The cast of characters may be slightly different but the script never changes.
Now that the Taiwan Strait has been designated as the site of the next American conflict, cable news and legacy print outlets have spent much of the past year splitting their Ukraine coverage with giving airtime and column inches to the neocon forces most anxious to see a war with China over the sovereignty of Taiwan. Far from a new tactic, it’s a formula the establishment used with the war in Iraq, and then perfected to whip up public support for a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan as well as interventions in Libya and Syria.
On May 23, at a press conference in Tokyo, alongside Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, President Biden said that the US would defend Taiwan militarily if it was attacked by China.
For the third time in his presidency, Biden had declared his absolute and unequivocal commitment to starting a war with China. And for the third time, the White House swiftly went into damage control and walked the comments back.
Whether or not Biden meant what he said doesn’t need to be dissected because it’s not debatable. For well over a century, the US has intervened in dozens of conflicts and has dictated the global order. If China attempted to reunify with Taiwan by force, there is simply no way that the US would just sit by and allow it to happen. A timeline like that doesn’t align with the US government’s Global Posture Reviews, the coordinated fearmongering, and yes, the president’s repeated statements that this would in fact be our response.
What is most noteworthy about this development was the media’s reaction. Instead of criticizing and challenging the president’s willingness to risk a nuclear showdown with China, many in the mainstream pushed the White House to go even further.
As it’s proven time and time again, the mainstream press doesn’t challenge power; it packages the establishment’s agenda and sells it to the public. This began in 2021 when the current push for a confrontation over Taiwan was still in its infancy.
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Stanley McChrystal – the ‘Runaway General’ whose military career was cut short when the late Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone published a piece that featured the general mocking numerous senior Obama officials, including the president – was one of the most visible faces on cable last fall to sell the Empire’s next conflict.
Following his much-publicized exit, McChrystal was able to parlay his failures on the battlefield into a broad and lucrative consulting career. According to publicly available data, the former general has served as a board member or adviser for at least 10 companies since being terminated by President Obama in 2010.
McChrystal received more than $1.3 million in compensation during his seven years on the board of Navistar International, the Illinois-based defense contractor that reported $7.5 billion in revenue in 2020. Although he’s since left the company, the prospect of future gigs just like this one are very real for a former general, especially one with McChrystal’s professional history.
Generals are wired to reflexively opt for the militaristic option, and they always do. That’s ultimately their default setting and politicians who place a premium on their expertise only do so because it’s a lazy cover for the establishment-favored positions they already hold. For a news organization to rely on their opinion is equally as deceptive.
Organizations such as ExxonMobil, Bank of America, the National Basketball Association, and Monsanto have also utilized The McChrystal Group, the general’s consulting firm, to try to absorb the lessons the company’s founder learned in battle. When COVID-19 hit, the company was able to make money off that as well, making millions consulting the city of Boston and the state of Missouri on their responses to the pandemic.
In October 2021, Stanley McChrystal published Risk: A User’s Guide, a book centered on “an entirely new way to understand risk and master the unknown,” as the new tome’s Amazon page describes it.
In the days that followed, none of the networks who used McChrystal to sell the government’s previous wars missed the opportunity to use him to sell the next one. As the general made the rounds on cable news to sell his book, every anchor he spoke to used the time to help manufacture consent for military action to defend Taiwan.
On October 10, during a conversation with CNN’s Pamela Brown, McChystal, without explaining how, insisted that Taiwan is a critical part of the US military’s defense strategy whose sovereignty must be protected. When Brown followed up to ask McChrystal about the risks of a potential war with China, the general noted that Taiwan is essential to our supply chain, particularly when it comes to chip production. In his response about the prospect of a hot war with a nuclear superpower, he said that “abandoning” Taiwan would also have the potential of leading countries like Japan and South Korea to recalculate their relationship with the US. In his view, this was something that was worth risking a world war to try to prevent.
McChrystal’s other appearances throughout that week followed largely the same formula. After being asked to corroborate the false premise that we weren’t militaristic enough in Afghanistan, McChrystal was repeatedly asked by the networks to push the benefits of militarism with China.
On the same day as his CNN interview, McChrystal, a former general of a military that’s spent the past century seizing and occupying anything and everything it’s wanted, was on MSNBC lamenting the fact that “we used to be able to intimidate the Republic of China into not thinking about taking Taiwan and that basic reality has changed.”
Establishment repeaters like Don Lemon and Andrea Mitchell were more forceful. Instead of asking if it was necessary or wise for the US to step in and defend Taiwan, they openly wondered exactly how the general recommended doing so. McChrystal was happy to comply, telling Lemon that China has reached the point where they need to ask themselves if we are willing to pay the price to defend Taiwan.
McChrystal was even more explicit during his segment with Mitchell, noting that “… the Chinese military is now in a position where defending Taiwan is a much more difficult prospect than ever before and probably must involve threatening mainland China with a significant attack if we are going to make a credible defense against Taiwan. It is a tough military issue. I think what the Chinese are trying to do is convince us that it is not worth it, to convince us that they will get control of Taiwan and we should not want to pay that price.”
“… And women helping women. The women of Afghanistan forge ahead under Taliban rule,” Mitchell pivoted after thanking McChrystal for his appearance. The propaganda never stops.
Retired General Jack Keane, also no stranger to leveraging his military career into big dollars, made at least half a dozen appearances on Fox News during the first half of that month andwas equally as accommodating.
“I think it’s time for the Biden administration, because of President Xi’s aggressive behavior and say unequivocally that the United States will come to the defense of Taiwan if the mainland China takes any military action whatsoever,” Keane noted during one such appearance.
None of the segments this page reviewed mentioned any details about his extensive corporate ties. For starters, Keane serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Institute for the Study of War, the infamously hawkish think tank with a consistent record of being on the wrong side of every foreign conflict of the 21st century.
Perhaps the most important part of Keane’s professional life at that time was his role since October 2016 as the Executive Chairman of AM General, the Humvee manufacturer that “received a $459 million contract in 2017 to provide more than 2,000 Humvees to Afghanistan through 2023,” as the Daily Beast noted in September. Through all of his on-air criticisms of Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan, this is an important fact about Keane that’s gone unmentioned on Fox. Nobody said a word about this while discussing Taiwan either.
“You are talking about an event that would lead to the next world war, because now, general, the scenario you described here, our Western European allies would have to take a side, our southeast Asian allies would have to take a side. Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan… ” Fox’s Bill Hemmer challenged. The potential risk to the lives of hundreds of millions of people didn’t do anything to derail Keane, who proceeded to outline all of the various ways that Xi could possibly maneuver to take Taiwan.
Former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino ended the segment by noting that “everything that you warned us about in Afghanistan came true, so you’re obviously worth listening to.”
Resistance hero Fareed Zakaria also did his part, inviting former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to advance the Pentagon’s next disaster.
In his intro, Zakaria repeated the misleading talking point that China sent planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, making it sound as if China was flying jets directly over Taipei, when in reality they were actually hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast.
When Zakaria asked if we’d benefit from increased communication with the Chinese, McMaster – a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, an organization also home to war criminal Henry Kissinger – brushed the idea away, saying that communication rarely amounts to much.
“They’re also looking at our defense budget. Our defense budget isn’t doing enough, Fareed, to make up for what’s been a bowed wave of deferred modernization to answer some of the asymmetric capabilities that the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Liberation Army developed. They’ve increased their defense spending 400 percent since 1995,” McMaster noted. This is really the essence of the modern cable news formula… allowing someone like McMaster to inject a quick hit of propaganda before cutting to the Honda commercial without any pushback or analysis of what’s just been stated.
It wasn’t just former military personnel; Washington’s think tanks, as always, were also platformed.
“I think we ought to take this really seriously. Plus, if China were to move against Taiwan and I am not predicting this… if the United States were not to act for whatever reasons, this would be a transformational moment. This would be the end of-”
The connection was lost before Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Richard Haass was able to finish his thought but MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough finished the talking point for him, noting that “Richard is right… we can’t sit back quietly and do nothing if China decides to invade Taiwan.” CFR is one of the most notorious pro-war establishments in Washington, whose roster of donors and board members is a who’s who of some of the most powerful and influential people in the country.
Moments later, when the connection with Haass was reestablished, he returned with a more direct, much more terrifying prescription.
“Putting US forces in the region, tightening our coordination with Japan, and Japan would be critical to hear. In some ways being explicit. We have never been explicit about our preparedness when it comes to Taiwan’s defense. I would move to a position of America’s clarity. If China did act by design or an accident, they grew up and escalated, yes, I believe the United States would have to undertake a wide range of military operations… potentially their bases on the mainland. We are talking about war here. Let’s not sugarcoat it.“
Not to be outdone by his “left-wing” counterparts, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto had former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on last fall to assess the situation.
Unsurprisingly, the architect of the Iraq war was equally as hawkish, expressing his worry that we were sending the wrong message to China, and that we should make it crystal-clear that the US will be ready to step in and help the Taiwanese fight to retain their autonomy.
The networks featured nearly identical analysis from other neocon insiders like Gatestone Institute Senior Fellow Gordon Chang and former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman. Hoffman is a contributor to The Cipher Brief, a media start-up featuring commentary from individuals like former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, General David Petraeus, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and what a coincidence, Stanley McChrystal, Jack Keane, and yes, Gordon Chang, among many others. Small world.
It’s a recipe the establishment has sharpened over time. It’s how they’ve sold our wars for decades. This same strategy that the establishment recycled over the airwaves was replicated in print.
The US government invents a new boogeyman for every generation and the military-industrial-think-tank ecosystem has spent much of the past year planting seeds in mainstream publications that the new boogeyman, along with Russia, is China. Just like manufacturing consent for the war in Iraq began with articles long before the floor vote to authorize military action, that same ecosystem has started to do the same to cultivate support for a potential confrontation with China.
Max Boot’s thinly veiled July 5, 2021 Washington Post piece is a good example.
In the article, Boot – the Iraq war apologist turned Never Trump opportunist – offers a cartoonish and formulaic examination of the differences between the US and China, pointing out that we were founded on the belief that all individuals “are created equal,” while China is rooted in “collective entities” like the Chinese nation and the Chinese people. The horror.
According to Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the GOP is trying to make America more like China. This is the same trick they deployed during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and here it is once again. Forcing Americans to despise a group on people on the other side of the planet is generally one of the first and most crucial steps to laying the groundwork for any military conflict.
After the fall of Kabul, major publications swiftly began lending their platforms to the people hungriest for the next war.
Two weeks after the last US forces left Afghan soil, the New York Times let the DC War Machine get right to work, allowing Oriana Skylar Mastro to workshop what were essentially war plans in its pages. In her piece, Mastro wrote that many countries around the world would view Taiwan falling to Beijing as a sign of the arrival of a Chinese world order. She then proceeded to outline all of the disadvantages that China would have in a potential war against the US.
“But if China has any hope of winning a war across the Strait, its military would have to move fast, before the United States has time to respond,” Mastro notes, insinuating that any conflict over Taiwan would automatically prompt a counterattack from the US. Another seed planted.
In a war against American forces, Mastro also wrote that production and manufacturing centers within mainland China would be vulnerable targets for the US military, and noted that China’s reliance on outside sources for oil and natural gas would leave open the possibility of the US attempting to cut off its supply.
Only in a rotting society like ours can the paper of record so casually float the idea of bombing and economically devastating a country of 1.4 billion that’s never attacked us, with so few people taking notice.
“Chinese leaders already expected a tense relationship with the Biden administration. Now they are faced with the fact that the United States might have the will and resources to push back against Chinese aggression, even if it means war,” Mastro noted, while also assuring that the US “would need to stick it out for only a short time” if a war with China were to break out. Famous last words.
Mastro’s tone is softer than many of the other pieces that were printed in 2021 but doesn’t deviate from the establishment’s central premise – any Chinese attempt to reunify with Taiwan will trigger an automatic US response.
In the guest essay, Mastro is identified as “an expert on China’s military and security policy.” At the end of the piece, the New York Times tells its readers that Mastro is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), but they don’t tell them what that means.
Described by Vanity Fair as the “intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq” during the Bush administration, AEI has long been recognized as one of the most infamous pro-war outfits in Washington.
Some of AEI’s other fellows include aforementioned neocon Paul Wolfowitz as well as John Yoo, the man responsible for sculpting the legal framework for many of George Bush’s most lawless actions.
Another is Frederick Kagan, who is married to Kimberly Kagan, the founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War, where Jack Keane serves as board chairman. His brother, Robert Kagan, is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, and his wife, Victoria Nuland, served as CEO of the Center for a New American Security, and currently serves as President Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. [Nuland – the official who for years has been responsible for US policy in Ukraine – made headlines this past March for her surprisingly honest answer before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she confirmed that there are in fact “research facilities” in Ukraine producing chemical/biological weapons. Up until that point, this had widely been dismissed by the mainstream media as nothing more than a conspiracy theory concocted by the Kremlin.]
All of these similar-sounding organizations have one primary goal: to gobble up as much cash as they can from the defense industry to continue their pursuit of advocating for endless war.
An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal co-written by former chief of staff of the White House National Security Council Alexander B. Gray and former National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien was also very direct.
The piece begins with childish fearmongering about how weak the US looks to the rest of the world following the collapse of Kabul. Now that Afghanistan has fallen, the pair’s implied remedy is for the US to risk potentially starting a world war. “Post-Afghanistan, deterring China from a catastrophic invasion of Taiwan must be the Biden administration’s principal national security objective,” the two writers insist. O’Brien and Gray – an American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) Senior Fellow – list a series of recommendations to achieve this goal. Naturally, they all involve purchasing large quantities of expensive weapons from America’s top defense manufacturers.
It’s important to note that four of the AFPC’s advisory board members are also currently serving as board members for the Atlantic Council, whose donors include the US State Department, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
Boeing, also one of the defense contractor donors on the lengthy list, is involved in the production of Quickstrike air-dropped sea mines, one of the items the article recommends we should sell to Taiwan immediately. Last summer, the US Navy awarded Boeing a $58.3 million contract for the design and production of wing glide kits for Quickstrike-Extended Range aerial-delivered sea mines, a tiny sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars the defense industry will make if we spend the next decade(s) fighting a war in Asia.
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Fast-forward to the present and not much has changed.
The invasion of Ukraine has certainly dominated the discourse over the last few months, but the American War Machine hasn’t taken its eye off China. In the wake of Biden’s comments, the media’s response has been just as aggressive.
The day after the press conference in Tokyo, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called the president’s statement “prudent, necessary and strategically astute.”
But Stephens didn’t just praise Biden’s irresponsible comments; he went further by suggesting that the White House wasn’t being militaristic enough.
“Last year The Wall Street Journal broke the news that a few dozen US Special Operations troops and Marines were in Taiwan, secretly training their island counterparts. That contingent should grow,” Stephens wrote. “So should US sales of the kinds of smaller weapon systems — Stingers, Javelins, Switchblades— that have foiled the Russians in Ukraine and that are hard to target and easy to disperse.”
One of the Times’s warmongers-in-residence also made sure to add that “US defense spending, despite nominal increases, is also too low in the teeth of inflation, with a Navy that continues to shrink in a world far more dangerous in this decade than it was in the last.”
Stephens isn’t alone. His brand of commentary has been regurgitated countless times in every corner of the mainstream media landscape.
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen – also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute – was just as offended by the president’s unwillingness to stick to his guns.
“This makes no sense. He said he would defend Taiwan if it were attacked,” Thiessen wrote.
In making his case for increased clarity on the matter, he went on to cite Richard Haass, of all people, noting Haass’s words in a 2020 essay in which the CFR president wrote that “the policy known as strategic ambiguity has … run its course. Ambiguity is unlikely to deter an increasingly assertive China with growing military capabilities. The time has come for the United States to introduce a policy of strategic clarity: one that makes explicit that the United States would respond to any Chinese use of force against Taiwan.”
Naturally, just as Stephens does, Thiessen ends with the only policy solution a think tank goon is capable of providing.
The sentiment was echoed by his colleague Henry Olsen, who also used the Washington Post’s pages to lament that Biden “has only proposed a 4 percent increase in [defense] spending this year.”
On June 1, the New York Times published a similar piece by Susannah Patton, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based outfit that receives a substantial portion of its funding from the Australian government, which consistently plays along with Washington’s competition with Beijing.
In the op-ed, Patton decries the recent security agreement China signed with the Solomon Islands. [The US was so alarmed by the prospect of an alliance between these two states that it deployed a delegation to the Solomon Islands in an effort to stop the deal from being signed. US officials would arrive after the deal’s announcement.]
“Over time,” Patton worries, “a more dominant China could impede US military access to regional bases during crises, pose challenges for American companies doing business and force US diplomats to work harder to make their voices heard.”
The US never stop competing, but never in a way which benefits the working class Americans our government claims to care so much about.
“Competing with China in Asia will not be easy. But it starts with recognizing that right now the United States is losing,” Patton adds.
Our government worries about the great competition based on how it impacts global access to capital in a way that benefits the powerful, never the ordinary.
The New York Times doesn’t have to go deep into its contacts when it wants to fill its readers’ minds with pro-war propaganda.
In a piece entitled “Biden Says We’ve Got Taiwan’s Back. But Do We?” Oriana Skylar Mastro returned by detailing her many worries about the fact that it would be “far from certain that the United States could hold off China” in a direct military conflict. Included among the many reasons she provides for this concern is the fact that China’s navy is larger than the US fleet, a beaten-to-death cliché directing people to focus on total ship count, as opposed to technical capability.
Mastro assures readers that her words are credible because a 2018 congressionally mandated assessment reached largely the same conclusion.
The assessment she cites was facilitated and published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a Reagan-era federally funded outfit which takes pride in remaining “independent“ and not taking money from corporations but has no qualms about having its opinions shaped by people who do. The “research” the USIP conducts is engineered to produce outcomes that are never in doubt and the results of these “investigations” are a foregone conclusion before the work even begins.
A quick glance at the authors the USIP utilizes and it’s not hard to see why. Some of the contributors to the aforementioned report follow below:
Michael Morell, the former CIA director currently working for Beacon Global Strategies, a DC consulting firm with a roster of clients that reportedly includes swamp monsters such as Citi and Raytheon.
Gary Roughead, who served as Chief of Naval Operations under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution
Jon Kyl, the former Republican Senator working for Covington & Burling, a lobbying firm with clients such as Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.
Christine Fox, formerly the Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense and now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
Current Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks
Network news was, unsurprisingly, just as irresponsible.
Just as President Biden made his way to Asia, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd promised his audience “something that’s never been seen on camera,” and that’s probably not a lie.
After all, who can recall the last time they saw a think tank, funded by the US State Department, showcasing various wargame scenarios on television. Anyone who wishes to try to dispute that networks like NBC are nothing short of state media needs to explain how it’s even remotely acceptable to air something like this.
The US Security State will do anything to prevent China from attaining any additional geopolitical power and, as always, it’s using the media to build public support for a war that absolutely does not need to be fought.
