Pentagon “Preemptive Strike” Plan For North Korea (FIRE AND FURY, REDUX)
August 13, 2017Vermont’s Green Mountain Power Moves Towards Decentralized Energy Grid (New York Times)
August 14, 2017Publisher’s Note: This is the seventh installment in our geoengineering series. Our skies are our most visible and vital global Commons, and they are under siege by powerful forces we are just beginning to understand. Our Geoengineering Age series tells the story of the most important and underreported global environmental phenomenon of our time, and is researched and written by Chelsea Green co-founder Ian Baldwin.
Our story begins with Installment #1 – “Monkey Wrenching Vermont’s Night Sky” – here.
It is not possible to grasp the preposterous idea that covert military geoengineering is taking place on a planetary scale without our consent unless we understand its historic context, its roots. What is the cultural, political, even civilizational background that has given rise to the outrageous possibility of deliberately altering — or “dominating” — an entire Earth system, such as the climate, or the ionosphere?
When the Soviet Union began to dissolve in 1989, two years later formally ceasing to exist as a contestant in the decades-long quest for world dominance, the Cold War between the two rival empires ended. The US alone remained to lead the world into a future in which the shadow of nuclear doom momentarily paled.
What next? Would the US midwife the arduous transition toward a multipolar democratic world, now that the world was otherwise unified under the banner of global capitalism and economic growth? Would the US commence the painful but essential demilitarization of its economy, whose antidemocratic effects General and President Eisenhower had so dramatically warned his fellow citizens about a generation earlier? [1] Would the US begin the long process of liberating some of the resources it allocated for war to make a momentous, concerted shift to a non-fossil-fuel energy economy, and in the process of doing so lead the world toward a radical reduction of humanity’s CO2 planetary footprint?
As we know, the US decided otherwise.
Full Spectrum Dominance: “The Plan” to Control the Planet
(For further detail on the US military’s involvement in the geoengineering dimension of full spectrum dominance see Installment 3 and Installment 6.)
The answer as to what top Pentagon elites were thinking about the post-Cold War world surfaced in a DoD planning document, a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 Fiscal Years leaked to the New York Times in early March 1992. “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower,” the Times reported, adding that the document maintained the US should “reserve the option to act unilaterally or through selective coalitions” as opposed to relying on the now limp UN security system US leadership had created in 1945. The Pentagon envisioned “one dominant military power, whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” [2, emphasis added]
Thus, India must not have “aspirations” of great influence in the Indian Ocean region, nor China, the South China Sea, nor Russia in its contiguous former republics. To manifest such aspirations was to risk becoming a “hostile” power. For that matter allies like Europe must not, at least explicitly, presume to rival the global hegemon in Europe’s own foreign affairs, i.e., in its dealings with contiguous Russia, much less in its dealings with the nearby nations of the Middle East and North Africa. The US must “endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region,” in particular “a region whose resources could…be sufficient to generate global power.” [3] Since Russia, all by itself — within its own sovereign borders — was such a “region,” it unknowingly sat on a fuse, a fuse that in a few years’ time would inevitably be ignited.
David Armstrong, writing for Harper’s Magazine a decade later, referred to the evolution of the DoD’s new military doctrine as “Cheney’s masterwork,” as Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense when the first draft of the 1994–1999 Guide was launched under his aegis in 1992 and Vice President of the US when Defense Planning Guidance for the 2004-2009 Fiscal Years was released by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2002. Armstrong refers to the series of documents that make up Cheney’s masterwork as “the Plan.” “The Plan is for the United States to rule the world,” and its “overall theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately…[about] domination…domination over friends and enemies alike…not that the United States must be powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.” [4]
Miller Cylindrical Projection Map of global DOD COMMANDS, courtesy of the Pentagon.
As the Pentagon’s own Unified Command Plan map clearly shows, no country on Earth does not lie within one of these six territorially-based “commands”: Russia lies inside USEUCOM, as do all European nations; China, inside USPACOM, along with India; Iran, in USCENTCOM; Brazil, in USSOUTHCOM; Mexico, in NORTHCOM: and South Africa and Nigeria in AFRICOM. No “potential regional power” is left outside the gaze of the eagle’s piercing eye.
The first document to use the term “full spectrum dominance” was the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Vision 2010, released in 1996 during the Clinton administration. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower, “Since 1996, the Pentagon’s proclaimed mission is to maintain ‘full-spectrum dominance’ in every domain (land, sea, air, space, and information) and…in every accessible part of the world.” To this end “the Department of Defense acknowledged maintaining 4,855 physical ‘sites’” worldwide, with an unofficial count in 2015 of around 800 bases in 80 countries, while “elite US special operations forces were deployed to around 150 countries,” or over three-quarters of Earth’s “sovereign” nations. Additional countries were “provided assistance in arming and training security forces,” a way of incorporating such countries into the Pentagon’s “command” orbit. [5]
It is important to recall that in the 1990s and well into the 2000s there were no even ostensible challengers to the globally extensive power of the US, including both Russia and China. The US was the uncontested Lord of the Universe. Joint Vision 2020, issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2000, declared “The label full spectrum dominance implies that U.S. forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains — space, sea, land, air, and information.” [6, emphasis added]
The start of concerted clandestine geoengineering operations began, according to the best evidence we have (as we shall see in later installments), after the Cold War had ended, during the 1990s. The full-bore imperial attitude of US military elites was clearly expressed after 1992 in their own public documents, explaining repeatedly what they meant by “Full Spectrum Dominance.” These documents themselves grew out of an economy geared to permanent war production that has commanded a majority of the nation’s scientific, engineering, and technical talent for many decades. The pride of intellect in its science-based products, its “shock-and-awe” weaponry, has led to an overweening sense of US superiority over all other nations.
How do we comprehend this radical hubris, this self-arrogated “right” to unilaterally control — to dominate — all the nations of the world, a hubris that appears to have arisen seemingly overnight during the 1990s? A hubris that presumes the right to control the climate? (For more detail, see Installment 6.)
The Permanent War Economy and the Need for an Enemy
(For further detail on the US military’s involvement in the geoengineering dimension of full spectrum dominance see Installment 3 and Installment 6.)
In fact the US doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance emerged slowly, over a period of many decades, and in some important respects, over the course of centuries. Canadian historian Jacques Pauwels maintains that during and immediately after WW II US elites designed an economic and political system to keep “the ghost of disharmony between supply and demand” at bay. The memory of the recent more-than-decade-long Great Depression still haunted the minds of Americans during WW II and it “threated to return to haunt America again” when the war ended. [7]
Mobilizing its entire industrial capacity for the purpose of waging a global war had shown US leaders that military state expenditures were the source of high profits — state-guaranteed profits — near-full employment, and economic and social stability.
As a result, to solve the chronically debilitating problem of recurrent depressions and recessions US elites organized a “permanent war economy” in which corporate executives and Pentagon officials were “oriented to the maximization of subsidy payments from the federal government” to the top manufacturing corporations, a unique civilian-military hybrid according to the economist Seymour Melman, who devoted a lifetime to the study of the Pentagon’s political economy. [8]
Investment of the lion’s share of government revenues in the war economy, however, skewed the overall US economy because the military claimed more than half of all the US’s scientific-technical human resources, weakening the long-term health of the civilian economy, especially its manufacturing sector. [9]
For over 70 years the “virtual guarantee of profits by the State” to the top defense contractors [10] has been a guarantee Congress has always willingly provided, making Congress an integral part of the military-industrial complex, along with the nation’s top research universities, as President Eisenhower so clearly saw and warned about [11]. According to Melman this civilian-military hybrid economy, or “new state capitalist economy,” grew “to dominate the American economy as a whole while undermining its competence as a productive system” for making civilian goods, because the permanent war economy “came to be the key strategy for fighting the Cold War” [12] — as well as keeping economic depression at bay.
Our economy placed its biggest bets not in producing consumer goods, but in producing the gadgets and weaponry of hi-tech warfare. These bets led the nation into the long “deindustrialization” spiral of its once enviable consumer-goods-based economy. Deindustrialization “has increased U.S. state managers’ reliance on military might” — on the US’s ever-booming war economy — so that “[o]perating a permanent war economy is now the main continuing activity of the U.S. government, dominating its spending and determining the number of people it employs.” [13]
In this perspective, military geoengineering may be one more venue through which the military-industrial complex enlarges not only its opportunities for power over nations and Earth’s land, sea, air, and space “domains,” but also for profits. John Dower reminds us, “Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly — and remunerative.” [14, emphasis added] It would be foolish to ignore enduring commercial motives. They almost certainly inform geoengineering schemes as well as they do warfare schemes.
At WW II’s end, according to Pauwels, “new enemies and new war threats were urgently needed” to provide a credible rationale for an ongoing war economy, adding that “[m]ost American historians now admit that in 1945 the Soviet Union, a country that had suffered enormously during the war, did not constitute a threat…to the economically and militarily far superior USA.” [15] But the Soviet Union, embodying what Herbert Hoover had called “the specter of Bolshevism” and dreaded by the Axis and its fellow Allied powers alike [16], was in retrospect an ideal enemy precisely because it was an ideological enemy.
“America, whose existence has never been threatened by any war other than the Civil War,” the English historian Eric Hobsbawm observed, “has only ideologically defined enemies: those who reject the American way of life.” [17] In February 1946 the State Department’s George Kennan’s “long telegram” from Moscow warning Washington of the world ambition, the disciplined patience, and the ruthless cunning of the Soviet empire catalyzed the US decision to launch the Cold War. By 1950 the decision was cemented in place in the classified government-planning document, NSC-68 [18]. “‘Our policy and action,’ warned NSC-68, ‘must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet System’. Any less global imperial policy would have ‘a drastic effect on our belief in ourselves and in our way of life’.” [19]
Newly conjured, the Soviet enemy was an ideological enemy, that is, an enemy who challenged “our belief in ourselves and in our way of life,” and whose own system, or “way of life” therefore had to be changed. Those grounds alone were sufficient for the US government to mobilize the latent ideological and security fears of its citizenry and gain its support for an unprecedentedly expensive permanent war economy.
The West and Its Imperial Offspring
(For further background on the relevance of empire and resources to geoengineering, see Installment 5.)
Neither full spectrum dominance nor ideological necessity, however, is a new idea or motivation in the history of modern empire. “The Portuguese,” the first Europeans to set out in the service of a sovereign to explore the maritime world beyond Mediterranean Sea, “believed that they came by permission of the pope and the will of God to secure the commerce of India.” [20] One of the greatest of the early imperialist explorers, Vasco da Gama, declared to a startled sultan on the shores of the Indian Ocean: “this is the fleet of the king of Portugal my sovereign, who is lord of the sea, the world, and also of all this coast.” [21] For millennia a panopoly of civilizations had conducted long-distance trade across the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean without one-power dominance, until the Portuguese showed up.
In fact Da Gama spoke in error. Portugal presumptively ruled but half the world. The other half, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas negotiated by Spain and Portugal in 1494 and ratified by the pope, was ruled by Spain. The Treaty of Tordesillas “simply cut the globe in two with a vertical line through the Atlantic Ocean ‘from the Arctic to the Antarctic’.” [22] All lands to the East belonged to the Portuguese and to the West, to the Spanish. Pope Pius III later ratified, as the supreme head of the Christian Church, this sober division of the world, over which his rule, in the name of Christ, was entire.
Map of the World under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.
In his absorbing account of the early decades of the Portuguese empire, Roger Crowley writes that the “Portuguese came from an arena of fierce competition, rooted hatreds, and the military application of advanced technologies in navigation and artillery,” adding that the “Iberian powers who had carved up the world at Tordesillas in 1494 were conditioned to believe in monopoly trading and the obligation to crusade.” [23] This description more or less fits all the European empires that followed the Portuguese, including the American.
Ideology (whether religious devotion or, later, devotion to democracy, freedom, and progress) and technological dominance combined to conspire with the oldest motivation of all — loot, riches, financial gain — to “set in motion five hundred years of Western expansionism and the forces of globalization” that are still shaping the world today. [24]
Four hundred years after the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English empires had all reached their climaxes, the epicenter of the West shifted to the US. In the words of the historian of empires and civilizations, Samuel Huntington, the US “has always been a missionary nation.” [25] During America’s strenuous early history, European settlers pushed the confines of the “untamed wilderness” ever westward, until the Apaches led by Geronimo finally surrendered in 1886 and the last Indian battle was fought at Wounded Knee by the Dakota Sioux in 1890. In the course of their constantly expanding frontiers, white “Americans increasingly defined safety in terms of conquest — or at any rate domination.” [26]
Once the US’s continental wars ended, its overseas imperial wars began, precipitating an intense national debate at the dawn of the 20th century between imperialist and anti-imperialist factions.
President Woodrow Wilson won the debate by elevating the imperialists’ argument above the geopolitical fray of “corrupt” European colonial-power politics, and persuaded ordinary Americans to adopt a new sense of national mission. Wilson “wished to see America not only as a champion of its own freedom,” the focus of its 19th century identity, “but as ‘champion’ of the cause of human liberty, going abroad in search of ‘monsters’ — the enemies of freedom — to destroy.” [27] It was a noble cause “ordained by God for all mankind.” [28, emphasis added]. In a time of huge influxes of non-English-speaking southern and eastern Europeans “the significance of being American” consisted not in “ethnic or religious characteristics but faith in freedom” and that this faith “constituted the American character, what he [Wilson] called ‘Americanism’.” [29]
The Wilsonian legacy took hold during WW II and ever since that war Americans have been imbued with the sense that making the world like America was their sacred trust and obligation to all the world’s people. Strangely no institution was better endowed, in American eyes, than the US military to guarantee the cultural mission of Americanism, of making the world safe for democracy and freedom. When the Soviet Union self-imploded, however, the ensuing power vacuum posed a graver and more complicated threat to US hegemony than most realized.
The end of the Cold War stripped the West of its idealistic rationale for expansion. After 1991 US military interventions could not be credibly described as spreading freedom and democracy — a claim former DoD official Daniel Ellesberg flatly asserted “is false…a cover story.” [30] In the middle of the Soviet implosion the ideological vacuum was further heightened by a massive US-led invasion of Iraq. The First Gulf War raised in view the possibility of the most enduring of imperialism’s purposes: resource plunder — or more precisely, control over the flow of Persian Gulf oil. [31]
The US neoconservative dream of a “new Pearl Harbor” to “rebuild America’s defenses” [32] and mobilize its beleaguered citizens to get behind a rejuvenated permanent war economy was fulfilled on September 11, 2001. Ten days after the attacks, in a seminal speech President Bush concisely outlined the who, what, and how of the new ideological enemy the US and the West suddenly faced:
“On September the 11th , enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country….These terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism….There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries….They hate our freedoms….They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century… fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism….Americans should…expect a lengthy campaign unlike any other….Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom….Perhaps the NATO charter reflects best the attitude of the world: An attack on one is an attack on all….The advance of human freedom…now depends on us….and we know that God is not neutral between [us and] them.” [33]
The speech made plain that the US — “America” — is not only the leader of the West, but also of the world, and of the world’s one true “civilization” (on whose side God stands). The launch of the Global War on Terror (rechristened the Long War by the Obama administration) was the new ideological framework under which the West, and presumptively the world, would stand firm under NATO’s banner, the banner of the West, the banner of “civilization,” as the world’s new de facto global police force.
The power American elites hold over the judgment of their citizens regarding war and peace is culturally deep-rooted and reliable, provided the threat can be crafted as un-American, and potentially harmful to the American Way of Life. That the “terrorists” were Muslims of varying national origins tapped into the deep legacy of Europe’s Christian Crusades, a legacy that powerfully influenced the momentum of the West’s first overseas empires. [34]
An expanding globalized economy — free of terrorism — meant economic growth for all, the basis of freedom, and American security. [35] As we have seen, during and immediately after WW II US elites placed their faith in a permanent war economy as the best guarantor of long-term growth and economic security. “Economic freedom was the foundation of all freedom…for that reason…the [US] system had at all costs to be maintained through expansion.” [36] Throughout our history our American sense of freedom and liberty has been tied to security, to being unopposed in our way of life. As many of the founders of our nation and our greatest statesmen understood, empire — sometimes called “benevolent empire” — and freedom were indissoluble. Both were practical and psychological necessities.
The Raw and the Cooked: Freedom and Democracy vs. Power and Plunder
The post-Cold War geopolitical challenge to the mission of Full Spectrum Dominance arose not for lofty reasons but because US dependence “on imported oil” had been “a central feature of the US economy for fifty years,” and, despite the fact that “the US consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s oil production,” it “controls less than 3 percent of an increasingly tight [long-term] supply” according to a 2009 CNA report entitled “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risk to National Security.” And “US supremacy rests on…[its] influence over fossil fuel energy markets.” [37]
The energy situation that confronts the US and its globally dispersed, oil-ravenous military is of course even more drastic for its oldest allies, Western Europe and Japan. For them the energy stakes, in the form of precious imports, are higher. Much higher.
Control of world oil has been a foremost US foreign policy concern ever since President Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi monarchy, on the USS Quincy in February 1945 and “permanently linked Middle Eastern oil with American national security.” [38] In the fossil-fuel mix that is projected to yield on the order of 80 percent of the world’s energy needs as late as 2040, oil’s importance may be slowly giving way to natural gas. Many hope for an “All Electric Economy,” but that economy is likely to be dependent for decades on fossil fuels and nuclear energy, which currently provide about three-quarters of the energy needed to power the world’s electrical grids.
In the decades-long transition to an all-electric economy no fuel is likely to be more important than natural gas, which currently supplies over one-fifth of the world’s electric power. Unfortunately for the West — guided as it is by the US’s militarized full-spectrum-dominance foreign policy — well over half the world’s proven natural gas reserves are concentrated in just three nations: Russia, Iran, and Qatar. Almost inevitably, under the US doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, these nations are likely to be deemed “hostile” unless they surrender their sovereignty (or undergo “regime change”).
This situation highlights a US historian’s conclusion about the US’s Middle East policy: “The increasing willingness of the United States to use force and violence to shore up the flow of oil [and natural gas] to foreign markets has not been a sign of American strength but rather of its limits.” [39, Jones] (For a look at the new, emergent world energy and natural resources order, see Installment 5.)
Empire = One Civilization
While it is universally appreciated that empires subsist through expansion, either by conquest or by less direct means of control, it is less widely appreciated that, in a full world, the practice of empire-building and its accompanying militarism and environmental violence are anachronistic habits likely to be fatal to the future of all civilizations — those “mortal but…very long-lived…most enduring of human associations.” Professor Huntington maintains the “most important groupings of states are…the world’s seven or eight major civilizations” which he describes as Islamic, Hindu, Sinic/Confucian, Japanese, Latin American, sub-Saharan African, Orthodox Christian, and Western. [40]. (Indigenous cultures of course exist outside these larger human collectivities.)
Huntington warns against our hubristic “illusions and prejudices” that “live on…and have blossomed forth in the widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the West is now the universal civilization of the world.” [41] Paradoxically the West’s gift to the complicated human universe of civilizations has undermined its claim to universality and global dominance. That gift, a complex of mental disciplines and habits institutionalized under the term “modernization,” is the great leveling force now at work amid the community of civilizations, cultures, and nations. Modernization “strengthens” all civilizations — and thus “reduces the relative power of the West.” [42]
Breaking the 500-year-old habit of territorial, intellectual, and moral empire building will not be easy for those Westerners — the global “monoculturalists” among us — who regard Western civilization as universal. Believing in their civilization’s universality gives the monocultural supremicists license to participate in imperialism, itself “the necessary logical consequence of universalism.” [43] There is no other way to fully understand, for instance, European participation in US-led the 21st century wars of domination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
The commonplace puerile juxtaposition of “good” versus “evil” among US leaders speaking about the state of international affairs, the continuous casual mention of “good guys” versus “bad guys” in Western war theaters gives a disturbing impression of American psychological maturity. According to a Chinese scholar and US historian, “[s]uch rhetoric implies that the failure of freedom and democracy anywhere in the world is a defeat for America that will affect American security,” making it “therefore necessary for America to resist any threat to freedom and democracy, no matter where.” [44] Offsetting this historian’s insight is the fact that the US and the West eschew their principles and support some of the world’s most repressive autocratic regimes (Saudi Arabia is but one) whenever it suits their imperial interests to do so.
In the end plunder — resources — trumps ideology.
Parading before the world as the “sole superpower” and “champion of liberty and democracy,” possessed of an absolute power to dominate others “may intoxicate Americans, but cannot help them handle their increasingly complex relations with the outside world.” [45]
Conclusion: Full Spectrum Dominance and the Geoengineering Prospect
(For further background on the rise of the military geoengineering complex, see Installment 3 and Installment 4).
Alexander Hamilton’s warning that “frequent hostility” would give birth to “disciplined [professional] armies” to which citizens would look for protection, came to be true for the US republic after WW II, because “perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it…The continual necessity for their [the military’s] services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionately degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil…and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors. [46, emphasis added]
Inside the world’s largest corporation, whose real annual military or “defense” budget has exceeded $1 trillion dollars for many years [47], “the dominant measure of success” is not profits — those are the concern of private corporate contractors and their myriad subcontractors — but “gain in power, the ability to control the behavior of…whole nations.” [48] As Daniel Ellsberg once said, “America’s leaders inside the military-industrial complex believe” they can run foreign countries “‘better than they [those countries] would run themselves’.” [49]
Such arrogant confidence grows like a poisonous vine out of what President Eisenhower warned was the military-industrial complex’s “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [that] is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government…Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.” [50] Decades ago investigative reporter Fred J Cook warned that when a quarter or more US jobs directly or indirectly depend on arms spending, “self-interest in military spending becomes a national disease…every food store, every gas station feels it has a stake in keeping the war plants going.” [51]
A strange, inordinate fear compels us Americans not to change our bloated military economy, which has freighted us down with debt we can never repay. We the people are in thrall to our military. Our thralldom means we are loathe to question its programs, and especially its covert programs, no matter how inimical to humanity. As Bill Moyers said to Seymour Melman, a passionate advocate for the civilian economy: “…you have not reached the men and women who work in the General Dynamics of America, the second-, third-, fourth-generation families working for this company. It’s not…a company, it’s a culture…with thousands upon thousands of families. You haven’t convinced them that they can make as good a living in a civilian economy as they can living off the Pentagon’s defense budget.” [52]
Americans do not want to look their gift horse in the mouth. Besides, as US Naval Academy historian Aaron B O’Connell points out, “the military is the true ‘third rail’ of American politics.” [53] Touch it and you die.
Military geoengineering? It’s none of my business.
Since the Cold War ended the US has been constantly at war yet no enduring anti-war movement of consequence has materialized, even though “[o]ur culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era” and we “are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas.” [54]
The same “participation mystique” that partially explains European involvement in US-led Middle Eastern wars, explains, at least in part, the widespread acquiescence of Westerners — a deaf, blind, and speechless acquiescence — in their military’s deadly, clandestine geoengineering, as well as their endless wars of domination. “The ceaseless US quest to maintain massive ‘technological asymmetry’ militarily,” one of the presumable motives of ongoing geoengineering projects, “is guaranteed to keep arms races of every sort going.” [55, Dower, p 110] It’s good for “business.” And it keeps university-industrial-military classified research programs humming.
Geoengineering depends on these classified research programs to provide the US with the technological superiority necessary to control nations and the planetary environment. Empire needs to exercise control over the world’s “diminishing resources,” its wobbly climate, and the communications segment of its command, control, and communications global system.
Full spectrum dominance and military geoengineering go together, like hand in glove.
Read installment #2 – “Beyond Global Climate Talks” – here.
Read installment #4 – “Secrecy and Geoengineering as a Weapon as a War” – here.
Read installment #5 – “Is Global Warming Good Or Bad? That Depends On Who You Ask” – here.
Footnotes
[1] Dwight D Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961. Accessed September 14, 2015.
[2] Patrick E Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” The New York Times, March 08, 1992. Accessed May 26, 2015.
[3] Ibid.
[4] David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2002. Accessed April 28, 2017.
[5] John W Dower, The Violent American Century (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 9. See also David Vine, Base Nation (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2015).
[6] Ibid., 79.
[7] Jacques R Pauwels, “Why America Needs War,” Global Research, April 30, 2003. Accessed July 27, 2017.
[8] Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1974), 29.
[9] Ibid., 20.
[10] T N Vance & Walter J Oakes, The Permanent War Economy (Alameda, CA: The Center for Socialist History, 2008), 105.
[11] Eisenhower, Op. Cit. See also Fred J Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 11-78.
[12] Melman, Op. Cit., 14 and Seymour Melman, “Permanent War Economy,” in Marcus Raskin & Gregory D Squires (eds), Warfare Welfare (Dulles, VA: Potomoac Books, 2012), 141.
[13] Seymour Melman, “The Pentagon Loses $2,300,000,000,000,” (draft ms, 2003). Accessed September 16, 2015.
[14] Dower, Op. Cit., 12.
[15] Pauwels, Op. Cit.
[16] Jacques R Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War (Toronto: James Lorrimer, 2002), 180-188.
[17] Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire (New York: The New Press, 2008), 80.
[18] Ernest R May (ed), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993), 23-82.
[19] William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5.
[20] Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (New York: Random House, 2015), 91.
[21] Ibid., 104.
[22] Ibid., 27.
[23] Ibid., 109.
[24] Ibid., xxv. See also Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51, and Ian Morris, How the West Rules — For Now (New York: Picador, 2010).
[25] Huntington, Op. Cit., 184.[26] Williams, Op. Cit., 53.
[27] Wang Lixin, “‘Who Are We?’ Woodrow Wilson, the First World War and the Reshaping of America’s National Identity,” Social Sciences in China, Vol 31, Issue 2, 2010. Accessed July 26, 2017.
[28] David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 20.
[29} Lixin, Op. Cit.
[30] Kit O’Connell, “Daniel Ellsberg: US Military-Industrial Complex Also Includes Big Corporations and Congress,” Shadow Proof, January 05, 2016. Accessed January 05, 2016.
[31] Toby Craig Jones, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” Journal of American History, Vol 99, Issue 1, 01 June 2012. Accessed November 17, 2015.
[32] Thomas Donnelly (principal author), Rebuilding America’s Defenses (Washington, DC: The Project for the New American Century, September 2000). Accessed June 20, 2015.
[33] George W Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the Nation,” Washington Post, September 20, 2001. Accessed August 04, 2017.
[34] Crowley, Op. Cit., 5-6.
[35] Williams, Op. Cit., 20.
[36] Ibid., 121.
[37] Bart Hawkins Kreps, “The stratospheric costs of The American Century,” Resilience, June 28, 2017. Accessed July 07, 2017. See also CNA, “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security,” May 2009.
[38] Jones, Op. Cit. See also Daniel Yergin, The Prize (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 391-393.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Huntington, Op. Cit., 43, 21.
[41] Ibid., 55.
[42] Ibid., 78.
[43] Ibid., 310.
[44] Lixin, Op. Cit.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Alexander Hamilton, “The Effects of Internal War in Producing Standing Armies and Other Institutions Unfriendly to Liberty,” Federalist VIII, in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, Issac Kramnick (ed) (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 116-117. See also Cook, Op. Cit., 49, 51.
[47] John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman & Robert W McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review Press, October 2008. See also Chalmers Johnson, “Why the US has really gone broke,” Le Monde diplomatique, February 05, 2008; John Dower, Op. Cit., 12; and, Anthony Cordesman, “U.S. Military Spending: The Cost of Wars,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 26, 2017. Accessed July 18, 2017.
[48] Melman, “The Pentagon Loses $2,300,000,000,000,” Op. Cit.
[49] Kit O’Connell, Op. Cit.
[50] Eisenhower, Op. Cit. See also Cook, Op. Cit., 13.
[51] Cook, Op. Cit., 33.
[52] Bill Moyers, “Seymour Melman: A Conversation in the Economics of Disarmament,” Moyers & Company, April 29, 1990. Accessed March 25, 2015.
[53] Aaron B O’Connell, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” The New York Times, November 04, 2012. Accessed September 20, 2015.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Dower, Op. Cit., 110.
