1). “U.S. Munitions Supply DANGEROUSLY LOW Former DoD Official Warns”, Aug 19, 2025, Glen Greenwald interviews Dan Caldwell, former Trump Regime Pentagon official, System Update with Glen Greenwald, duration of video 29:19, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “Amerika: MAGA, China, Imperial Decline, Democracy”, Mar 27, 2025, John Keane, 6-part article, tab for parts at bottom left of each page, (Preparatory notes originally prepared for the session ‘US Foreign Policy and Its Implications for Asia-Pacific Cooperation’, Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, March 2025), JohnKeane.Net, at < https://www.johnkeane.net/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: In Item 1)., “U.S. Munitions ….”, Glen Greenwald, who once masqueraded as a leftist, now spews right-wing articles from Left-Leaning Brazil, where he hides from the very right-wing nightmare developments he now supports. Maybe he and his lover should move to El Salvador. Anyhow he talks with Dan Caldwell about the fact that the U.S. is now unable to supply the desired munitions to all its clients and to U.S. Imperial forces at the same time. Between snide remarks about the Imperialist BonFides of Biden Administration figures they are forced to acknowledge that the U.S. now falls far short of being the “Arsenal of Plutocracy” like it was during WW 2. They even admit that part of the problem is the proclivity of U.S. Arms producers for the most exotic, expensive, and highly profitable equipment. Meanwhile Russia, which some on the Right point out only has an economic output about equal to that of Texas, manages to produce 3 to 4 times the munitions the U.S. makes.
Item 2)., “Amerika: MAGA, China, ….”, discusses at some length the decline of the U.S. Empire and the concomitant rise of Chinese power. He predicts more horrors, outrages, and repression in the U.S. and the rest of the west while the Chinese and other East Asian societies grow in power and prosperity. Can a new Chinese Empire lead the world to a better fate or will we all perish in a nuclear confrontation?? Time will tell.
1). “U.S. Munitions Supply DANGEROUSLY LOW Former DoD Official Warns”, Aug 19, 2025, Glen Greenwald interviews Dan Caldwell, former Trump Regime Pentagon official, System Update with Glen Greenwald, duration of video 29:19, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Amerika: MAGA, China, Imperial Decline, Democracy
Preparatory notes originally prepared for the session ‘US Foreign Policy and Its Implications for Asia-Pacific Cooperation’, Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, March 2025
There is an old Chinese saying that when the winds of change blow some people build walls while others build windmills. The old proverb has a fresh pertinence for our world is living through stormy times marked by a strange subdivision: the emergence of a powerful new Chinese empire of a kind unknown in previous world history and the walled withdrawal and retreat of the global empire of the United States.
Getting the measure of these world-shaping dynamics should be a priority for every thinking person, but the task is hampered by much bluff and bluster, propaganda and disinformation and – strangely – by widespread support for the view that President Trump’s preachings on America’s renewal and greatness are basically correct. It’s true that both the supporters and observers of Donald Trump’s vision of America’s embattled global role are predicting a rough ride for the world. But even when they are doubtful or outright hostile to the new president’s mutterings, including his bizarre executive order against ‘windmills’, they tacitly or explicitly indulge his conviction that the United States, despite its recent decline, is still the dominant global power and will remain so indefinitely, thanks to the gutsy leadership of the new Trump administration. Presented as breaking news interpretations for audiences hungry to make sense of a moment of great drama, Trump’s recent victory is interpreted as he would like it to be understood, as the triumph of the zeal to fix American decline, as the beginning (as he crowed at his 2025 inauguration) of a splendrous new ‘golden age’ in which the United States, standing on the verge of the ‘four greatest years in American history’, proves that it’s the ‘most powerful, most respected’ country on our planet.
One trouble with this way of thinking is its blindness to the ways the United States squandered its global supremacy and bankrolled the rise of its principal rival during the past four decades. American decline is not recent. Never mind the latter-day pandering to Putin’s Russia. Think of the disastrous military interventions, the wars lost, the botched Blinken-style diplomacy and lies told, the cynical violations of the so-called ‘rules-based order’, and the derision and laughter nowadays generated by a ‘backsliding’ US-style liberal democracy. Then think of the huge historical irony: the way the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China and the subsequent material contributions of the United States to its sweeping reforms co-produced the return of China, after two centuries of subjugation, to a position of global prominence. The consequence? Thanks to the United States, technically speaking, China is no longer merely a ‘country’ or a ‘big power’. It is an empire on the rise. If by empire we mean a super-sized polity whose economic, governmental, diplomatic, cultural and military power spills over and spreads far beyond its borders, then the undeniable fact, as I explain at length in China’s Galaxy Empire (2024), is that China is rapidly becoming an empire with a global reach. Not only is this fledgling empire a formidable challenge to American global hegemony and a far more robust and determined rival to the American empire than was the Soviet Union. The new Chinese empire is in fact the most serious geopolitical threat the United States has faced since its foundation as a republic in the late 18th century.
A New Empire
The spinning shadows of Chinese windmills are everywhere on America’s walls, but you wouldn’t know it from the derogatory statements and bleak forecasts made by MAGA believers. Orientalist ignorance and denial of China’s imperial ambitions are the underbelly of their belief in US superiority, so let’s consider some of the most important evidence.
Measured by total assets, the four biggest banks in the world are Chinese. China has outflanked bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to become the largest global creditor backed by its own financial services institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China is spearheading the global rebellion against a world financial system defined by the US dollar and its rentier finance capitalist economy; in mid-2023, for the first time, the RMB topped the US dollar in China’s cross-border transactions. With a nearly US$1 trillion surplus in 2024 – the United States hasn’t enjoyed a trade surplus since 1975 – China is the largest trading country and owner of half the world’s patents.
Despite US-led efforts to ‘decouple’ from China by applying tariff penalties, boycotting its products and services, and banning the sale and import of new communications equipment from Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies, China’s economy – unlike the former Soviet Union – is an open political economy shaped by big business entangled with big government. It is a new species of state capitalism which attracts substantial upstream investment from major foreign companies such as Airbus SE, Samsung, Toyota, German chemicals giant BASF and Singapore’s OCBC bank and lithium-ion battery manufacturer Durapower Holdings. China meanwhile produces a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined. China is the EU’s and India’s main trading partners in goods. It is the principal investor and trader in the world’s most sizeable free trade zone in Africa; and in Latin America, for the first time in two centuries of independence from the Spanish empire and de facto economic and military dependence upon the United States, countries such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and Colombia are actively drawing closer to China.
Globally significant shifts are also happening in China in matters of everyday life. After experiencing low levels of life expectancy like those in the West a century ago, life expectancy (78.6 years in 2022 compared with 51 in 1962, according to World Bank data [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN]) has surged beyond levels in the United States, where healthy life expectancy at birth has been declining. Life expectancy is even higher among China’s 400-million strong middle classes. Beneficiaries of the domestic push towards a ‘moderately prosperous society’, global expansion has for them become a way of life. Loyal to the system, guided by dreams of house, car and money, frequenters of shopping malls, practised at the art of keeping their heads down – follow the Party, but listen to your wife, runs a common joke – the social significance of the new middle classes has been boosted by overseas studying and by massive state investments in higher education – a nearly 10-fold increase during the past two decades. China now produces more STEM graduates than India, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Canada combined.
Not to be overlooked is a fact of sobering importance: the People’s Liberation Army and its strategy of militarised peace. The PLA is now the globe’s largest standing army, with two million troops backed by an expanding nuclear arsenal, more submarines than any other power, and sophisticated military hardware. The PLA is heavily involved in UN peacekeeping operations. In Libya, Yemen and the Sudan, the PLA has already practised the difficult military arts of evacuating its citizens from conflict zones. Its hand has been strengthened by China’s internal colonisation of Tibet and Xinjiang and by its settlement of disputes with neighbouring states, including India.
The PLA militarised peace strategy is backed by a huge military-industrial-aerospace complex featuring mega-companies sporting trade names such as China North Industries Group Corporation (NORINCO) and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is reinforced by space power aspirations, a heavy reliance on smart diplomacy, and a commitment to a new and formidable model of warfare that presupposes, runs the Chinese saying, that melons forced from the vine don’t taste sweet. Success in war, runs this PLA way of thinking, demands self-control, forbearance, and the ability and willingness to wait (wuwei: non-action). Only fools rush into war. Wars are won, or avoided, by outfoxing opponents, wearing down or frightening enemies without firing a single shot.
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