Lew Rockwell: Scaring Us Into War

Brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to start nuclear war with both Russia and China. Suicidal, you say? Millions of people would be killed, but the Biden gang doesn’t care. They intend to exercise hegemony over what is left, with no challenges from the Super Powers they have destroyed.

Of course, the America people don’t want a nuclear war. We don’t want to be destroyed. What can Biden and his henchmen do? They aim to scare us into war. They want us to think that Russia and China intend to attack us. If we can be induced to believe that, maybe we will go along with their nefarious plans for war.

The balloon incidents of this past month are an example of their tactics. The American people were told that China had sent spy balloons over America to gather sensitive information and these had to be shot down. Naturally, if the government is shooting down foreign objects, people will get scared.

Timur Fomenko gives a good account of what happened: “Over the past few days, the US succumbed to a political frenzy over a Chinese high-altitude balloon,  which Beijing says is designed to monitor weather, but which American officials dubbed a ‘spy balloon’.

Use of the term ‘spy’ to describe it quickly became mainstream, but it should be treated with caution given the US often uses that word to describe things it tends to dislike from China, whether or not there’s any evidence, for example, as we discussed last week, fridges.

The world looked on as the US descended into a self-orchestrated delirium, which ultimately resulted in President Joe Biden issuing the order to shoot the balloon down over South Carolina. For him, it was purely a matter of domestic political standing, as hawkish Republicans derided him as weak for his initial decision to leave the balloon alone out of caution.

It is very telling that after the ‘spy balloon’ was shot down, unnamed Pentagon officials told American media that similar aircraft entered US airspace three times during the Donald Trump administration. Apparently, no-one thought to inform the public about them until they could be used to make Biden look better in comparison. And of course, ‘unnamed Pentagon officials’ are the most convenient sources, generating headlines that shape public opinion and political debate without the need for evidence or accountability.

In the US, political debate pertaining to China is broken, unhinged to the point that it is impossible to have a rational or modest conversation about the topic in the political arena without descending into Red Scare-worthy hysteria and wild paranoia. If you followed the ‘conversation’ and the calls to action, you’d think China committed a large-scale atrocity against the US that demanded immediate retaliation.

What does that mean? It means those who seek to ramp up tensions with China have control of the US debate to the point that it is detrimental to the administration, and it is thus impossible for America to act reasonably in its foreign policy with China. There’s enough evidence of that already. The Biden administration is, to some extent, a passenger in the toxic anti-Beijing foreign policy momentum which Trump and his allies created. There’s little Biden can do about it even if he wanted to, so for China, attempting good faith diplomacy with the US is a waste of time.

American foreign policy works through the deliberate promulgation of mass hysteria targeted at ‘official enemies’. The institutions of state, combined with the media, are adept at creating an atmosphere of immense fear, threat and paranoia towards anyone who is an opponent of the US, a legacy which began with McCarthyism in the Cold War. This fearmongering is often weighted on falsehoods, rather than evidence, and the scale of the threats are almost always exaggerated. The claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Russia interfered in the US selection, are two contemporary examples.

While US foreign policy works through bipartisan consensus, these paranoid narratives are jumped on by politicians who often exaggerate claims that their opponents are being influenced, infiltrated or acting to appease the given enemy, for domestic political point-scoring, as in the bogus ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ stories. They mix hysterical foreign policy narratives with deadly domestic partisan divides, and the product of it all is a dangerously unstable foreign policy which is predisposed towards hawkishness, because perceived reason or compromise with the ‘enemy’ becomes a domestic political liability.

On the issue of China, this has become a serious problem. As the balloon story shows, all things related to China now serve to amplify paranoia in the US. While these narratives have been carefully selected in order to manufacture consent for US sanctions and technology embargos on China, such as Huawei, they have become so deeply saturated that it has allowed many political figures to see an advantage in embracing a full-on Cold War agenda and to extend that paranoia to anything, such as, for example, TikTok.

And in this environment, how is it possible to ever find balance in the relationship with China? When the hostility is plentiful from all levels of government, irrespective of political party, any attempts to mend or fix the relationship with China can be derailed by those eager to dramatically ramp up tensions or provoke Beijing whenever they get the chance. Another example was Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and the next will be Kevin McCarthy’s visit. These deliberately staged confrontations force the administration’s hand to act in order to save face, and make any kind of diplomacy with Beijing politically costly.

What this shows is that the Biden administration is not really in control at all. In fact, it has no leadership, no innovative or courageous thinking, and has just gone with the extremely hawkish flow on almost every foreign policy issue. This is ironic given Blinken framed his visit to Beijing as ‘managing’ the competition between the two powers, when in fact the destabilizing, aggressive and unhinged behaviour is coming plainly from one side.

This saga paints an extremely pessimistic vista of the path ahead for US-China relations, because even though it is only a balloon, it demonstrates how unhinged the US political climate about China has become, and how the US President has neither control over, nor ability to manage, it. The White House is making decisions based on impulse and popular talking points, not national interest.”

Even though the story of the dangerous Chinese satellites was soon exposed as a hoax, the Biden gang doubled down on the story: “After the outburst of paranoia triggered by the so-called ‘Chinese Spy Balloon’, the US has now reportedly briefed the diplomats of 40 countries about the supposed threat.

Washington has apparently sent American missions around the world information about the incident and presented to foreign diplomats gathered in Beijing information to demonstrate that it was indeed an espionage aircraft, and not a weather-monitoring balloon as China claims.

In addition to the domestic political motivations for Washington to whip up a frenzy about the Chinese balloon (covered here), we now see the US deliberately weaponizing the story to attack China on a global scale, aiming to instill greater fear, suspicion and paranoia of Beijing worldwide. The incident itself might be nothing more than hot air, but Washington is willing to gaslight its allies and ‘partners’ into greater alignment with American goals and preferences.

The American foreign policy machine is a master of a process known as ‘manufacturing consent’, the term famously coined by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. The US uses an array of aligned think tanks and cherry-picked experts, as well as a monopoly over information and press access, in order to perfectly craft a narrative which promotes their goals and preferences. Simply speaking, the topics, areas of interest and points of view which the US government focuses on are given funding (often from government departments), press access and regular airtime. Those it does not care for are simply ignored.

As a key example of how this works: Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a story that cited unnamed US officials to confirm the Chinese balloon was indeed used by Beijing’s military for spying and was part of a wider aerial surveillance effort. Not only is this a direct official-to-media report, but no evidence or facts were given, neither was any possible agenda behind the story highlighted or scrutinized, nor any ‘alternative’ point of view presented. Of course, these are beyond the scope of a simple news story – and we don’t get anything other than this news story, sourced from US officials, speaking to the media on condition of anonymity but most likely with the direction of their superiors. This is how the US government shapes the narrative and manufactures consent through the media.

So what’s the agenda behind the US raising the ‘spy balloon’ alarm internationally? It’s one thing to make it a scandal at home, trading some political points over who is the most hard-line on China, but to publicize it internationally like that, there must be a bigger goal behind it. By claiming that the balloon was being used for military and espionage purposes, and therefore constitutes a ‘national security threat’, the US is clearly eyeing up an opportunity to impose new sanctions against Chinese firms.

It has been a running theme of US sanctions against China to blacklist a company, either from receiving US technology exports, or from US investment, by claiming that it is owned or operated on behalf of the Chinese military, even when it isn’t. This has been a key part of Washington’s growing technology war against Beijing. These assumptions are made on insinuations and ‘guilt by association’ logic, rather than clear-cut proof. Therefore, the US could be preparing to blacklist the companies involved in constructing the balloon, claiming they are a military threat.

In addition to that, it should be noted that the US is also trying to push G7 to collectively sanction China for ‘supporting’ the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which would also involve blacklisting Chinese firms. As this requires consensus, Washington is looking to get more partners on its side, and creating a political capital of mass paranoia against China is one way to do it. History shows that if the US cannot get allies to comply with a given foreign policy course of action, its response is to deliberately escalate tensions until they do. We have seen this many times in its approach to China and Russia.

Given this, the conclusion is that the US is manufacturing outrage over the Chinese balloon in order to manipulate international discourse to procure support for its foreign policy objectives. This is not just a domestic policy squabble, and not at all a matter of national security; the US is actively aiming to amplify the threat of the balloon to leverage its allies into following suit with anti-China objectives. In addition, it is clear from circumstantial evidence that the Biden administration is also eyeing up new sanctions on China, and what better opportunity is there to do so than a hyper-dramatic incident like this? The US always, always exaggerates threats to shape its agenda, at home and abroad.”

Let’s do everything we can to prevent brain-dead Biden and his minions from destroying the world. We should demand a return to our traditional policy of non-interventionism, supported by those great Americans, Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and . Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.