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13 July 21
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n June 7, Jeff Bezos announced his plan to go to space on July 20 — just fifteen days after finishing up as CEO of Amazon. It was positioned as a bold next step in the billionaire space race that has been escalating for several years, though it didn’t take long for its true face to show itself. Soon after Bezos set his date, Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson — a man known for his marketing stunts — decided he would try to beat the richest man in the world into orbit and scheduled his own space flight for July 11.
But as these billionaires had their eyes turned to the stars and the media showered them with the headlines they craved, the evidence that the climate of our planet is rapidly changing in a way that is hostile to life — both human and otherwise — was escalating.
Near the end of June, Jacobabad, a city of 200,000 people in Pakistan, experienced “wet bulb” conditions where high humidity and scorching temperatures combine to reach a level where the human body can no longer cool itself down. Meanwhile, half a world away, on the West Coast of North America, a heat dome that was made much worse by climate change sent temperatures soaring so high that the town of Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6ºC, beating Canada’s previous temperature record by 4.6ºC, then burned to the ground when a wildfire tore through the town.
The contrast between those stories is striking. On one hand, billionaires are engaging in a dick-measuring contest to see who can exit the atmosphere first, while on the other, the billions of us who will never make any such journey are increasing dealing with the consequences of capitalism’s effects on the climate — and the decades its most powerful adherents have spent stifling action to curb them.
At a moment when we should be throwing everything we have into ensuring the planet remains habitable, billionaires are treating us to a spectacle to distract us from their quest for continued capitalist accumulation and the disastrous effects it is already having.
The Spectacle of Billionaires in Space
Last May, we were treated to a similar display of billionaire space ambition. As people across the United States were marching in the streets after the murder of George Floyd and the government was doing little to stop COVID-19 from sweeping the country, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump met in Florida to celebrate SpaceX’s first time launching astronauts to the International Space Station.
As regular people were fighting for their lives, it felt like the elite were living in a completely separate world and had no qualms about showing it. They didn’t have to make it to another planet.
Over the past few years, as the billionaire space race has escalated, the public has become increasingly familiar with its grand visions for our future. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants us to colonize Mars and claims the mission of his space company is to lay the infrastructure to do just that. He wants humanity to be a “multiplanetary” species, and he claims a Martian colony would be a backup plan in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, Bezos doesn’t have much time for Mars colonization. Instead, he believes we should build large structures in Earth’s orbit where the human population can grow to a trillion people without further harming the planet’s environment. As we live out our lives in O’Neill cylinders, as they’re called, we’ll take occasional vacations down to the surface to experience the wonder of the world we once called home.
Neither of these futures are appealing if you look past the billionaires’ rosy pitch decks. Life on Mars would be horrendous for hundreds of years, at least, and would likely kill many of the people who made the journey, while the technology for massive space colonies doesn’t exist and similarly won’t be feasible for a long time to come. So, what’s the point of promoting these futures in the face of an unprecedented threat to our species here on Earth? It’s to get the public on board for a new phase of capitalist accumulation whose benefits will be reaped by those billionaires.
To be clear, that does not even mean anything as grand as asteroid mining. Rather, its form can be seen in the event last May: as Musk and even Trump continued to push the spectacle of Mars for the public, SpaceX was becoming not just a key player in a privatized space industry but also in enabling a military buildup through billions of dollars in government contracts. The grand visions, rocket launches, and spectacles of billionaires leaving the atmosphere are all cover for the real space economy.
The Public-Private Space Partnership
While Branson is using the PR stunt for attention, the real competition is between Bezos and Musk — and while they do compete with each other, they have significant mutual interest. In 2004, Bezos and Musk met to discuss their respective visions for space, which led Musk to call Bezos’s ideas “dumb.” As a result of that discussion, they occasionally snipe at each other — exchanges the media eats up — but they’re still working to forward a private space industry from which they both stand to benefit.
The years of competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin over landing platforms, patents, and NASA contracts show what the billionaire space race is really about. The most recent example of this is a $2.9 billion NASA contract awarded to SpaceX to build a moon lander, which Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics challenged. In the aftermath, Congress considered increasing NASA’s budget by $10 billion, in part so it could hand a second contract to Blue Origin. But that’s hardly the only example of public funding for the ostensibly private space industry.
A report from Space Angels in 2019 estimated that $7.2 billion had been handed out to the commercial space industry since 2000, and it specifically called out SpaceX as a company whose early success depended on NASA contracts. Yet private space companies aren’t just building relationships with the public space agency.
SpaceX won a $149 million contract from the Pentagon to build missile-tracking satellites, and two more worth $160 million to use its Falcon 9 rockets. It also won an initial contract of $316 million to provide a launch for the Space Force — a contract whose value will likely be worth far more in the future — and it’s building the military a rocket that will deliver weapons around the world. On top of all that, SpaceX won $900 million in subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission to provide rural broadband through its overhyped Starlink satellites.
For all the lauding of private space companies and the space billionaires that champion them, they remain heavily reliant on government money. This is the real face of the private space industry: billions of dollars in contracts from NASA, the military, and increasingly for telecommunications that are helping companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin control the infrastructure of space — and it’s all justified to the public under the promise that it’s in service of grand visions that are nothing more than marketing ploys.
Part of the reason SpaceX has been so successful at winning these contracts is because Musk is not an inventor but a marketer. He knows how to use PR stunts to get people to pay attention, and that helps him win lucrative contracts. He also knows what things not to emphasize, like the potentially controversial military contracts that don’t get tweets or flashy announcement videos. Bezos’s trip to space is all about embracing spectacle, because he realizes it’s essential to compete for the attention of the public and the bureaucrats deciding who gets public contracts.
Billionaires Aren’t Going Anywhere
For years, there have been concerns that billionaires’ space investments are about escaping the climate chaos their class continues to fuel here on Earth. It’s the story of Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium: the rich live on a space colony, and the rest of us suffer on a climate-ravaged Earth while being pushed around by robot police as we perform the labor that makes the abundance of the colony possible. But that’s not actually the future we’re headed toward.
As Sim Kern explains, keeping just a few people alive on the International Space Station takes a staff of thousands — and it gets harder the farther away people are from the one world we can truly call home. Mars colonies or massive space stations are not happening anytime soon; they won’t be a backup plan, nor an escape hatch. As billionaires chase profit in space and boost their egos in the process, they’re also planning for climate apocalypse down here on Earth — but they’re only planning for themselves.
Just as Musk uses misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement, he does the same with climate solutions. His portfolio of electric cars, suburban solar installations, and other transport projects are promoted to the public, but they are designed to work best — if not exclusively — for the elite. Billionaires are not leaving the planet, they’re insulating themselves from the general public with bulletproof vehicles, battery-powered gated communities, and possibly even exclusive transport tunnels. They have the resources to maintain multiple homes and to have private jets on standby if they need to flee a natural disaster or public outrage.
We desperately need the public to see through the spectacle of the billionaire space race and recognize that they’re not laying the groundwork for a fantastic future, or even advancing scientific knowledge about the universe. They’re trying to extend our ailing capitalist system, while diverting resources and attention from the most pressing challenge the overwhelming majority of the planet faces. Instead of letting the billionaires keep playing in space, we need to seize the wealth they’ve extracted from us and redeploy it to address the climate crisis — before it’s too late.
Jeffrey Epstein. (photo: Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Book by Miami Herald journalist details extraordinary efforts by special prosecutor who hounded Bill Clinton to aid sex trafficker
en Starr, the lawyer who hounded Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a new book.
In Perversion of Justice the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown writes about Starr’s role in securing the secret 2008 sweetheart deal that granted Epstein effective immunity from federal prosecution. The author, who is credited with blowing open the cover-up, calls Starr a “fixer” who “used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case”.
The book says that emails and letters sent by Starr and Epstein’s then criminal defense lawyer Jay Lefkowitz show that the duo were “campaigning to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case”. Starr had been brought into “center stage” of Epstein’s legal team because of his connections in Washington to the Bush administration.
Perversion of Justice will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
When Epstein’s lawyers appeared to be failing in their pressure campaign, with senior DoJ officials concluding that Epstein was ripe for federal prosecution, Starr pulled out the stops. Brown discloses that he wrote an eight-page letter to Mark Filip, who had just been confirmed as deputy US attorney general, the second most powerful prosecutor in the country.
Filip was a former colleague of Starr’s at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Brown writes that Starr deployed “dramatic language” in the letter reminiscent of the Starr report, his lurid and salacious case against Clinton that triggered the president’s 1998 impeachment.
In the letter Starr begins affably, invoking the “finest traditions” of fairness and integrity of the DoJ. He then goes on to deliver what Brown calls a “brutal punch”, accusing prosecutors involved in the Epstein case of misconduct in trying to engineer a plea deal with the billionaire that would benefit their friends.
Brown reports that Epstein’s legal team also went after Marie Villafaña, the lead federal prosecutor in the case, accusing her of similarly distorting negotiations to benefit a friend of her boyfriend – an allegation she denied.
Brown cites an unnamed prosecutor linked to the 2008 case who said of the legal campaign in which Starr was central that “it was a scorched-earth defense like I had never seen before. Marie broke her back trying to do the right thing, but someone was always telling her to back off.”
The prosecutor added that someone in Washington – the book does not specify who – was “calling the shots on the case”. Villafaña warned fellow prosecutors at the time that Epstein was probably still abusing underaged girls, but according to the unnamed prosecutor quoted by Brown “it was clear that she had to find a way to strike a deal because a decision had already been made not to prosecute Epstein.”
The outcome of this process was a secret deal that only became public years later, largely through Brown’s own reporting. Given the number of victims and the severity of the allegations, Epstein got off exceptionally lightly with a sentence that saw him serve just 13 months in jail. During his sentence, Epstein was allowed out to work in his private office for 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a breach of jail norms.
In 2018 Brown published a three-part exposé in the Miami Herald that lifted the lid on the “non-prosecution agreement” that had been reached covering up Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The reporter managed to identify 80 potential victims, some as young as 13 and 14.
Following Brown’s exposé, a judge ruled that the secret agreement was illegal, opening up the possibility of a renewed federal prosecution. Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July 2019 – 11 years after Starr and the rest of his legal team had worked so hard to shield him – and died in jail the following month in what was ruled a suicide.
In the fallout, Alex Acosta, who as Miami’s top federal prosecutor in 2008 had signed off on the Epstein sweetheart deal, was forced to resign as Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
Though Starr’s role in securing the Epstein deal was public knowledge, Brown’s book reveals the lengths that the lawyer was prepared to go to in order to protect from federal justice an accused sexual predator and pedophile. The extent of his involvement is all the more striking given the equally passionate lengths that Starr went to in 1998 to pursue Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, given the much less serious sexual activity that sparked that investigation.
Starr’s handling of sexual assault scandals has dogged him during other phases in his career. In 2016 he was stripped of the presidency of Baylor University after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.
Four years later Starr served as a member of Trump’s legal team in the former president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.
Texas Greg Abbott speaks at the NRA annual meeting on May 4, 2018. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Private planes carrying more than 50 Democrats left Austin for Washington DC on Monday, skipping town just days before the Texas house of representatives was expected to give early approval to sweeping new voting restrictions in a special legislative session.
The move denied the Republican-led legislature a quorum, leaving it with too few lawmakers in attendance to conduct business. That means it could not, at least for now, vote on the bill.
Even though Democrats cannot stop the Republican legislation, bringing the legislature to a halt might give them some kind of leverage in negotiating over the bills, as the Guardian previously reported. Walking out also signals to constituents how far Democrats are willing to go to try to stop Republican efforts to make it harder to vote.
In response Abbott told an Austin television station he would simply keep calling special sessions of the legislature through next year if necessary, and raised the possibility of Democrats facing arrest upon returning home.
“As soon as they come back in the state of Texas, they will be arrested, they will be cabined inside the Texas capitol until they get their job done,” Abbott said.
The cross-country exodus was the second time that Democratic lawmakers have staged a walkout on the voting overhaul, a measure of their fierce opposition to proposals they say will make it harder for young people, people of color and people with disabilities to vote.
But like last month’s effort, there remains no clear path for Democrats to permanently block the voting measures, or a list of other contentious GOP-backed proposals up for debate.
The Texas bills would outlaw 24-hour polling places, ban ballot drop boxes used to deposit mail ballots and empower partisan poll watchers.
The measures are part of a Republican drive across America rush to enact new voting restrictions in response to former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. More than a dozen states this year have passed tougher election laws but only in Texas have Democrats put up this kind of fight.
Texas Democrats, shut out of power in the state capitol for decades, last fled the state in 2003 to thwart a redistricting plan. They ultimately lost that fight.
Trump won Texas easily in 2020 and it is already one of the hardest places to vote in the US. It does not have online voter registration nor allow everyone to vote by mail. Texas was also among the states with the lowest turnout in 2020.
But it has been trending Democratic in recent election cycles, pushed in part by changing demographics, and the Republican effort is seen by many as a way of seeking to offset that change by making it harder to vote for groups who traditionally vote Democrat.
The U.S.-Mexico border. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
The remains of 43 people were discovered along Arizona's border region last month, the Associated Press reported, citing the nonprofit organization Humane Borders, which tracks the recoveries of bodies in the Grand Canyon State with data from the Pima County medical examiner's office.
Blistering heat waves across the West Coast and the East Coast made last month the hottest June on record for the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported.
Arizona was among eight states in the nation that saw their hottest June on record, the agency said.
Mike Kreyche, Humane Borders' mapping coordinator, told the Associated Press that not all 43 of those who were found dead died in June.
At least 16 of them had been dead for a day, while another 13 of them had been dead for less than a week at the time they were discovered, Kreyche said.
The death figures by Humane Borders are more than the number of deaths reported by the US Border Patrol, the Associated Press reported. The AP added that the Border Patrol only counts the bodies it handles in the course of its work.
The number of human remains found so far this year at the US-Mexico border has already outpaced the number of bodies discovered during the same period last year, with 127 found in 2021 compared to last year's 96, Kreyche said.
The most commonly listed cause of death among those found is exposure, the Associated Press reported.
There has also been an uptick in migrant deaths in Texas this year, the news outlet said.
President Joe Biden answers questions from members of the news media on May 25 before departing from the White House. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and radio) to warn us all to duck and cover. The Soviet Union, it seemed, had managed to emplace medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach major East coast cities. He was ordering a naval “quarantine” of the island. As he put it, “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.”
That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, I’m here today, so neither New Haven, where I was then a freshman in college, nor New York, where I grew up, had its Hiroshima moment, nor did anyplace else in the U.S., Russia, or Cuba. Still, it felt too close for comfort.
Despite all the years of the Cold War still to come, I never again felt that unforgettable sense that a nuclear war might break out. But never say never, not on a planet filled with such weaponry, not when its two major powers, the U.S. and China, are increasingly facing off, particularly over the island of Taiwan.
Last month, for instance, Admiral Sam Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet, called China a “pacing threat,” explaining that “I worry about China’s intentions. It doesn’t make a difference to me whether it is tomorrow, next year, or whether it is in six years. At Pacific Fleet and Indo-Pacific Command we have a duty to be ready to respond to threats to U.S. security.” And that “duty,” he added, includes delivering a fleet “capable of thwarting any effort on the part of the Chinese to upend that [world] order, to include the unification by force of Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.”
Meanwhile, in Army circles, there is increasing discussion of the possibility of stationing a U.S. armored brigade combat team as a “tripwire force” on that very island. That way, should Beijing decide to invade, it would face U.S. troops from second one. And just as such thinking was emerging in military circles here, a Chinese publication put out a “detailed outline of a three-stage surprise attack which could pave the way for an assault landing on Taiwan.” All of this, of course, was happening as the Biden administration ramps up its distinctly anti-China-focused foreign policy.
So, welcome to the world TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy, considers as he peers into a future in which the Chinese Missile Crisis of 2024 or 2026 is anything but beyond imagining. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
On the Brink in 2026
U.S.-China Near-War Status Report
t’s the summer of 2026, five years after the Biden administration identified the People’s Republic of China as the principal threat to U.S. security and Congress passed a raft of laws mandating a society-wide mobilization to ensure permanent U.S. domination of the Asia-Pacific region. Although major armed conflict between the United States and China has not yet broken out, numerous crises have erupted in the western Pacific and the two countries are constantly poised for war. International diplomacy has largely broken down, with talks over climate change, pandemic relief, and nuclear nonproliferation at a standstill. For most security analysts, it’s not a matter of if a U.S.-China war will erupt, but when.
Does this sound fanciful? Not if you read the statements coming out of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the upper ranks of Congress these days.
“China poses the greatest long-term challenge to the United States and strengthening deterrence against China will require DoD to work in concert with other instruments of national power,” the Pentagon’s 2022 Defense Budget Overview asserts. “A combat-credible Joint Force will underpin a whole-of-nation approach to competition and ensure the Nation leads from a position of strength.”
On this basis, the Pentagon requested $715 billion in military expenditures for 2022, with a significant chunk of those funds to be spent on the procurement of advanced ships, planes, and missiles intended for a potential all-out, “high-intensity” war with China. An extra $38 billion was sought for the design and production of nuclear weapons, another key aspect of the drive to overpower China.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress, contending that even such sums were insufficient to ensure continued U.S. superiority vis-à-vis that country, are pressing for further increases in the 2022 Pentagon budget. Many have also endorsed the EAGLE Act, short for Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement — a measure intended to provide hundreds of billions of dollars for increased military aid to America’s Asian allies and for research on advanced technologies deemed essential for any future high-tech arms race with China.
Imagine, then, that such trends only gain momentum over the next five years. What will this country be like in 2026? What can we expect from an intensifying new Cold War with China that, by then, could be on the verge of turning hot?
Taiwan 2026: Perpetually on the Brink
Crises over Taiwan have erupted on a periodic basis since the start of the decade, but now, in 2026, they seem to be occurring every other week. With Chinese bombers and warships constantly probing Taiwan’s outer defenses and U.S. naval vessels regularly maneuvering close to their Chinese counterparts in waters near the island, the two sides never seem far from a shooting incident that would have instantaneous escalatory implications. So far, no lives have been lost, but planes and ships from both sides have narrowly missed colliding again and again. On each occasion, forces on both sides have been placed on high alert, causing jitters around the world.
The tensions over that island have largely stemmed from incremental efforts by Taiwanese leaders, mostly officials of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to move their country from autonomous status as part of China to full independence. Such a move is bound to provoke a harsh, possibly military response from Beijing, which considers the island a renegade province.
The island’s status has plagued U.S.-China relations for decades. When, on January 1, 1979, Washington first recognized the People’s Republic of China, it agreed to withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Taiwanese government and cease formal relations with its officials. Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, however, U.S. officials were obligated to conduct informal relations with Taipei. The act stipulated as well that any move by Beijing to alter Taiwan’s status by force would be considered “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States” — a stance known as “strategic ambiguity,” as it neither guaranteed American intervention, nor ruled it out.
In the ensuing decades, the U.S. sought to avoid conflict in the region by persuading Taipei not to make any overt moves toward independence and by minimizing its ties to the island, thereby discouraging aggressive moves by China. By 2021, however, the situation had been remarkably transformed. Once under the exclusive control of the Nationalist Party that had been defeated by communist forces on the Chinese mainland in 1949, Taiwan became a multiparty democracy in 1987. It has since witnessed the steady rise of pro-independence forces, led by the DPP. At first, the mainland regime sought to woo the Taiwanese with abundant trade and tourism opportunities, but the excessive authoritarianism of its Communist Party alienated many island residents — especially younger ones — only adding momentum to the drive for independence. This, in turn, has prompted Beijing to switch tactics from courtship to coercion by constantly sending its combat planes and ships into Taiwanese air and sea space.
Trump administration officials, less concerned about alienating Beijing than their predecessors, sought to bolster ties with the Taiwanese government in a series of gestures that Beijing found threatening and that were only expanded in the early months of the Biden administration. At that time, growing hostility to China led many in Washington to call for an end to “strategic ambiguity” and the adoption of an unequivocal pledge to defend Taiwan if it were to come under attack from the mainland.
“I think the time has come to be clear,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas declared in February 2021. “Replace strategic ambiguity with strategic clarity that the United States will come to the aid of Taiwan if China was to forcefully invade Taiwan.”
The Biden administration was initially reluctant to adopt such an inflammatory stance, since it meant that any conflict between China and Taiwan would automatically become a U.S.-China war with nuclear ramifications. In April 2022, however, under intense congressional pressure, the Biden administration formally abandoned “strategic ambiguity” and vowed that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would prompt an immediate American military response. “We will never allow Taiwan to be subjugated by military force,” President Biden declared at that time, a striking change in a longstanding American strategic position.
The DoD would soon announce the deployment of a permanent naval squadron to the waters surrounding Taiwan, including an aircraft carrier and a supporting flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Ely Ratner, President Biden’s top envoy for the Asia-Pacific region, first outlined plans for such a force in June 2021 during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. A permanent U.S. presence, he suggested, would serve to “deter, and, if necessary, deny a fait accompli scenario” in which Chinese forces quickly attempted to overwhelm Taiwan. Although described as tentative then, it would, in fact, become formal policy following President Biden’s April 2022 declaration on Taiwan and a brief exchange of warning shots between a Chinese destroyer and a U.S. cruiser just south of the Taiwan Strait.
Today, in 2026, with a U.S. naval squadron constantly sailing in waters near Taiwan and Chinese ships and planes constantly menacing the island’s outer defenses, a potential Sino-American military clash never seems far off. Should that occur, what would happen is impossible to predict, but most analysts now assume that both sides would immediately fire their advanced missiles — many of them hypersonic (that is, exceeding five times the speed of sound) — at their opponent’s key bases and facilities. This, in turn, would provoke further rounds of air and missile strikes, probably involving attacks on Chinese and Taiwanese cities as well as U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Guam. Whether such a conflict could be contained at the non-nuclear level remains anyone’s guess.
The Incremental Draft
In the meantime, planning for a U.S.-China war-to-come has dramatically reshaped American society and institutions. The “Forever Wars” of the first two decades of the twenty-first century had been fought entirely by an All-Volunteer Force (AVF) that typically endured multiple tours of duty, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. was able to sustain such combat operations (while continuing to maintain a substantial troop presence in Europe, Japan, and South Korea) with 1.4 million servicemembers because American forces enjoyed uncontested control of the airspace over its war zones, while China and Russia remained wary of engaging U.S. forces in their own neighborhoods.
Today, in 2026, however, the picture looks radically different: China, with an active combat force of two million soldiers, and Russia, with another million — both militaries equipped with advanced weaponry not widely available to them in the early years of the century — pose a far more formidable threat to U.S. forces. An AVF no longer looks particularly viable, so plans for its replacement with various forms of conscription are already being put into place.
Bear in mind, however, that in a future war with China and/or Russia, the Pentagon doesn’t envision large-scale ground battles reminiscent of World War II or the Iraq invasion of 2003. Instead, it expects a series of high-tech battles involving large numbers of ships, planes, and missiles. This, in turn, limits the need for vast conglomerations of ground troops, or “grunts,” as they were once labeled, but increases the need for sailors, pilots, missile launchers, and the kinds of technicians who can keep so many high-tech systems at top operational capacity.
As early as October 2020, during the final months of the Trump administration, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was already calling for a doubling of the size of the U.S. naval fleet, from approximately 250 to 500 combat vessels, to meet the rising threat from China. Clearly, however, there would be no way for a force geared to a 250-ship navy to sustain one double that size. Even if some of the additional ships were “uncrewed,” or robotic, the Navy would still have to recruit several hundred thousand more sailors and technicians to supplement the 330,000 then in the force. Much the same could be said of the U.S. Air Force.
No surprise, then, that an incremental restoration of the draft, abandoned in 1973 as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, has taken place in these years. In 2022, Congress passed the National Service Reconstitution Act (NSRA), which requires all men and women aged 18 to 25 to register with newly reconstituted National Service Centers and to provide them with information on their residence, employment status, and educational background — information they are required to update on an annual basis. In 2023, the NSRA was amended to require registrants to complete an additional questionnaire on their technical, computer, and language skills. Since 2024, all men and women enrolled in computer science and related programs at federally aided colleges and universities have been required to enroll in the National Digital Reserve Corps (NDRC) and spend their summers working on defense-related programs at selected military installations and headquarters. Members of that Digital Corps must also be available on short notice for deployment to such facilities, should a conflict of any sort threaten to break out.
The establishment of just such a corps, it should be noted, had been a recommendation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a federal agency established in 2019 to advise Congress and the White House on how to prepare the nation for a high-tech arms race with China. “We must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China,” the commission avowed in March 2021, given that “the human talent deficit is the government’s most conspicuous AI deficit.” To overcome it, the commission suggested then, “We should establish a… civilian National Reserve to grow tech talent with the same seriousness of purpose that we grow military officers. The digital age demands a digital corps.”
Indeed, only five years later, with the prospect of a U.S.-China conflict so obviously on the agenda, Congress is considering a host of bills aimed at supplementing the Digital Corps with other mandatory service requirements for men and women with technical skills, or simply for the reinstatement of conscription altogether and the full-scale mobilization of the nation. Needless to say, protests against such measures have been erupting at many colleges and universities, but with the mood of the country becoming increasingly bellicose, there has been little support for them among the general public. Clearly, the “volunteer” military is about to become an artifact of a previous epoch.
A New Cold War Culture of Repression
With the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon obsessively focused on preparations for what’s increasingly seen as an inevitable war with China, it’s hardly surprising that civil society in 2026 has similarly been swept up in an increasingly militaristic anti-China spirit. Popular culture is now saturated with nationalistic and jingoistic memes, regularly portraying China and the Chinese leadership in derogatory, often racist terms. Domestic manufacturers hype “Made in America” labels (even if they’re often inaccurate) and firms that once traded extensively with China loudly proclaim their withdrawal from that market, while the streaming superhero movie of the moment, The Beijing Conspiracy, on a foiled Chinese plot to disable the entire U.S. electrical grid, is the leading candidate for the best film Oscar.
Domestically, by far the most conspicuous and pernicious result of all this has been a sharp rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, especially those assumed to be Chinese, whatever their origin. This disturbing phenomenon, which began at the outset of the Covid crisis, when President Trump, in a transparent effort to deflect blame for his mishandling of the pandemic, started using terms like “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu” to describe the disease. Attacks on Asian Americans rose precipitously then and continued to climb after Joe Biden took office and began vilifying Beijing for its human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. According to the watchdog group Stop AAPI Hate, some 6,600 anti-Asian incidents were reported in the U.S. between March 2020 and March 2021, with almost 40% of those events occurring in February and March 2021.
For observers of such incidents back then, the connection between anti-China policymaking at the national level and anti-Asian violence at the neighborhood level was incontrovertible. “When America China-bashes, then Chinese get bashed, and so do those who ‘look Chinese,’” said Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University at that time. “American foreign policy in Asia is American domestic policy for Asians.”
By 2026, most Chinatowns in America have been boarded up and those that remain open are heavily guarded by armed police. Most stores owned by Asian Americans (of whatever background) were long ago closed due to boycotts and vandalism, and Asian Americans think twice before leaving their homes.
The hostility and distrust exhibited toward Asian Americans at the neighborhood level has been replicated at the workplace and on university campuses, where Chinese Americans and Chinese-born citizens are now prohibited from working at laboratories in any technical field with military applications. Meanwhile, scholars of any background working on China-related topics are subject to close scrutiny by their employers and government officials. Anyone expressing positive comments about China or its government is routinely subjected to harassment, at best, or at worst, dismissal and FBI investigation.
As with the incremental draft, such increasingly restrictive measures were first adopted in a series of laws in 2022. But the foundation for much of this was the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, passed by the Senate in June of that year. Among other provisions, it barred federal funding to any college or university that hosted a Confucius Institute, a Chinese government program to promote that country’s language and culture in foreign countries. It also empowered federal agencies to coordinate with university officials to “promote protection of controlled information as appropriate and strengthen defense against foreign intelligence services,” especially Chinese ones.
Diverging From the Path of War
Yes, in reality, we’re still in 2021, even if the Biden administration regularly cites China as our greatest threat. Naval incidents with that country’s vessels in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait are indeed on the rise, as are anti-Asian-American sentiments domestically. Meanwhile, as the planet’s two greatest greenhouse-gas emitters squabble, our world is growing hotter by the year.
Without question, something like the developments described above (and possibly far worse) will lie in our future unless action is taken to alter the path we’re now on. All of those “2026” developments, after all, are rooted in trends and actions already under way that only appear to be gathering momentum at this moment. Bills like the Innovation and Competition Act enjoy near unanimous support among Democrats and Republicans, while strong majorities in both parties favor increased funding of Pentagon spending on China-oriented weaponry. With few exceptions — Senator Bernie Sanders among them — no one in the upper ranks of government is saying: Slow down. Don’t launch another Cold War that could easily go hot.
“It is distressing and dangerous,” as Sanders wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.” At a time when this planet faces ever more severe challenges from climate change, pandemics, and economic inequality, he added that “the prevalence of this view will create a political environment in which the cooperation that the world desperately needs will be increasingly difficult to achieve.”
In other words, we Americans face an existential choice: Do we stand aside and allow the “fast-growing consensus” Sanders speaks of to shape national policy, while abandoning any hope of genuine progress on climate change or those other perils? Alternately, do we begin trying to exert pressure on Washington to adopt a more balanced relationship with China, one that would place at least as much emphasis on cooperation as on confrontation. If we fail at this, be prepared in 2026 or soon thereafter for the imminent onset of a catastrophic (possibly even nuclear) U.S.-China war.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Jovenel Moïse. (photo: Valerie Baeriswyl/AFP)
U.S. Justice Department will investigate whether there were violations of U.S. criminal laws in connection with the matter.
he U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) acknowledged that a suspect in the assassination of Haiti's President Jovenel Moise was one of its informants.
“A suspect in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise has been a classified source for the DEA,” the U.S. Agency said.
“After the assassination of President Moise, the suspect contacted his DEA acquaintances. A DEA official in charge of Haiti urged him to surrender to local authorities, and along with a U.S. State Department official provided information to the Haitian government that he helped the Haitian government,” it added.
“Some assassins yelled ‘DEA’ at the time of their attack,” CNN recalled, adding that the DEA said that none of the attackers were operating on behalf of the agency.
Two U.S. citizens, Joseph Vincent and James Solages, were arrested in connection with the attack on Moise's residence. Also, Haitian-American Christian Sanon, who is considered being primarily responsible for the attack, was arrested on Monday.
So far, Haitian authorities have arrested 17 Colombian mercenaries, 11 of whom are former members of the Haitian armed forces.
U.S. Justice Department spokesperson Anthony Coley said senior U.S. officials in Haiti have conducted an initial assessment of the situation. He also announced that his institution will investigate whether there were violations of U.S. criminal laws in connection with the matter.
Manatees crowd together near the warm-water outflows from Florida Power & Light's plant in Riviera Beach, Florida, on Feb. 5. More manatees have died already in 2021 than in any other year in Florida's recorded history, primarily from starvation due to the loss of sea grass beds. (photo: Greg Lovett/AP)
The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that 841 manatee deaths were recorded between Jan. 1 and July 2, breaking the previous record of 830 that died in 2013 because of an outbreak of toxic red tide.
The TCPalm website reports that more than half the deaths have died in the Indian River Lagoon and its surrounding areas in Volusia, Brevard, Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin counties. The overwhelming majority of deaths have been in Brevard, where 312 manatees have perished.
Some biologists believe water pollution is killing the seagrass beds in the area.
"Unprecedented manatee mortality due to starvation was documented on the Atlantic coast this past winter and spring," Florida's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute wrote as it announced the record Friday. "Most deaths occurred during the colder months when manatees migrated to and through the Indian River Lagoon, where the majority of seagrass has died off."
Boat strikes are also a major cause of manatee deaths, killing at least 63 this year.
The manatee was once classified as endangered by the federal government, but it was reclassified as threatened in 2017. Environmentalists are asking that the animal again be considered endangered.
The federal government says approximately 6,300 manatees live in Florida waters, up from about 1,300 in the early 1990s
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