EIR Nails US War Hawks as the Continuing British Empire

On the very day of the imperial ruling by the Hague Court of Arbitration against China on the Philippines’ claim over the South China Sea, CSIS, the neocon center in Washington, DC, held a full-day forum on the South China Sea, beginning with a keynote by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK). Sullivan, Sen. John McCain’s cohort on the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave a speech which would have fit well at a Nazi Nuremberg rally, only to be then exposed by EIR’s Bill Jones as a spokesman and hitman for the British Empire in its modern guise of the bipartisan war hawks backing Obama’s war mobilization against Russia and China.

Sullivan, like many others at the CSIS conclave, repeated Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s line that the US military can and will “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.” He had the gall to say that the US wants to use its military power so that “wars of aggression will be relegated to the past.” He said that the Founding Fathers wrote “freedom of navigation” into our Declaration of Independence against a tyrant that restrained that freedom, and that we are continuing that defense of freedom of navigation today with our military in the South China Sea.

EIR’s Washington bureau chief, Bill Jones, said that for him history was important, as one of his forefathers had been killed in that same American Revolution, and that he had a correction to make on Sullivan’s history lesson. “Our founding fathers had revolted against a British Empire,” Jones said, “the Lord of the Seas at the time, which also claimed that they represented the “rule of law”, THEIR law, and we had insisted that we had the right to determine our own destiny.” “Now we seem to have adopted the roll of the British Empire and are insisting China do the same thing. Think of how China is viewing this from the standpoint of their own history. If we follow up on your proposal to build up our military forces in the region on behalf of “freedom of navigation,” or any other pretext, this will lead to war,” Jones said.

Sullivan was thoroughly destabilized, as the audience was silent and clearly nervous.

“We don’t set the rules,” he finally babbled. “We may be the leaders, but this is the rules-based order. To say we are some sort of dictator is wrong. We disagree on that. We want freedom of navigation and commerce. More and more countries are calling on us to help because we are trusted. Look at the NATO meeting last week [!]. They trust us, that we have no territorial demands, they need our help to fight back against nations that use coercion, like Russia and now China.”

The very next question was posed by Defense News, whose reporter said: “In following up that last question, you said that now we should send two aircraft carrier groups to be permanently deployed in the region. Isn’t that going to be an escalation which leads to further tension?” Again Sullivan stood exposed, responding defensively: “I don’t view our country standing with our allies militarily, for trade and commerce, as some kind of a threat.”

The Nuremberg rally proceeded, nonetheless, in lock-step.

[All quotations above are close paraphrases of the respective comments.]