U.S. Fascism - Chapter Four
Pandemic Militancy
The world held its breath. Would a pandemic be the straw that finally broke Washington’s belligerent back? No. Pandemics alone don’t stop fascism. Warfare—both economic and military—defined Washington’s global conduct during the pandemic.
Militancy
The United States is the financial center of the world, the U.S. dollar the global reserve currency. U.S. economic sanctions—known formally as “unilateral coercive measures”—harm a person, business, group, or country in order to change their behavior. U.S. sanctions come in the form of embargos preventing companies from doing business with this enemy or parts of the enemy’s economy, travel restrictions, and/or a financial freeze. Washington uses economic warfare—sanctions increase unemployment, cause the targeted country’s currency to inflate, and create shortages of food, fuel, medicine, water—as collective punishment.
Eight countries under U.S. sanctions (China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela), comprising roughly one-quarter of all humans on the planet, sent a statement early in the pandemic to the United Nations’ leadership, including the World Health Organization director-general, stating that such economic warfare, illegal under international law, was hindering an effective pandemic response. No matter. The Trump administration in 2020 and the Biden administration in 2021 imposed crushing sanctions harming peasants, workers, and families worldwide. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) led the charge with 777 new sanction designations in 2020 and 765 in 2021, compared to 785 in 2019 prior to the pandemic.1 A nod to the public relations savviness of the Democratic faction, the Biden administration emphasized “human rights” when waging this economic warfare.
On Wednesday, 22 April 2020, 60 organizations from across the United States sent a letter to congressional leadership, pleading, do not fund the Pentagon anymore for the year. The wide range of signatories included Franciscan Action Network, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Just Foreign Policy, Social Security Works, Veterans for Peace, and Win Without War. The money saved could go toward combating the pandemic, the organizations asserted. Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) meanwhile put forth a House resolution detailing how to find $350 billion in savings within the military budget. Her straightforward fixes included eliminating Space Force to save $15.2 billion, cutting corporate contracting by fifteen percent to save $26 billion, and eliminating some unnecessary, obsolete, or excessive weapons systems to save $57.9 billion. The fascist structure ignored all.
In May, the U.S. government prevented the United Nations Security Council from voting on a resolution that called for a worldwide ceasefire. In September, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution calling for a worldwide suspension of economic sanctions during the pandemic, noting that international cooperation was the best way to defeat the virus. Only the United States and Israel voted against the resolution.
Around this time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that U.S. government surveillance of the public’s phone records, which NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had revealed seven years prior, was unlawful, and, in the words of Reuters, that “the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.” In between the Snowden revelations (mid-summer 2013) and the time of this ruling (late summer 2020), U.S. fascism had adapted well: Enhanced legal protections abetting government surveillance of the public’s communications, more “privacy officers” throughout intelligence agencies (not protecting the public’s privacy), and larger budgets. So, when the Court of Appeals ruled that the mass surveillance program was illegal, it had no effect on ongoing mass surveillance.
Cold War 2.0
The military-industrial complex began its “pivot” to Asia during the Obama administration’s first term2 as part of its broader elective Cold War against Russia and China known as “great power competition” or “strategic competition.” The pivot entailed positioning greater military and industrial infrastructure in Europe, in and around the Pacific Ocean, and in space. A particularly brutal step was the Wolf Amendment of 2011, which prohibited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from cooperating with Chinese organizations without approval from U.S. Congress and the FBI. The Pentagon enshrined Russia and China as enemies in the National Defense Strategy of 2018, emphasizing “inter-state strategic competition” as “now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford explained in November of that year that great power competition demanded new military funding priorities and weapons development. Dunford was speaking at the Halifax International Security Forum, which was sponsored by U.S. war corporations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and energy conglomerates. The National Defense Industrial Association later presented Dunford with its most prestigious award. In his acceptance speech, Dunford unsurprisingly inflated the threat of Russian and Chinese technological advancements. Dunford soon retired and joined the board of Lockheed Martin.
In the calculus of fascism’s big business component, a war on terror was no longer enough to justify ongoing extreme spending on cyber, submarines, satellites, nuclear weaponry, hypersonic technology, artificial intelligence, new command and control systems, and aircraft carriers. Competition with a major industrial country or two provided a better pretext. Moreover, competition against Beijing and Moscow further militarizes U.S. society, channeling frustration (which might otherwise manifest itself as class consciousness and/or physical protest against capitalist exploitation) into outrage against a new stereotyped enemy that resides overseas. With the new Cold War in the forefront and a roiling war on terror, the state’s armed bureaucracies were able to sustain and expand their budgets and legal authorities.
Government- and industry-affiliated media and think tanks demonized Beijing during the pandemic, as threat inflation is baked into the military-industrial complex’s daily operations. A partnership between the New America think tank, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine set the tone early, berating Beijing for its (often epidemiologically effective) efforts to cordon off cities. Michael Fuchs, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which received substantial funding from the war industry and capitalist foundations, took to the Guardian six days after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic to explain the “wide array of national security threats” facing the United States and to demonize China. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, funded by the Australian and U.S. governments and the war industry, itemized select information regarding COVID-19 and the Chinese government’s response. The U.S. Marine Corps would continue to adapt for great power competition against China, a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made clear fourteen days into the pandemic. Five days later, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is housed within a D.C. think tank known as the German Marshall Fund of the United States, published “Five Things to Know About Beijing’s Disinformation Approach.” Such slanted coverage saturated the media during the pandemic.
The Pentagon even went as far as implementing a classified propaganda operation aimed at sowing doubt online among Asian audiences about the vaccines and protective equipment that China was manufacturing. The Pentagon still stands by this operation.
As the pandemic wound down, NBC News’ Meet the Press hosted pundits from the Center for a New American Security to simulate war with China over Taiwan! The think tank’s co-founder, revolving door expert Michèle Flournoy, appeared in the segment.
The New York Times a couple weeks into the pandemic conveyed the assertion of U.S. officials that Beijing and Moscow were waging a campaign that was sowing doubt about the U.S. government’s handling of the pandemic. Less than a month later, the Times relayed U.S. officials’ assertion that China-amplified disinformation was reaching the U.S. public.3 Twitter soon deleted over 170,000 accounts deemed to have spread pro-China messages. The U.S. public’s view of China became increasingly negative as the days went on. The workers of the world, however, still viewed the U.S. government as biggest threat to democracy.
Amid public outrage that the U.S. government wouldn’t make corporations temporarily suspend “intellectual property rights” regarding how to make COVID-19 vaccines,4 which would have allowed countries rich and poor to manufacture generic vaccines and therapeutics to confront the pandemic together, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations read the political climate in Washington and adopted a new approach in their messaging: Assert that temporary suspension of intellectual property rights would strengthen China and Russia. The Financial Times reported, “Vaccine makers have warned US officials that temporarily scrapping patents for COVID-19 shots would risk handing novel technology to China and Russia, according to people familiar with the talks.” Corporate officials warned in private meetings with U.S. government officials that suspending intellectual property rights could, in the words of the Financial Times, “allow China and Russia to exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in the future.”
Yes, in order to keep corporate profits high, corporate operatives plucked Washington’s Cold War strings, warning politicians that sharing knowledge might lead other countries, the official bad guys, to develop life-saving medical treatments.5
Repositioning
Afghanistan’s socialist government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, established in April 1978, took steps toward helping the working class, empowering women, and improving healthcare and education. Founded to crush the workers of the world and pave the way for capitalism, CIA set about to destroy this Afghan government. To do so, the U.S. government and a few allies armed and financed an insurgency of religious conservatives.6 (This environment later gave birth to Pashtu fundamentalists known as the Taliban.) The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to keep the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in authority. The Soviets withdrew during 1988-89 after years of fighting, and the socialist government in Kabul fell. The remnants of the Saudi-Pakistani-U.S. effort to recruit, arm, and fund fighters from around the Arab world and send them into Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets became al-Qaeda.
After intervening sporadically, 1988-2001, in Afghanistan’s civil wars and instability, Washington seized upon the 9-11 attacks in order to invade and occupy Afghanistan. (There were no Afghans on the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Taliban was open to negotiating with Washington after 9-11 and to help arrest and try Osama bin Laden if Washington could provide proof of his involvement in the attacks.) Troops drawn from the U.S. working class were sent to fight in Afghanistan, 2001-2021. Thousands of them died. Thousands more were crippled, mentally or physically. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died. Millions were displaced internally and abroad.
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was designed to profit U.S. corporations.7
Throughout the 20-year occupation, U.S. military and political leadership consistently lied to the U.S. public, the troops, and the world, painting a positive picture of a dismal situation in Afghanistan. The Washington Post’s 2019 award-winning investigative series The Afghanistan Papers documented these official lies.
The medieval Taliban proved to have more popular legitimacy than Washington’s puppet government. The Taliban officially returned to power in August 2021, seventeen months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Writing in the Kansas City Star on 23 August 2021, former Marine officer Lucas Kunce wrote:
“What we are seeing in Afghanistan right now shouldn’t shock you. It only seems that way because our institutions are steeped in systematic dishonesty. It doesn’t require a dissertation to explain what you’re seeing. Just two sentences. One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.”
Amid the massive August 2021 evacuation of U.S. forces, allies, and proxies, an armed group attacked outside of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday the 26th. The attack killed close to 200 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. troops.8
The Islamic State, an enemy of the Taliban and one of the excuses Washington used to spread troops across the Middle East and Africa, claimed responsibility.
Three days later, as the U.S. evacuation waned, the U.S. government launched an airstrike (using a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone, which are assembled in Poway, California, armed with Lockheed Martin Hellfire missiles, which are manufactured a stone’s throw south of Universal Orlando Resort, Florida) against a residential neighborhood in Kabul, killing ten humans. The Pentagon claimed that the people targeted were ferrying suicide bombers to the airport. Though cracks immediately appeared in this official narrative, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, affirmed on 3 September that at least one of the dead was an Islamic State “facilitator” and that the strike was based on good intelligence.
The official lies crumbled in the face of investigative reporting and eyewitness testimony. On Friday, 17 September, U.S. military leaders conceded that the 29 August drone strike had indeed killed an aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and nine of his family members, including seven children. Explosives in the car, which the U.S. government had previously referenced when justifying the drone strike, turned out to be water jugs. Aimal Ahmadi, whose three-year-old daughter was murdered in the drone strike, mourned: It “is not enough… to say sorry. The U.S. should find the person who did this.”9
Former Australian Army major David McBride, on trial in Australia for leaking information to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan,10 summarized:
“For twenty years we said it was going well, publicly. Everyone in the military knew it wasn’t. We were pumping out things that had no relation to the truth. And that in itself was a crime… Our allies were often criminals, drug dealers, pedophiles. But we pretended that they weren’t in order to sell a good-news message.”
McBride continued: “It was a bit like the war was a huge military Enron in that we were putting out good-news information that things were going well, but it was a house of cards.” Enron had been a U.S. energy corporation whose executives had committed massive accounting fraud.
In early November, the Pentagon held a press conference presenting its review of the 29 August drone strike. It blamed rushed decision-making, communication bias, bad intelligence, and an “aggregate process breakdown.” Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami Said, who led the review, was quick to state, “It's not criminal conduct or negligence.” (In the words of the New York Times, “Nearly everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, then days and weeks, after the drone strike has turned out to be false.”) The full review was classified, per fascist custom, preventing the public from understanding all the conclusions that the military investigators had reached.
The following month, the Pentagon announced that no U.S. personnel would be punished for the drone strike. Spokesperson John Kirby stated, “There was not a strong enough case to be made for personal accountability.”
Money in the Bank
Modeled after the U.S. Federal Reserve, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) focuses on stabilizing the country’s currency and consumer prices. DAB monies belong to the Afghan people. Citing ongoing sanctions against the Taliban, the U.S. government froze DAB monies in the U.S. ($7.1 billion) and stopped all financial and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan shortly after Taliban returned to authority in Kabul in 2021. Freezing DAB monies prevented proper economic function and inflated the currency.
For years, some—not all—families of the 9-11 victims had filed lawsuits against different people and groups across the greater Middle East. Many of these people and groups did not get along with one another and outright opposed al-Qaeda. Defendants included but were not limited to deceased Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the armed Lebanese political movement Hezbollah, and Iranian leader Ali Khamenei. Exemplifying traits of a society living under fascism (potent nationalism, scapegoats as a unifying cause, and the dumbing down of political discourse), some of the 9-11 families looking to cash in turned their attention to the frozen DAB monies.
U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order in February 2022 dividing the frozen DAB monies into two: half for possible humanitarian aid for Afghanistan to be put in a trust bypassing the Afghan government and half for some of the aforementioned 9-11 families. These families would now “have the opportunity to sue for access to the frozen Afghan assets,” Agence France-Press reported. Plaintiffs would be able “to have their claims heard in court," the White House stated. The lawyers involved in the cases stood to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, Murtaza Hussain reported. Afghan-American Bilal Askaryar explained, what Biden proposed “is not justice” for 9-11 families, “it is theft of public funds from an impoverished nation already on the brink of famine and starvation…” A different group of 9-11 families concurred, urging President Biden to not use any of the DAB funds to pay 9-11 victims’ families.
The Biden administration soon allowed people and businesses to engage in financial transactions (e.g., duties, fees, taxes) with civil servants in the Afghan government in most circumstances. The Afghan people’s DAB funds remained frozen, and DAB was still unable to process most international transactions. Fourteen independent U.N. experts affirmed that Washington’s seizing of Kabul’s billions harmed Afghan women. The U.S.-exacerbated humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan had forced roughly 60% of the Afghan population to be reliant on food aid, with disproportionate impact on women and children. Regarding widespread hunger in Afghanistan, the Washington Post summarized, “The economic isolation of Afghanistan has done little to moderate the Taliban’s hardline rule. But the consequences have been devastating for the Afghan people, especially the poor.”
More greedy humans, invoking nationalism and employing punch-drunk political discourse against a unifying scapegoat, eyed pay dirt: A group of hundreds of U.S. veterans and military families asked the Armed Services committees in the Senate and House to consider expanding the award scope of the half of the frozen DAB funds beyond just 9-11 victims. (The Taliban hadn’t perpetrated the 9-11 attacks, and these veterans and families were not even victims of the 9-11 attacks, mind you.) These veterans and families argued that broadening the distribution of Afghanistan’s seized funds to include them would recognize military personnel “who were killed or severely injured as a result of state-sponsored terrorist attacks while serving our country around the world…”
A few months later, CIA launched a drone strike on a home in Kabul, reportedly killing the elderly nominal leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who had come to support violence only after being tortured in Egypt by the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime.
One month after killing al-Zawahiri, the Biden administration indicated that it would transfer $3.5 billion of the seized DAB monies into a trust housed at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. The fund's board—a U.S. official, a Swiss official, and two Afghan economists—could then direct the funds to pay for imports to Afghanistan, the printing of Afghan currency, and debt payments to international financial institutions, the administration stated. Not one red cent would go to DAB or the Taliban-run Afghan government.
D.C. continued to funnel tax dollars into opaque activities in Afghanistan after the August 2021 withdrawal: more than $1.1 billion to date, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) indicated in autumn 2022. Brazen stonewalling or minimal cooperation from several government bodies, including State, Treasury, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), meant that SIGAR was for the first time unable “to provide Congress and the American people with a full accounting of this U.S. government spending…” (pdf).
In harming Afghanistan via economic warfare instead of open military force, the fascist state was able to focus more fully on its elective Cold War against Beijing and Moscow.
One Particular Proxy War
The U.S. militarization of Eastern Europe was comprehensive.
The military-industrial pivot against Moscow and Beijing, which was initiated during the Obama administration and continued during the Trump administration,11 required extensive infrastructure. The Pentagon invested heavily—increasing its already sizeable presence—in military construction in Eastern Europe, contracting announcements indicated.12
Additionally, the U.S. military’s new $360-million-plus prepositioned stock site in Powidz, Poland, was one of the largest infrastructure projects funded by NATO members in over three decades. Prepositioned stock is some of the big stuff needed for fighting wars. The project complemented existing prepositioned stock elsewhere in Europe (Poland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands), Asia, and at sea.
In addition to building and expanding its military infrastructure, the U.S. government signed agreements with individual governments to use their military bases. In 2020, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a deal with the Polish Defense Minister to increase the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland. In 2021, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin signed a deal with the Georgian Defense Minister to expand U.S. training of Georgian troops. On February 9, 2022, Slovakia approved a deal pushed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that allowed the Pentagon to use two Slovak air bases for ten years in exchange for $100 million in U.S. tax dollars to upgrade the bases. These are just a few examples. Steady encroachment upon Russia was the name of the game.
U.S. fascism also rejected arms control agreements. Washington left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies treaty in 2020, and worked to undermine the popular Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. government rejected offers (2008 and again in 2014) from Beijing and Moscow to establish a treaty banning weapons in outer space. The U.S. continued to store nuclear weaponry in at least five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey), and evidence indicated that England was getting ready to once again host these U.S. weapons of mass destruction.
Brokered by France and Germany, the Minsk agreements were a way to end the war in Ukraine prior to Russia’s February 24, 2022, invasion. Minsk I was a 12-point deal to which Kiev and Ukrainian separatists in the east of the country agreed in September 2014. Each side quickly accused the other of violating the agreement. Minsk II, signed in February 2015, was a 13-point pact covering a ceasefire, demilitarization, diplomacy, prisoner exchange, humanitarian assistance, withdrawal of foreign armed forces, and more. Minsk II was never implemented, due in part to Moscow’s stance that it was not a direct party to the conflict, and Washington’s ongoing meddling in Ukraine and refusal to agree that Ukraine would never join NATO.
The U.S. military and NATO conducted regular, provocative operations and exercises on the continent—indeed, many were along Russia’s border—as U.S. fascism ramped up the elective Cold War long before Russia’s 2022 invasion: Agile Sprit, Allied Sprit, Atlantic Resolve, BALTOPS, Defender Europe, Formidable Shield, Global Thunder, Justice Eagle, Resolute Castle, Saber Guardian, Spring Storm, Swift Response, Thracian Summer. The list goes on. Deployment of threatening aircraft, including Boeing B-1 bombers over the Baltic Sea, General Atomics MQ-9 drones in Greece, Romania, and Estonia, and Boeing B-52 bombers hugging Russia’s border from inside Ukraine, was a key component of Washington’s belligerence.
U.S. military and industry worked in tandem when militarizing the region. Discrete instances included EPS Corp. of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, and the U.S. Navy developing underwater weapon systems in Montenegro and Bulgaria, and Gomez Research Associates of Huntsville, Alabama, and the U.S. Navy in Bulgaria and Ukraine working (e.g., A, B) to use drones to detect improvised explosive devices. Despite Moscow’s repeated protests, multiple corporations (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Vectrus) established and ran U.S. military installations featuring “missile defense” batteries and radar in Poland and Romania.13
The U.S. government conducted cyber operations against Russia and its people. The New York Times reported in 2019:
“Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid. But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before.”
In parallel, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted cyber operations against multiple countries, including Russia, since obtaining expanded legal authority in 2018.
Foreign military sales (FMS), in which the U.S. government acts as the intermediary between a corporation and a foreign customer, are one way that the U.S. war industry sells goods and services around the world. (The other is direct commercial sales, which are negotiated behind closed doors between a corporation and a foreign government without the U.S. government’s direct mediation, though the U.S. government does have to approve the sale.) Sales via FMS to European governments were thorough in the fifteen years prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, contracting announcements indicated. Every single Eastern European country except for Belarus was a frequent customer of the U.S. war industry. Foreign military sales are a “fundamental tool of U.S. foreign policy,” the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency affirms.
U.S. interference in Ukraine was comprehensive. After backing the notorious 2014 coup in Kiev, the U.S. government committed “over $2.7 billion in training and equipment” to Ukraine through January 2022. Embracing standard euphemism, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in January 2022, “We provided more defensive security systems in the past year than any year previous.” The relevant State Department fact sheet stated, “Ukraine has undertaken significant efforts to reform and modernize its defense sector in line with NATO principles and standards.” Standardization with NATO is a stipulation for many countries to receive foreign military financing (FMF), U.S. government grants or loans to a country so it can buy from the U.S. war industry. The U.S. government also trained Ukrainian military and intel forces,14 expanded propaganda networks, and pumped weaponry into Ukraine long before the Russian invasion. In November 2021, the U.S. Secretary of State and the Ukrainian Foreign Minister signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership to deepen the “strategic partnership by expanding bilateral cooperation in political, security, defense, development, economic, energy, scientific, educational, cultural, and humanitarian spheres.”15
After Moscow responded to U.S. militarization of Eastern Europe by invading Ukraine at the end of February 2022, the U.S. war industry won again, flooding Ukraine and European allies with even more weaponry. This is how the system works. The military-industrial complex is always the top bad guy, a fact many who suddenly flew the Ukrainian flag missed entirely.
Conclusion
The U.S. government kept its eye on the ball during the pandemic, spending 7.5 times more money on nuclear weaponry than on global vaccine donations.16
More U.S. citizens and residents died from COVID-19 than from all the major U.S. wars of the twentieth century.
One week after the United States officially reached 1,000,000 deaths from COVID-19, U.S. President Joe Biden indicated that the U.S. government would use the U.S. military to defend Taiwan if the People’s Republic of China ever attacked the island.17
The proposed fiscal 2023 budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was roughly $10 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s? Roughly $12 billion. “National security”? Roughly $1.4 trillion. Money talks, and U.S. fascism prioritizes neither public health during a pandemic nor environmental health during a climate catastrophe.
U.S. fascism’s self-declared legal authorities for implementing sanctions came in the form of Presidential executive orders and public laws passed by Congress. For a Beltway analysis of sanctions, see Dorshimer and Shin, “Sanctions by the Numbers: 2020 Year in Review” (CNAS, 14 Jan 2021) and Bartlett and Bae, “Sanctions by the Numbers: 2021 Year in Review” (CNAS, 13 Jan 2022). Sometimes governments push back. Though not the center of international finance, Beijing has imposed sanctions on RTX and Lockheed Martin for selling to Taiwan. Tehran has imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on U.S. officials (e.g., former military officers who had commanded forces in the Middle East, diplomats who had harmed Lebanon and Palestine, top Treasury officials, U.S. officials who supported Mojahedin-e-Khalq, and executives at Kharon, the data analysis firm founded by former U.S. Treasury and intel officials) for terrorism and for violating human rights. Sanctioning these officials is mostly symbolic, since the officials don’t travel to Iran and likely do not have money that Tehran could seize.
President Obama kicked off the pivot to Asia in November 2011. See “Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament” (White House Office of the Press Secretary, 17 Nov 2011).
This “supposedly ‘fake’ social media message promoted by Chinese ‘agents’ to sow panic in the U.S. about a ‘fake’ national lockdown over the coronavirus that was cited in the New York Times on Wednesday also appears word-for-word in a March column” by Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner, per Joe Lauria, “COVID-19: In NYT, US Intelligence Portray Veteran DC Columnist’s Report as Chinese Disinformation Meant to Sow Panic” (Consortium News, 23 Apr 2020).
Lobbyists and Congress crafted language in the first coronavirus spending bill, the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act (signed into law on 6 March 2020), so that pharmaceutical corporations did not have to share how they make the vaccines (“intellectual property rights”), which would have allowed for faster and more widespread vaccine production. The Department of Health and Human Services henceforth had no authority to strip intellectual property protection from any vaccine or treatment whose price it deemed too high, nor could it set prices for coronavirus vaccines and treatments.
Organizations and experts backed by the pharmaceutical industry blanketed media (online, print, broadcast) to argue against temporarily waiving some patent and “intellectual property” rights on vaccines and related technologies.
The public later learned more details regarding pharmaceutical corporations’ coordinated campaign against disparate peoples worldwide who wanted the industry to share the knowledge regarding how to make coronavirus vaccines. These corporations worked hard to stifle any effort to share pandemic-related patents and “intellectual property,” going so far as to threaten countries’ leaders with capital flight. (Capital flight is when capitalists move their corporations or financial institutions out of a country or region. Threatening capital flight is one way to intimidating politicians. Crack down on us or regulate us and we’ll leave, taking “jobs” and money with us, the capitalists say.) The corporations’ meanwhile lobbied governments and contacted social media giants to suppress the public’s wishes in the name of countering “misinformation.”
Big business knows how to pluck Washington’s cold-war strings.
When Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled in early 2022 to vacate an oil-and-gas lease (roughly 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico), citing the Biden administration’s failure to consider carbon emissions when approving the sale, the president of the industry pressure group for offshore fossil fuels stated, “Uncertainty around the future of the US federal offshore leasing program may only strengthen the geopolitical influence of higher emitting – and adversarial – nations, such as Russia.”
Later that year, three former intel officials who now work for big business (Brian Cavanaugh, Robert O'Brien, John Ratcliffe) wrote to congressional leaders regarding proposed government regulation of large tech firms (e.g., the Open App Markets Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act): “We note with certainty that our adversaries – especially China – will welcome any federal government actions that diminish the strength of the U.S. tech industry.” Investigative reporter Lee Fang pointed out, the “letter left unmentioned that the former officials were paid by tech industry lobbyists at the time as part of a campaign to suppress support for the legislation.”
CIA funneled money and weaponry to its allies inside Afghanistan before Moscow’s invasion. See Robert Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 145-147, and Kai Bird, The Outlier (New York: Random House, 2021), pp. 504-506.
Broad profiteering discussed in Kate Brannen, “Cashing in on the decision to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan” (Foreign Policy, 30 Oct 2015); Matt Taibbi, “We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around” (taibbi.substack.com, 18 Aug 2021); Shaan Sachdev, “The war in Afghanistan was a huge victory — for the military-industrial complex” (Salon, 23 Aug 2021); and Stephen Semler, “The top 5 military contractors ate $2 trillion during the Afghanistan War” (Speaking Security, 23 Aug 2021).
Regarding “reconstruction” of Afghanistan, C. Christine Fair explained, “between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the U.S. economy. Of the 10 to 20 percent of the contracts that remained in the country, the United States rarely cared about the efficacy of the initiative.”
“We do capitalism,” said Paul Brinkley, former head of the military’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations. “We're about helping companies make money.”
Building the Afghan Air Force to be dependent upon U.S. corporations was covered in Thomas Gibbons-Neff, et al., “Departure of U.S. Contractors Poses Myriad Problems for Afghan Military” (NYT, 19 Jun 2021) and Kathy Gannon, “Before Pullout, Watchdog Warned of Afghan Air Force Collapse” (AP, 18 Jan 2022). For the profiteering of U.S. military officers, see Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Corporate boards, consulting, speaking fees: How U.S. generals thrived after Afghanistan” (WP, 4 Sep 2021).
There were indications that after the explosion U.S. forces opened fire on the crowd, killing some. See Nick Paton Walsh, “The US said no one was shot. A CNN investigation raises questions” (CNN, 8 Feb 2022).
On Thursday, October 14, 2021, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy met virtually with the president of Nutrition & Education International, the aid group that had employed Zemari Ahmadi, who perished in the 29 August drone attack. The following day, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said that the Pentagon was offering money (“ex-gratia condolence payments”) of an unspecified amount to the family whose members it had killed and that it was in contact with the State Department to help any of the remaining family members if they wished to relocate to the U.S. One year after the drone strike, however, only 11 of the 144 people the U.S. government had promised to help were in the U.S.
In May 2024, McBride was sentenced to over five years in prison for his leaking of classified information.
Crude and unstable, President Trump nonetheless stayed in line with military-industrial priorities and facilitated all manner of offense against Russia: deploying more troops to Eastern Europe; build-up of military infrastructure in Eastern Europe; arms sales to Eastern European countries; naval exercises in Barents Sea and Black Sea; sanctions against senior Russian officials, energy firms, and the ship laying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; provocative ballistic missile tests; withdrawal from international arms treaties; establishment of Space Force and monitoring Russian space infrastructure; ongoing training and arming of Ukraine military and intelligence; launching missiles and bombs at Syria, killing Russian troops in February 2018; increasing the U.S. military presence (including General Dynamics fighting vehicles, some Raytheon radar, gunship patrols) in northeast Syria, September 2020; massive investment in hypersonics and nuclear weaponry; issuing a presidential finding giving CIA more authority for cyber-attacks against Russia and others; increased cyber warfare, including limiting the internet access of the Russian Internet Research Agency; issuing a 9 June 2020 memorandum instructing the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security to commence buildup of an icebreaker fleet for competition against Beijing and Moscow in the arctic; summer 2020 sanctioning of the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute, which had been part of a largely non-military Russian effort to develop and test the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine; pressuring Brazil to reject Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Department of Health and Human Services; requiring Russian news media in the U.S. to register as foreign agents; and expelling Russian diplomats.
U.S. military construction in Eastern Europe spanned Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, and Romania. Contracts issued 2020 (17 Jul, 24 Aug, 9 Oct), 2021 (28 Jan, 18 Feb, 16 Jul, 9 Aug, 30 Sep).
Relevant contracts issued 14 Feb 2020, 24 Sep 2021, 3 Aug 2021. See also Todd Lopez, “Aegis Ashore in Poland on Target for 2022” (DOD News, 19 Nov 2021) and Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Debra Thomas, “AEGIS Ashore Missile Defense Facility in Romania Changes Command” (Sixth Fleet Public Affairs, 8 Aug 2020). Further product information available at <https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products> and “Aegis Ashore launches Standard Missile-3 for first time” (Raytheon.mediaroom.com, 21 May 2014). Vectrus and Vertex merged in 2022 to form V2X. Most of V2X is owned by private equity.
Training detailed in Andrew E. Kramer, “Ukraine troops in basic training — with U.S. instructors” (NYT, 9 May 2015); Oren Liebermann, “US small arms and ammo arrive in Ukraine as Pentagon details troops to train country's military” (CNN, 10 Dec 2021); Zach Dorfman, “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades” (Yahoo News, 13 Jan 2022); and “U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine” (Congressional Research Service, updated 24 Jun 2022). U.S.-led training also included Cossack Mace, Rapid Trident, Three Swords, and other exercises.
Meddling also noted in “‘Fuck the EU’: US diplomat Victoria Nuland's phonecall leaked – video” (Guardian, 7 Feb 2014) and “It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” (Guardian Opinion, 30 Apr 2014).
CIA building a dozen bases for itself and Ukrainian intelligence—bases packed with advanced technology (e.g., satellite tracking, communications interception)—inside Ukraine after the U.S.-backed 2014 coup is detailed in Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, “The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” (NYT, 25 Feb 2024).
Global vaccine donations were $7 billion while the Department of Energy’s spending on nuclear weaponry, 11 Mar 2020 through 15 Apr 2022, was $53 billion. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons pointed out in March 2020 that the amount of money the U.S. government spent annually on nuclear weapons (approximately $35 billion in 2019) could instead have paid for 300,000 beds in intensive care, 75,000 doctor salaries, 150,000 nurse salaries, and 35,000 ventilators. For more opportunity costs, see the National Priorities Project.
Reporter: “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”
Biden: “Yes.”
Reporter: “You are?”
Biden: “That’s the commitment we made.”
Quoted in Kanno-Youngs and Baker, “Biden Says U.S. Military Would Defend Taiwan if China Invaded” (NYT, 23 May 2022).
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee on 9 March 2023 that China should know that Washington is willing to go to war over Taiwan: “I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is, based on the president’s comments.”