All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Steven Glane.
He's the author of the book state versus defense, and he's got a very important new piece at salon.com.
We're featuring it today in the viewpoints at antiwar.com, the Pentagon's new China war plan.
Welcome to the show, Steven.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
Before we get into this scary article, which I'm putting off because I'm scared of it and I don't like that subject whatsoever, but anyway, tell me about this book.
I love the title, the battle to define America's empire, the battle between the state department and the defense department.
Sounds so interesting.
Well, I'm glad you I'm glad it intrigued you.
It's basically about the history of U.S. foreign policy since the beginning of the cold war.
And I try to focus on each inflection point where the president of the United States in various circumstances was compelled to choose a militarized option to what really was a diplomatic challenge, beginning with Truman and ending with President Obama.
Now, it seemed like as far as we have come, you know, in the 20th century, really, it was described as a revolution by a lot of people during the Bush years where Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department took over more and more for the CIA as well as the State Department.
That's true.
And but in the book, I argue that really that the process has its root right in the beginning of the Cold War with the Truman doctrine itself.
You're probably familiar with the doctrine of containment, which was inspired by George Kennan, the great statesman diplomat.
Kennan's original intent and his interpretation of the Soviet threat was basically hijacked by James Forrestal, who was the then secretary of war and a almost pathological hawk.
And he had as much to do as anyone with informing U.S. foreign policy is in a militarized way.
And but certainly, yes, the Bush administration was kind of the denouement of this whole process.
And we're living with it two years into the Obama administration.
I remember one anecdote about I may have this wrong.
You probably know it better than me, but it was something about I think the State Department told the dictator of Uzbekistan, you got to stop boiling people to death and we're going to withhold 20 million dollars or something.
And the Pentagon showed up and they're like here and paid him all the money anyway.
I'm not familiar with that particular anecdote, but I certainly have come across things that are very similar.
And this is this is also something that's very significant about the Bush administration under Secretary Rumsfeld.
The Pentagon was given its own proprietary funding for the first time going back to the 1961 foreign, I forget the actual name, under Kennedy.
All the power of the purse in terms of financing are for our initiative.
Our initiative abroad was concentrated with the State Department.
So if the Pentagon wanted to work with a foreign military or train its leaders, they had to ask for permission from the State Department.
Well, in 2000, 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld insisted on having his own authority.
And this is something that's rolled over every couple of years by Congress.
And it's now valued in the over a trillion dollars.
So that is one less check on what the Pentagon can do overseas.
And there's very poor oversight.
So it's another way for the Pentagon to get around certain things and do things that we don't really know much about.
Now, there's one thing I would like to point out.
The book is called State vs.
Defense.
But a leitmotif of the book is that the militarists, the ones who are doing the militarizing of foreign policy, are almost exclusively civilians.
Either working in the White House or in Congress, whether it's a McCarthy or a Walt Rostow or a Rumsfeld or a Cheney.
So the military, to the extent that it is expanding its influence, has been doing it very much with civilian complicity and encouragement.
Well, yeah, I wonder about, you know, in the Obama years, we got Hillary Clinton over there, and she's got a very strong will.
Is there any pushback from her, even just for her own, you know, ambition, like in Federalist No.
10, make them fight among each other?
Well, she gets high marks for working closely with her opposite number at the Pentagon.
She had a very good relationship with Robert Gates.
And one of the reasons is, I think she's very much in favor of a strong defense, and the military taking the lead on certain initiatives.
Remember, her motto is, and I'm quoting, defense, diplomacy, and development.
Note the ranking.
And she was also very much in favor of the aerial bombardment over Libya.
So she's very much part of what is called the liberal interventionist school of foreign policy making, which in some ways, and I argue in the book, state versus defense, is not all that much different from neoconservatives, although, of course, they would never acknowledge that.
Yeah.
Well, that's really too bad, too, because she's got the right attitude to maybe even win a fight if she wanted to, whereas, you know, Colin Powell was more likely to just click his heels and go along with even things that he completely disagreed about.
That's true.
She's got more backbone than him, I guess is what I'm saying.
Well, Colin Powell is a good soldier, and good soldiers follow orders.
It's a pity he did not resign rather than give that awful address to the United Nations in the run-up to the war.
I wonder if he, whether or not he regrets that, but we're not doing so.
But another thing that I learned from researching the book is that personalities do matter.
There's no doubt about it.
But when you have an imbalance or an imbalance in terms of resources between our civilian agencies that are involved in foreign policy making and our military ones and our security ones of 12 to 1, a ratio imbalance of 12 to 1, in other words, for every $1 that's spent on diplomacy, $12 are spent on national security and all the resources that go into that.
It's very hard to resist it.
It develops a momentum of its own.
You probably know that when the Pentagon wants a new weapon, it's very careful to ensure legislators that their constituents will get a piece of the manufacturing pie.
And that's just one example of how we all get hooked onto the war wagon, sometimes without even knowing it.
Right.
Well, and here we are in an economic crisis where we have to choose, we finally have to choose between world empire and total bankruptcy.
And we're right at the point where it sounds like you're describing the empire.
The enforcement arm of the empire is less accountable than ever before.
There's the ability of the people through their democratic process to restrain this thing is really in question.
Yeah, I think there are a number of things going on here.
First of all, with the end of conscription and the beginning of the all-volunteer army, which let's face it, is without doubt the most efficient, highly trained, highly educated, well-provisioned military force in history.
We've effectively segregated our civilian and military realms.
And I think out of a sense of guilt or a misguided sense of patriotism, we just assume that the military knows best and we let them let it do its thing without rigorous oversight.
And as a result, there is no, we're not having a national discussion about what we should be doing abroad.
Now we are talking about cutting the Pentagon's budget, but nobody's talking about bringing, unwinding our enormous military commitments overseas in Asia and Europe and elsewhere, which have been basically legacies of the Cold War.
They were established to contain the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union has been gone for 20 years.
So I think it's because of that, not estrangement, but that segregation between military and civilian that we're not having the conversations that we should be having.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it there.
We'll be right back after this break with Stephen Glane.
The article at Salon.com is called The Pentagon's New China War Plan.
And we're going to talk about that when we get back.
Again, the book is called State versus Defense, The Battle to Define America's Empire.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest is Stephen Glane.
We're talking about his new book, State versus Defense, The Battle to Define America's Empire.
And now this new article in Salon.com, The Pentagon's New China War Plan.
Despite budget woes, the military is preparing for a conflict with our biggest rival, and we should be worried.
Okay, well, you got me.
Should be.
So here's my thing about war with China.
H-bombs, right?
So people in the Pentagon, they know that China has H-bombs, which means they can't ever have a war with China.
And it's as simple as that.
And I shouldn't be worried at all, right?
Well, actually, the Chinese have a limited nuclear deterrence.
Their policy, going back to when they first developed their own capability, was to have a minimum deterrence, meaning they wanted just enough to deter a foreign power from engaging them in some kind of exchange, as opposed, of course, to the United States policy, which is always massive retaliation and weapons in abundance and and overkill, which I go into into the book, by the way.
I think what the Pentagon is looking at is not so much of an all-out, symmetrical war involving nuclear weapons, God forbid.
To the contrary, it's focusing on China's disputed claims on strategically vital sea lanes in what is known as the South China Sea, which is a subject of long-standing counterclaims with its neighbors.
This is important because it is the duty of any major power to keep the sea lanes open.
What complicates the situation is that China is a rising power.
It has 3,000 years of history.
For most of that time, it was the regional power, and it wants to restore its position of prominence.
It is the U.S. policy, and has been really since containment, but codified since the 1992 defense planning guidance, which is in my book, where it was established that the U.S. would prevent any so-called peer competitor from challenging U.S. hegemony anywhere in the world.
This is a perfect example.
In fact, it's the first real example of a foreign power challenging the spirit, if not the letter, of this guidance.
That defense planning guidance, that's the famous thing that was leaked to the New York Times, that was written by Wolfowitz and Libby for Dick Cheney, right?
It was actually written, it's interesting you mention that, it was written under Wolfowitz's authority by Zalmay Khalilzad, who, as you may know, was our ambassador to Afghanistan and to Iraq.
The way he wrote it, it was just too obviously imperious.
And so, Scooter Libby then took it and kind of gave it a whitewash.
But if you read it, it's still quite a document.
It's a first-class specimen of imperial hubris and arrogance.
I think what you're telling me, though, is they imagine, at worst, some kind of top gun thing in the sea lanes over there, taking one side against the other, but keeping it somehow from escalating into a real full-scale war between the two powers.
They look at it as an asymmetrical conflict, which means, critically...
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's just that I'm deterred by a couple of H-bombs is enough.
If they can destroy L.A., if they can destroy Austin, Texas, then I want to be friends with them forever, simple as that.
They're blackmailing me, what can I do?
I can't start a war with them from now on.
Well, the Pentagon doesn't see it that way.
They see many different spectrums of conflict, and they plan accordingly.
One of the reasons why the U.S. military is as effective as it is is that it plans and it trains.
The problem is, and this is something, again, this is a subtext of my book, is that these things tend to take on a life of their own.
And in planning to do something and being very transparent about it, which I think is to the Pentagon's credit, I mean, this is something that we're reading in the defense press, or the defense trade press.
It puts the Chinese on the defensive, and they go into counter mode, and we could have a situation in five, ten years' time where the region is such a power keg and everybody's been gearing up for a fight, that there's a minor incident, possibly manufactured, and then we have a war on our hands.
That's just the hazard, that's the perils of dominance.
But the fact that we're not talking about this as a nation makes it particularly hazardous.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think, well, the American people, we don't really discuss this at all, but like, you know, Council on Foreign Relations levels or whatever, they probably just figure that everybody wants America to be the sheriff of all the C lanes and that kind of thing, and that no one would try to dispute it, so they won't have to put down a near-period competitor.
Now, they're faced with China saying, well, maybe we will exercise our influence here, and they don't know what to do.
They've backed themselves into a corner, basically.
You're talking about our allies in the region or the United States?
Yeah, the United States.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
They seem to think, just as a third-party observer, and someone who's spent quite a bit of time in Asia and the Middle East, there's clearly a disconnect here.
The two sides are talking past one another.
It's U.S. policy to welcome the peaceful rise of China, but it is not going to concede any control whatsoever of what they call green ocean or green no-water power projection capability, which is, of course, in the coastal areas.
The Chinese are saying, well, you had your Monroe Doctrine and your Manifest Destiny, and we've got 3,000 years of regional hegemony in this part of the world, so why can't we be entitled to our natural ascendancy or progression?
There doesn't seem to be any good-faith effort to reconcile these two positions.
If there are disputes in the region that could be a tender keg for conflict, then why aren't we trying to resolve those disputes?
Disputes were made to be resolved.
Well, it goes back to where we started.
It's because whenever there's a question, the Pentagon is the answer, instead of maybe a diplomat going over there and finding out where there's common ground and we can work things out.
Yes, and that gets back to what we were saying about Secretary Clinton.
She's been very aggressive in dealing with China's positions on these disputed territories, and she doesn't seem to be inclined to really take the initiative seriously.
She has said publicly, well, we should engage in a multilateral framework to reconcile these disputes.
To do that publicly, especially with the Chinese, is effectively to preclude any chance of success or any willingness to negotiate in such an environment.
Something like this should be done with a special envoy in a really low-profile way, secret shuttle diplomacy, at least from the outset.
Well, and now what's really to fight about?
I mean, they're not intent on a naval invasion or a recreation of the Japanese empire of World War II era or anything like that, right?
So what's the worry?
Well, to be fair, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, they all have very complicated and in some ways very negative experiences with China going back thousands of years.
This is nothing new to them.
If they have a problem with the Chinese and they can manipulate the United States into assuming the burden of their security needs, then they're very happy with that.
And our military bureaucracy, which includes the whole complex, Congress, the defense contractors, etc., they're very happy to go along for the ride.
I mean, in your article, you say, well, there's competing claims on these tiny little islands and stuff like that.
I mean, is that basically all they have to fight about?
Well, they're mineral rich, so there's a lot of money to be made in exploiting these reserves.
And there were, I don't know, a large percentage of global trade passes through.
So whoever controls them controls the choke points of the global economy, in addition to whatever energy reserves that might be existing there.
So to the countries in the region, it is a very important, it's a very big deal.
One of the points I try to make in the book is that we're talking about, in terms of our allies in the region, Japan, Korea, Singapore, some of the richest countries on earth.
And we've been there, we've been sheltering their burden for since the end of World War II, really.
And it's time to ease away from these decades-long military commitments, and let our allies take up the burden.
We're out of money, but because it's the right thing to do.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Sorry for interrupting.
That's all right.
That's Stephen Glaine, the Pentagon's new China war plan.
This is at Salon.com, you can find the viewpoints at antiwar.com today.
And the book is State versus Defense, the battle to define America's empire.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Thank you for having me.
