Fred Reed on the U.S. cold war with China

In pondering Washington’s new toy, a cold war against China, one sees a pattern.  China’s approach to influence and prosperity is commercial and longsighted.  This does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy, only intelligent.  They advance their interests while turning a profit, which wars don’t.  China invests heavily in the infrastructure, both physical and educational, that makes for current and future competitiveness.  They are fast, agile, innovative, and imperfectly scrupulous...  Washington’s approach is military, coercive, shortsighted, and commercially dimwitted.

[...]

China’s major capital expenditures, as gleaned as best I can from pubs covering these: highways, dams, bridges, very-high-voltage power lines, airports, rail, new high-tech 360 mph rail, five-g implementation, reactors, and semiconductor catchup.  America’s major capital expenditures: the B-21, F-35, Virginia-class subs, Ford-class aircraft carriers, SSN (x) attack submarine.

[...]

What is a Ford-class carrier good for?  The Fords are versatile ships, having a three-fold purpose: Funneling lots of money into military industry, killing defenseless peasants, and sticking the Pentagon’s tongue out at China. Killing peasants and soldiers in third-rate armies of bedraggled third-world countries is what the American military does.  Think Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia. Getting into big wars with real countries is no longer practical despite the opportunities for profits because big countries depend on each other too much commercially.  Even killing peasants begins to lose cache, as witness the comic opera defeat in Afghanistan..

~ Fred Reed, "A Military Solution to a Commercial Problem: It Probably Ain't Gonna Work Much Longer," The Unz Review, September 13, 2021

Fred Reed on the delusion of American power

Finally... there is the 1955 Syndrome, the engrained belief that America is all powerful.  This is arrogance and self-delusion.  In the Pentagon you encounter a mandatory can-do attitude a belief that the US military is indomitable, the best trained, armed, and led force in this or any nearby galaxy.  In one sense this is necessary: You can’t tell the Marines that they are mediocre light infantry or sailors that their aircraft are rapidly obsolescing, their ships sitting ducks in a changing military world, and that the whole military enterprise is rotted by social engineering, profiteering, and careerism. 

But look around: The US has failed to intimidate North Korea, chase the Chinese out of its islands in the South China Sea, retrieve the Crimea from Russia, can’t intimidate Iran, just got run out of Afghanistan, remains mired in Iraq and Syria, failed to block Nordstream II despite a desperate effort, and couldn’t keep Turkey from buying the S-400.  The Pentagon plans for the wars it wants to fight, not the wars it does fight.  The most dangerous weapons of the modern world are not nukes, but the Ak-47, the RPG, and the IED.  Figure it out.

~ Fred Reed, "Despair in the Empire of Graveyards," LewRockwell.com, August 21, 2021

Fred Reed on pulling out of Afghanistan

So why did this happen?  Why another rush to the exit as the world laughs?  Which the world is doing.  In a sentence, because if you do something stupid and it doesn’t work, it probably won’t work when you do it again. 

The psychological explanation is slightly more complex. Vietnam is a good example. America invaded a country of another race, utterly different culture, practicing religions GIs had never heard of, speaking a language virtually no Americans spoke, a country exceedingly sick of being invaded by foreigners, most of them white.  In Afghanistan the designated evil was terrorism, in Viet Nam communism, but the choice of evils doesn’t matter.  You have to tell the rubes at home something noble sounding.

~ Fred Reed, "Despair in the Empire of Graveyards," LewRockwell.com, August 21, 2021

Fred Reed compares the evacuation of Afghanistan to that of Saigon in 1975

And now we have done it all over again in Kabul, complete with helicopters over the embassy and a panicked evacuation undertaken way too late and sudden concern for turncoat Afghans who made the mistake of working for the US.  There is talk of importing 20,000 Afghan refugees to America.  I find it amusing that many conservatives, who thought the war was peaches because it was about democracy and niceness and American values, now object to importing people their dimwitted enthusiasms put in line to be killed.  Use and discard.  Countries and people.

~ Fred Reed, "Despair in the Empire of Graveyards," LewRockwell.com, August 22, 2021

Fred Reed on the American empire

As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.

~ Fred Reed, "A Country Not Salvageable," The Unz Review, June 24, 2020

Fred Reed on the mixing of cultures

The likelihood of amity between races is proportional to their agreement on values important to them. For example, the Chinese share (what once were) the white values of study, work, courtesy, and obedience to the law. That they eat with chopsticks and celebrate New Year on the wrong day doesn’t matter.

However, again for example, a culture that believes in female genital mutilation and utter subjection of women cannot live amicably with a culture that abhors these things. Black ghetto culture and white are immiscible in so many fundamental values that they will not live well together.

Some cultures can assimilate, for example East Asian and American white, Latino and American white. But, in addition to sharply different cultures, too many blacks live in sprawling, racially isolated urban centers with almost no contact with the outside world other than television.

~ Fred Reed, "A Country Not Salvageable," The Unz Review, June 24, 2020

Fred Reed on the failure of the Civil Rights movement

The coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly, though implausibly, over racism. But never mind. The causes don’t matter. The deal is done.

Still, it is interesting to recognize that the protesters are, perhaps deliberately, confusing the incapacity of blacks with systemic racism. In truth, America has made the greatest effort ever essayed by one race to uplift another. Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court unanimously ended segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by employers illegal because blacks scored poorly, then found “affirmative action,” racial discrimination against whites, legal (hardly oppression of blacks, this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white President sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has been an enormous flow of charity to blacks: Section Eight Housing, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. We now have free breakfasts for black children, then free lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In aggregate they resemble a distributed guaranteed basic income. Which is interesting.

These measures sprang from the best of intentions. Most I think should continue. I for one do not want to evict blacks from public housing or have their children go hungry. Yet none of these programs has had its desired effect. The crucial academic gap has not closed, crime remains horribly high, illegitimacy verges on universal. This is a great shame. Blacks are decent enough people, likable if they don’t hate you, and phenomenally talented. But it hasn’t worked.

~ Fred Reed, "A Country Not Salvageable," The Unz Review, June 24, 2020

Head Start logo