their own sphere of influence in the Asia Pacific, really the territories and the waters that are just around their seashore and their sort of naval presence.
They want their strategic influence.
It's very, you know, this is sort of overstated sometimes, but it is very analogous to the United States and the Monroe Doctrine in the early 1800s, in which we sort of said to Europe, listen, stop intervening in our sphere of influence.
The Americas, Canada, you know, Latin America, and beyond, this is our sphere.
Okay, we're a big enough power now.
We don't want you butting your heads in here.
And that's what China's saying now, and that's another area of total hypocrisy that we had no desire to conquer Europe.
The United States was never going to, you know, invade the shores of Spain and Britain and France in the entire century of the 1800s or the 1900s.
I mean, we eventually came to dominance because of our associated victory in World War II.
But, you know, this is not about conquering the world for China, just as it wasn't about conquering the world for a relatively weak state like the United States in the early 1800s.
You know, part of this that people don't really understand is that these countries, like the Philippines especially, they don't want U.S. military troops there.
In fact, after the Cold War, the Philippines kicked us out.
They said, no, the legacy of U.S. military presence on our lands has been absolutely horrible, and we don't want that anymore.
We want our independence.
We want our sovereignty.
And to sort of launch a new imperialism, which is all the more blatant.
You know, with Iraq and the Middle East post-9-11, at least there was this neocon sort of fantasy about ideas, you know, spreading democracy, and they had this whole propaganda behind it.
Yeah, and preempting a threat that wasn't real, but still there was an implied defensive something in there.
Right.
But with China, they don't have anything like that.
It's very much, it's like a harking back to the imperial wars between Britain and Russia, you know, and the Crimean War and the wars in Central Asia and stuff like that.
I mean, it's very cold-hearted, sort of.
I don't even have the time to propagandize about China being a rogue state or, you know, supporting terrorism or spreading the democracy for all the world and stuff like this.
The U.S. officials aren't even bothering with this.
They're just pretty explicitly saying this is about imperialism.
We want to dominate the world.
China's coming up on us, and it's our business to squash that threat.
The real question is whether China's going to just obey and lie prostrate, you know, and sort of give us their behinds to go screw again, or they're going to say, no, we don't want to obey you, and then we could come to a head, unless people in Washington get better heads and start to see that we can't continue on this road of world domination for our own resources and our own lives and our own security.
It's dangerous.
Right.
Well, and especially, again, this will be the tenth time the word ridiculous was used in this interview, I think, but here, China's our number one trading partner.
China's everything.
Never even mind if we had a nuclear missile shooting war.
How about just if, you know, trade relations were frozen?
It would be the complete and total destruction of their economy and ours, and for a while.
I mean, the recovery would be, you know, would take years and years, never mind the hole that they've already dug for us with this economy the way it is.
You know, that brings up a really important point, Scott, because not only is this a military surge in Asia Pacific, but it's also an economic war.
So the United States realizes that China's a huge trading partner.
They own a lot of our debt, so on and so forth, and so what we're doing now is we're engaging in extensive diplomatic talks that are mostly secret.
WikiLeaks just had a leak about this, like, last month.
The TPP, it's called, the TTP, it's Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we're talking with all these Asian states and saying, yeah, we're going to do a free trade deal.
In reality, there's a lot of corporate welfare and economic protectionism involved, but there's something interesting about it.
It's a Pacific partnership, trans-Pacific partnership, and it doesn't include China.
It includes all these Asian countries, all these Pacific countries, but not China, because the United States wants to engage in an economic warfare with China.
They want to exclude China from the global system of trade, and this is the first effort to try and do that, and it's really kind of astonishing what this TTP deal is really about, and I encourage everyone to read.
I wrote an upcoming piece for The Future of Freedom about it, and you can go on WikiLeaks and read their release.
They released a 95-page leaked document, a chapter of the deal, and nobody really knows about it except for a few people, but this guy apparently leaked it, and that's good for us to know.
But, you know, this is an economic war as well as a military war.
All right, well, now, so for the last couple of minutes, talk to me about the economic war with China and what, if anything, you think it might have to do with the continued occupation of Afghanistan that they're at least trying to negotiate.
I guess maybe the first question there is, is Karzai really standing up to them about this, or this is all just for show, for temporary, like usual, and then they are staying, and then is that about China or is that about anything?
We talked about this before, you know.
First of all, yes, Karzai does seem to be standing up to the United States a little bit.
He's refusing to sign an already written security deal which would govern the presence of U.S. troops beyond 2014, probably into 2024 and stuff like this.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is a failure.
The insurgency is still alive and well.
We haven't built a state the way they wanted to build a state.
It's a horrible state that could just collapse at any minute, probably without U.S. support.
So the mission there has failed, and that's why the Obama administration, I think is the main reason, wants to continue to occupy Afghanistan.
An additional security reason is that they want to continue to do drones in Pakistan, and Afghanistan offers the only and perfect state to be able to do those kind of cross-border attacks.
The economic argument, the sort of geostrategic argument for Afghanistan, I think is probably a little bit less important in the minds of Washington.
I think that there is something to be said about strategic competition with China in the Central Asian region.
China has been doing oil deals and pipeline deals and trade pacts and all this kind of stuff with a lot of the Central Asian states.
And Afghanistan is one of them that they're sort of working on as well, although it's hampered by the war.
And certainly, I think China probably would try to take advantage of some economic opportunities if U.S. military presence were to be withdrawn.
And that could be one argument in favor of keeping U.S. troops there, according to people making policy.
But that, again, I think is inflated incredibly.
I don't think that you can really argue that it's in U.S. interest to continue to keep U.S. troops in a country where they have been for a decade, where they continue to be killed, where they continue to prop up a corrupt and weak and feeble state, and where they continue to spawn new enemies in the United States, where they continue to invigorate an insurgency against us.
I mean, there's all kinds of reasons to leave, and they far outweigh, even in the minds, I think, at least they should, the realist minds of national security makers, policy makers, they should really just get the heck out and pull our guys out of there, because it's not worth the security competition with China.
The gains couldn't possibly be worth the cost at this point.
I think that's pretty much unanimous among everybody who's not in the military, or a Democrat at this point.
Anyway, thanks very much for your time, John.
Appreciate it as always.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's John Glaser writing for Antiwar.com, The Washington Times, and The Huffington Post.
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