On Contradiction

The contradictions of China-bashing, US not selling any subs to the Australians, Brain Dead NATO has fully “NATO-ized” the continent.

Jul 13, 2023

UPDATE: The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Chinese spy” balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February 2023 did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China.

US is Tripping on Contradictions

By Richard D. Wolff

The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Chinese spy” balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February 2023 did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China. White House economists have been trying to excuse persistent U.S. inflation saying it is a global problem and inflation is worse elsewhere in the world. China’s inflation rate is 0.7 percent year-on-year. Financial media outlets stress how China’s GDP growth rate is lower than it used to be. China now estimates that its 2023 GDP growth will be 5 to 5.5 percent. Estimates for the U.S. GDP growth rate in 2023, meanwhile, vacillate around 1 to 2 percent.

China-bashing has intensified into denial and self-delusion—it is akin to pretending that the United States did not lose wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more. The BRICS coalition (China and its allies) now has a significantly largerglobal economic footprint (higher total GDP) than the G7 (the United States and its allies). China is outgrowing the rest of the world in research and development expenditures. The American empire (like its foundation, American capitalism) is not the dominating global force it once was right after World War II. The empire and the economy have shrunk in size, power, and influence considerably since then. And they continue to do so. Putting that genie back into the bottle is a battle against history that the United States is not likely to win.

Denial and self-delusion about the changing world economy have led to major strategic mistakes. United States leaders predicted before and shortly after February 2022—when the Ukraine war began—for example, that Russia’s economy would crash from the effects of the “greatest of all sanctions,” led by the United States. Some U.S. leaders still believe that the crash will take place (publicly, if not privately) despite there being no such indication. Such predictions badly miscalculated the economic strength and potential of Russia’s allies in the BRICS. Led by China and India, the BRICS nations responded to Russia’s need for buyers of its oil and gas. The United States made its European allies cut off purchasing Russian oil and gas as part of the sanctions war against the Kremlin over Ukraine. However, U.S. pressure tactics used on China, India, and many other nations (inside and outside BRICS) to likewise stop buying Russian exports failed. They not only purchased oil and gas from Russia but then also reexported some of it to European nations. World power configurations had followed the changes in the world economy at the expense of the U.S. position.

War games with allies, threats from U.S. officials, and U.S. warships off China’s coast may delude some to imagine that these moves intimidate China. The reality is that the military disparity between China and the United States is smaller now than it has ever been in modern China’s history. China’s military alliances are the strongest they have ever been. Intimidation that did not work from the time of the Korean War and since then, will certainly not be effective now. Former President Donald Trump’s tariff and trade wars were aimed, U.S. officials said, to persuade China to change its “authoritarian” economic system. If so, that aim was not achieved. The United States simply lacks the power to force the matter.

American polls suggest that media outlets have been successful in a) portraying China’s advances economically and technologically as a threat, and b) using that threat to lobby against regulations of U.S. high-tech industries. Of course, business opposition to government regulation predates China’s emergence. However, encouraging hostility toward China provides convenient additional cover for all sorts of business interests. China’s technological challenge flows from and depends upon a massive educational effort based on training far more STEM scientists than the United States does. Yet, U.S. business does not support paying taxes to fund education equivalently. The reporting by the media on this issue rarely covers that obvious contradiction and politicians mostly avoid it as dangerous to their electoral prospects.

Scapegoating China joins with scapegoating immigrants, BIPOCs, and many of the other usual targets. The broader decline of the U.S. empire and capitalist economic system confronts the nation with the stark question: whose standard of living will bear the burden of the impact of this decline? The answer to that question has been crystal clear: the government will pursue austerity policies (cut vital public services) and will allow price inflation and then rising interest rates that reduce living standards and jobs.

Coming on top of 2020’s combined economic crash and pandemic, the middle- and-lower-income majority have so far borne most of the cost of the United States’s decline. That has been the pattern followed by declining empires throughout human history: those who control wealth and power are best positioned to offload the costs of decline onto the general population.

The real sufferings of that population cause vulnerability to the political agendas of demagogues. They offer scapegoats to offset popular upset, bitterness, and anger. Leading capitalists and the politicians they own welcome or tolerate scapegoating as a distraction from those leaders’ responsibilities for mass suffering. Demagogic leaders scapegoat old and new targets: immigrants, BIPOCs, women, socialists, liberals, minorities of various kinds, and foreign threats. The scapegoating usually does little more than hurt its intended victims. Its failure to solve any real problem keeps that problem alive and available for demagogues to exploit at a later stage (at least until scapegoating’s victims resist enough to end it).

The contradictions of scapegoating include the dangerous risk that it overflows its original purposes and causes capitalism more problems than it relieves. If anti-immigrant agitation actually slows or stops immigration (as has happened recently in the United States), domestic labor shortages may appear or worsen, which may drive up wages, and thereby hurt profits. If racism similarly leads to disruptive civil disturbances (as has happened recently in France), profits may be depressed. If China-bashing leads the United States and Beijing to move further against U.S. businesses investing in and trading with China, that could prove very costly to the U.S. economy. That this may happen now is a dangerous consequence of China-bashing.

Because they believed it would be in the U.S. interest, then-President Richard Nixon resumed diplomatic and other relations with Beijing during his 1972 trip to the country. Former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong, former Premier Zhou Enlai, and Nixon started a period of economic growth, trade, investment, and prosperity for both China and the United States. The success of that period prompted China to seek to continue it. That same success prompted the United States in recent years to change its attitude and policies. More accurately, that success prompted U.S. political leaders like Trump and Biden to now perceive China as the enemy whose economic development represents a threat. They demonize the Beijing leadership accordingly.

The majority of U.S. megacorporations disagrees. They profited mightily from their access to the Chinese labor force and the rapidly growing Chinese market since the 1980s. That was a large part of what they meant when they celebrated “neoliberal globalization.” A significant part of the U.S. business community, however, wants continued access to China.

The fight inside the United States now pits major parts of the U.S. business community against Biden and his equally “neoconservative” foreign policy advisers. The outcome of that fight depends on domestic economic conditions, the presidential election campaign, and the political fallout of the Ukraine war as well the ongoing twists and turns of the China-U.S. relations. The outcome also depends on how the masses of Chinese and U.S. people understand and intervene in relations between these two countries. Will they see through the contradictions of China-bashing to prevent war, seek mutual accommodation, and thereby rebuild a new version of the joint prosperity that existed before Trump and Biden?

US cannot sell Australia nuclear subs

By Brian Toohey

The good news is the US can’t sell Australia the three to five used Virginia class nuclear subs that the Albanese government has announced it will buy. Nor will it sell us any new ones.The chief of US Naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday was recently reported from Washington as saying the US shipyards are only producing subs at a rate of about 1.2 a year. He says a minimum of two a year is needed to fill the Navy’s own requirements. Until then, he said, “We’re not going to be in a position to sell any to the Australians”. A senior Biden advisor, Kurt Campbell added there was also “a troublingly large number of submarines in drydock that needed to be back into the water quickly”.

If Albanese were genuinely a good friend of America, he would say, “We don’t want to deprive you of any nuclear submarines, so we’ll buy readily available conventional subs that serve our needs”. Instead of grabbing this chance to get out of an impossible commitment, he behaves as if everything is still on track.

Another reason to abandon the whole idea of getting US nuclear subs is that Campbell also said that if any were sold to Australia, they would not be “lost to America”. In other words, the US could use them whenever it liked under the policy the Defence minister, Richard Marles has announced of making Australia’s equipment “interchangeable” with the Americans. Contrary to Albanese and Marles’ claims, we can’t have a sovereign capability if we have to hand back US equipment we’ve just bought from it.

Selling Australia second hand subs is not feasible either, as it would reduce the total number available in the US fleet. At present, the US has 21 Virginia attack class submarines and 29 older Los Angeles class that make up its previous target of 50. Serious maintenance problems mean that only a quarter of the Virginia class are available for operational duties. As a result, only a quarter of the total fleet is operationally available at any one time.

In April, Newsweek explained the maintenance problems with the Virginia class have led the Pentagon to increase the total number of attack submarines from 50 to 66. Newsweek said nuclear submarines “have become so complex, the only way the Navy can appreciably increase its level of operations against Russia, and China is by building many more”. The Albanese government has promised to inject $3bn into the US shipyards. The US spends almost $900 bn a year on its notoriously wasteful military. Our $3 bn won’t make a difference.

The US has two good agencies overseeing procurement problems with military equipment – the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office, plus knowledgeable American journalists. The reports from these sources are readily available, so why hasn’t the Defence department kept the government aware of the pitfalls in its chosen path to obtain nuclear subs? One plausible possibility is no one in the Defence department reads these reports. Another is that the Albanese government doesn’t want to hear bad news with a pet project.

The second hand US subs were due to start arriving in 2035 to fill the gap until we build eight of our own in Adelaide each displacing about 10,000 tonnes. However, it is highly likely that less than two will be available for operational duty. Part of the reason is that these subs, called the “AUKUS” class, will be designed by a combination of Australia, the US and the UK – a recipe for confusion, squabbling and delay. Yet the government has estimated that, including contingencies, they could cost $368 bn by 2050.

In contrast, most modern conventional subs have very low maintenance costs. It would enhance Australia’s defence preparedness if it did the obvious thing and dropped it attempts to get nuclear subs and bought readily available smaller conventional ones that are superior in almost every respect to nukes.

One big disadvantage of a US nuclear reactor is it uses weapons grade uranium fuel that has to be dismantled after the sub finishes its 33-year life. The fuel then has to be processed overseas, returned to Australia, buried in thick drums a minimum of 400 metres below stable rock and monitored for several hundred years.

These subs don’t even use nuclear propulsion. Instead, they are propelled by steam engines, like Puffing Billy. All the nuclear reactor does is heat the water to make the steam. It’s a glorified hot water system. Another big drawback is that hot water from the reactor is continuously expelled from a nuke, creating an infrared signature detectable from space. Other than at low speed, nukes leave an easily detected wake on the surface.

Worse, Rex Patrick, a former submariner and ex-Senator, has pointed out that once nuclear submarines go above a low speed, acoustic tiles on their hulls become loose and start to flap, making an easily detected noise, before some fall off. After startling photos of the extensive damage were shown to a Parliamentary committee hearing, Admiral Hammond protested the photos were taken at the end of a long patrols. But long voyages at high-speed are supposed to be a great advantage of nuclear submarines. Patrick said, “I wonder how comfortable the Admiral would be landing at Heathrow Airport in London from Sydney, with the captain advising that the parts of the wings normally fall off on long haul flights”.

It’s now widely accepted that advances in sensor technology and data processing will render oceans transparent by 2050. Large metal boats travelling underwater will be more easily detected and destroyed than smaller ones. But Vice Admiral Mead, who had 350 staff working on the best way to get nukes, said in an interview with the Guardian that the answer to this problem is to use small underwater drones controlled from a nuke at a safe distance. Underwater drones have a big future. However, it is much better to control them from a cheap platform rather than a massively expensive remote control device called a nuclear submarine that can’t risk being detected doing what it was purchased for.

The first of the eight we build in Adelaide might not be operationally available to almost 2050 and the last by 2070. This assumes nothing will change in the strategic outlook before then. No one knows what the future holds. Peace might have broken out if we take arms control seriously, or a war may start in response to fake intelligence about Taiwan. In the circumstances, we would be wise not to get big, expensive, easily detected submarines which will be increasingly useless.

This means choosing smaller modern conventional ones, but not the Navy’s plans for a newly built version of the clapped-out Collins class, called the “Son of Collins”, that is meant to fill the gap between when Collins class starts retiring in 2026 and the nukes eventually arrive. This stop gap sub will still use lead acid batteries which have to be charged every couple of days. This requires surfacing to put up a snorkel that can be detected by radar, when the sub can be sunk.

Because the Navy insists on keeping lead acid batteries, the Son of Collins can’t achieve near silent operation by using modern high-performance batteries that only have to be charged every three weeks or even later. Much quieter operation can also be achieved by using a hydrogen fuel cell or sterling engine for propulsion, but the Navy doesn’t like those either. Apparently, survival of the crew and the sub it’s not a priority for the current Labor Party leadership.

Options include a German designed sub similar to those by Singapore and others. It has a long range, a fuel cell and crew of 28 – a big advantage when the Navy finds it hard to recruit crew. The Collins class has about 52 crew; a nuclear sub about 130. The Japanese Navy is already operating a fully electric sub with a crew of 70. It insists the chemical compound in the batteries is safe and achieves a high speed and long endurance. Because lithium ion batteries can catch fire, its essential to use a safe compound for the battery chemistry. The Germans are offering a lithium iron [ion] phosphate battery that should be safe and cheaper. The Swedish A26 sub has a small crew and a sterling engine. South Korea will soon launch a big sub with what it says is a crew of 50 and safe modern electric batteries. However, bigger subs can be easier to detect.

Figures Rex Patrick got from the Parliamentary research service show we could get 12 of these modern, high-quality conventional submarines for a project cost of $18 bn. This is a bargain compared to the government’s estimate of $368 bn for N subs. The next most expensive program is $16 bn for 72 F-35 trouble plagued fighter planes.

The value of submarines is often overstated. In many cases, fighter planes, maritime patrol planes or drones would be more useful. A fighter plane could sink an enemy ship in the Indian Ocean in the morning, refuel at its base at Tindal in the Northern Territory, and sink another one in the afternoon. A nuclear submarine would take much longer to cover the required distance from its base at Fremantle.

The value of being hard to detect was demonstrated in two exercises. In one off Hawaii called Rimpac, a German designed South Korean sub “sunk” the entire US surface fleet without being detected in a two week exercise. A Swedish sub did the same in an exercise in the Mediterranean. The US Navy then leased two Swedish subs to let their carriers practice finding them.

Nuclear subs also don’t have an impeccable safety record. In October 2021 the USS Connecticut ran into an undersea mountain in the South China Sea, injuring 11 sailors. The Navy subsequently relieved the commanding officer, executive officer and the boat’s chief of their duties. An official inquiry found, “Grounding at this speed and depth had the potential for more serious injuries, fatalities and even the loss of the ship”. Photos of the Connecticut show it tethered to a tug to stay afloat and with its bow sheared off and its sonar dome missing. Although the South China Sea is a very crowded, the US sub turned off its sonar pings which basically let it “see” where it’s going. Next time it could run into a friendly sub in the SCS.

Australia doesn’t need to regularly deploy submarines into Southeast Asia, let alone up near China. Our subs are not needed because Japan, South Korea, Singapore and US all have submarines closer than us to China, the target. The Defence Strategic Review clearly recommends that Australia’s “northern approaches should be the primary area of military interest”. That’s where our submarines should mainly be deployed to dissuade an enemy entering waters where they could be sunk by one of our submarines.

To justify buying Nukes, Albanese and Marles have revived the discredited doctrine of forward defence. It failed Australia with destruction of the big British naval base at Singapore that was supposed to provide forward defence before WW2. The Vietnam war was supposed to do the same but didn’t.

Now Marles and Albanese justify buying Nukes because they could be forward deployed off the Chinese coast to fire cruise missiles into the mainland. Once the first missiIe was fired, it would be detected and the sub could be sunk, leaving us with only one operational one.

To his great credit, the coalition defence minister in 1969, Allan Fairhall accepted there was no threat from Vietnam to Australia and scrapped the forward defence doctrine in favour of defending Australia closer to home.

It should never be forgotten Vietnam won the war at an estimated cost of 3 million lives. It still shows no sign of invading Australia. Nor does modern China. It has never started a major war of aggression, unlike the US and Australia.

Albanese showed little interest in defence before becoming PM. He has a loose grip on the subject. He said in interview in December last year, “Because of our values, Australia won’t attack any other nation”. But it did so in Iraq in 2003 and Vietnam in 1965. As far as I’m aware, the rest of the mainstream media did not report this staggering display of ignorance.

The Albanese government refuses to rock the boat on most domestic policy issues. But it is extremely radical in pushing so hard to get nuclear submarines, despite all the reasons outlined above not to do so.

NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is

By Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney

NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to toast their success. Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of “brain death.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed. As NATO plans to welcome Sweden into its ranks — Finland became a full-fledged member in April — and dispatch troops to reinforce its eastern flank, European Union allies are finally making good on long-deferred promises to increase military spending. Public opinion has followed suit. If Russia sought to divide Europe, President Biden could plausibly declare last spring that it had instead fully “NATO-ized” the continent.

This turnabout has understandably energized the alliance’s supporters. The statement of purpose from Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary general, that “the strength of NATO is the best possible tool we have to maintain peace and security” has never had more loyal adherents. Even critics of the organization — such as China hawks who see it as a distraction from the real threat in East Asia and restrainers who would prefer that Washington refocus on diplomatic solutions and problems at home — concede that NATO’s purpose is primarily the defense of Europe.

But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Fielding 100 divisions at its Cold War height, a small fraction of Warsaw Pact manpower, the organization could not be counted on to repel a Soviet invasion and even the continent’s nuclear weapons were under Washington’s control. Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful.

Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organisation truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

When European populations proved too stubborn, or undesirably swayed by socialist or nationalist sentiments, Atlantic integration proceeded all the same. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later. The new century brought more of the same, with an appropriate shift in emphasis. Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans. The war in Ukraine, for all the talk of Europe stepping up, has left that asymmetry essentially untouched. Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined. European spending pledges may also turn out to be less impressive than they appear. More than a year after the German government publicized the creation of a special $110 billion fund for its armed forces, the bulk of the credits remain unused. In the meantime, German military commanders have said that they lack sufficient munitions for more than two days of high-intensity combat.

Whatever the levels of expenditure, it is remarkable how little military capability Europeans get for the outlays involved. Lack of coordination, as much as penny-pinching, hamstrings Europe’s ability to ensure its own security. By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap. U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s annual budget — less than 6 percent by a recent estimate. And the war has only strengthened America’s hand. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, roughly half of European military spending went to American manufacturers. Surging demand has exacerbated this tendency as buyers rush to acquire tanks, combat aircraft and other weapons systems, locking into costly, multiyear contracts. Europe may be remilitarizing, but America is reaping the rewards.

In Ukraine, the pattern is clear. Washington will provide the military security, and its corporations will benefit from a bonanza of European armament orders, while Europeans will shoulder the cost of postwar reconstruction — something Germany is better poised to accomplish than the buildup of its military. The war also serves as a dress rehearsal for U.S. confrontation with China, in which European support cannot be so easily counted on. Limiting Beijing’s access to strategic technologies and promoting American industry are hardly European priorities, and severing European and Chinese trade is still difficult to imagine. Yet already there are signs that NATO is making headway in getting Europe to follow its lead in the theater. On the eve of a visit to Washington at the end of June, Germany’s defense minister duly advertised his awareness of “European responsibility for the Indo-Pacific” and the importance of “the rules-based international order” in the South China Sea.

No matter their ascendance, Atlanticists fret over support for the organization being undermined by disinformation and cybermeddling. They needn’t worry. Contested throughout the Cold War, NATO remained a subject of controversy into the 1990s, when the disappearance of its adversary encouraged thoughts of a new European security architecture. Today, dissent is less audible than ever before.

Left parties in Europe, historically critical of militarism and American power, have overwhelmingly enlisted in the defense of the West: The trajectory of the German Greens, from fierce opponents of nuclear weapons to a party seemingly willing to risk atomic war, is a particularly vivid illustration. Stateside, criticism of NATO focuses on the risks of overextending U.S. treaty obligations, not their underlying justification. The most successful alliance in history, gathering in celebration of itself, need not wait for its 75th anniversary next year to uncork the champagne.

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