John Michael Greer has a review of an important Pentagon document that should chill your spine. It is called the Joint Operations Environment projection for the year 2035 or JOE-35. Greer points out that the environment it envisions is already here. He politely does not mention that a lot of that environment was created by the US national security state in the period after the Cold War or by DARPA in service to the Cold War and post-Cold War US military.
Greer then points out these areas of strategic conflict that the report fails to mention.
- A crisis of legitimacy in the United States
- The marginalization of the United States in the global arena
- The rise of “monkeywrenching” warfare
- The genesis of warband culture in failed states
- The end of the Holocene environmental optimum
This is thought-provoking stuff, but neither the Pentagon study nor John Michael Greer consider the projective nature of their forecasts. They see other nations doing unto the US and US interests what the US has at one time or another done to other states or people since the end of the Cold War.
A careful reading of JOE-35 and John Michael Greer’s analysis should become the impetus for a new global peace initiative not seen since the movement during the Reagan administration that reacted to the analysis of nuclear winter.
Will we?
It is indeed worth your time to read both of these carefully. And much meatier than the latest Trump outrage.
As Sherlock Holmes, might say…all the destabilization we have produced overseas HAS to be deliberate–it is too consistent to be accidental.
Now that USians are being hit with the same methods–well, don’t be surprised.
Are USians being hit with the same methods or is that just the project of the US military. Remember the date on this forecast is 2035.
It is people in the US and Europe who have been writing articles warning about the consequences of drone war, cyberattacks, and cybersabotage of physical infrastructure in attacks like StuxNet.
The government’s attribution of the hacking of the DNC is likely wrong, politically motivated, and following the doctrine of “revisionist states”.
Edward Lucas,DELF, by the Lithuanian Tribune: Russia is winning
Edward Lucas is Senior Fellow at Centre for European Policy Analysis (Washington DC) and Senior Editor at The Economist magazine. The above is his written testimony to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, 3 September 2014.
You begin to see who the think tank players and lobbyists are in this view of international affairs.
Notice that in the 2035 frame the Pentagon does not have to show actual historical facts of evidence of current trends, just cite national security experts.
What is instructive to watch in JOE-35 is the aphorism that lead each section. Notice who those authors are. Virtually every one is a long-time war hawk, going back to Nicholas J. Spykman’s geostrategy of Heartland, Rimland and Offshore Islands and Continents.
“They see other nations doing unto the US and US interests what the US has at one time or another done to other states or people since the end of the Cold War.”
I was thinking along the lines of economic colonization that began to be applied over here 40 yrs ago. The sale of commons and the race to the bottom. We had a few more stabilizers to be overcome, but they are getting there….
Whoa. Jacobin has the blueprint explained….
Some were puzzled by “a contradictory US policy that publicly supports Aristide as `the people’s choice’ while privately grooming those who ardently oppose him.” After all, Clinton went so far as to invade Haiti in order to restore Aristide to power, so wasn’t covert support for the right-wing opposition somewhere between pointless and disastrous?
It was not. As Emmanuel Constant himself explained, the United States asked him to “balance” Aristide’s leftist movement, a task he took to with violent enthusiasm. By supporting the FRAPH, the United States increased its bargaining power in negotiations with Aristide. Returning Aristide to power was conditional on his agreeing to an austerity and privatization program, and through ensuring that Haiti remained divided between competing factions, the Clinton administration was able to ensure that Aristide would be compliant while in office, and not attempt to implement the radical redistributionist economic policies that the IMF and United States feared.
https:/www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/haiti-clinton-guantanamo-hiv-aristide-constant
Also how Bill Clinton foreshadowed Bush’s abuses of detainees in Cuba.
As I remember from the 1990s, US rice growers were a big lobby for ensuring that Haiti continued to import rice from the US instead of producing it locally. US agricultural policy subsidized US production.
Until we can monetize peace, there will be no peace.
A small correction, Dunwoody:
Until we can monetize peace at a rate where it will be more profitable than war, there will be no peace.
Ay, there’s the rub!!!
AG
Tax in time of war. FDR did.
It turns out that under private markets, war is the only legitimate form of full employment. And then, only existential war.
And even then you cannot possibly ever eliminate the underclass that is essential for suppressing wages.
“existential war”
Please elaborate.
AG
World War II was framed as an existential war on two fronts that required a total conscription, a massive war effort, taxes to offset war protiteering and inflation. Even the leaders thought that without an all-out effort Hitler with the help of Japan and Italy could indeed actually invade the continental United States. To their minds, the war threatened the very existence of the United States government.
Vietnam considered the Vietnam War and existential war; the US did not. All of the warhawks tried to argue that it was existential. That’s what the “domino theory” was all about–trying to make the war existential instead of imperial and convenient. But the tell was not full mobilization (LBJ’s “guns and butter” policy) and the failure to extend the draft to every available male 18-45.
This forecast is even further from that sense of existential peril, but its arguments are trying to make the existential case in order to avoid cuts in the military if we actually diplomatically learned how to live with the rest of the world.
When you draft everyone possible, those left behind are at full employment, wages go up (or unions are successful in organizing), the fear of inflation causes prudent leaders to impose taxes and rationing during war in order to avoid a massive debt overhang after the war.
Declarations of war for an existential war are not controversial.
THe brilliance of framing the Cold War is that you could have the context of an existential war without the risks (except when diplomacy got too hardnosed or not-well-thought-out technology signalled false positives of long-range attack. But you could live as if in peace, just with a seemingly unexplained Age of Anxiety in the air.
Didn’t miss it, see my diary …
○ DOD Report: USA Not Exceptional and Threatened by 2035 by Oui on July 30th, 2016
I had forgotten that and even the comment I made at the time. Thanks for bringing that link.
I guess it became more salient in the context of Clinton as the next commander-in-chief and her closeness to exactly these sort of national security folks.
Naked Capitalism had a piece on “Ungovernability” that discusses the legitimacy issue as it develops from the “end of growth” era’s devolution.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/ilargi-ungovernability.html