US prepared to nuke China in ’58, papers reveal

Revelations as Biden heads for new ‘Cold War’

The US under Joe Biden has done little to damp down the anti-China rhetoric of the Trump era – something that was obvious at last month’s UK-hosted G7 meeting and the American president’s follow up visit to NATO.

This has been occurring as new evidence has emerged as to just how close Washington came to authorising a nuclear strike against China in 1958 in defence of anti-communist forces on Taiwan.

Celebrated whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg – whose release of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ 50 years ago famously exposed the US administration’s duplicity over the Vietnam War - has now disclosed documents hitherto unseen by the public.

He told The New York Times, which has published his latest revelations, that he was doing so now because of renewed tensions between the US and China.

Millions would die

The Times reported that American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union might retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die. The crisis arose at a time when Chinese Communist forces were planning to attack islands in the Taiwan Strait in their ongoing campaign against the nationalist stronghold of Chiang Kai-shek.

The US government published a report on the conflict in 1966 but the specific reference to a nuclear attack plan remained classified. It is these pages that Ellsberg, now 90 years old, has released. Present day commentators have said the new information serves to act as a warning of an escalating confrontation with China over Taiwan. The US continues to supply the island with arms and senior US officials have visited there in recent years.

In 1958, officials doubted whether the US could successfully defend Taiwan with conventional weapons. Since then China has grown exponentially in military terms and now rivals the US as an economic superpower.

This, commented Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, was behind President Biden’s view that the G7 nations he met in Cornwall in early June should be co-opted into a new Cold War against China. The message was pressed home when he then visited NATO headquarters in Brussels before a follow-up trip for his first presidential meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Behr argues that such a meeting with the Russian leader, apart from re-setting relations between the country that were so unhinged by Trump, actually flatters Putin by the pretence that Russia, despite its still formidable arsenal, is still a superpower. Washington, argues the columnist, views Russia as a declining force.

Marked contrast

This is in marked contrast with the White House’s view of China, an actual economic powerhouse that is seriously threatening America’s global dominance. Hence the importance for Biden of enlisting the support of G7 nations in backing the US’s anti-China rhetoric, even though the EU and individual nations such as Germany are involved in substantial trade deals with Beijing, also to the US’s annoyance.

Britain’s position in all this is different, and worrying. Biden takes a dim view of Brexit, writes Behr, which is seen as “a pointless sabotage of European unity.” The White House preferred Britain as a pro-US voice wielding influence inside the EU. Since that is no longer the case, Britain under the present government is more subject than ever to US economic pressures and Johnson is particularly keen to be viewed as America’s ultra-loyal friend. That means toeing a hawkish line on China.

This has influenced the Government’s decision to send a naval force, headed by the brand new aircraft carrier, off to the South China Sea in a highly provocative and destabilising show of force.

Kate Hudson, CND general secretary commented: “How well this demonstrates the Government’s warped priorities: spending vast sums on sending a warship halfway round the world while many British children don’t have enough to eat and the NHS struggles to bear the pressures of the pandemic. This is a provocative voyage that should be called off. Our government needs to end the military posturing and work with all in the global community to meet the enormous challenges we face.”

Don’t start a cold war, warns Bernie

The US’s most popular independent Democrat senator Bernie Sanders has issued a warning about Washington’s burgeoning hostile attitude towards China.

In an article for the website Foreign Affairs on June 17 entitled Washington’s Dangerous New Concensus on China, subtitled Don’t Start a New Cold War, Sanders argues that the current attitude towards the world’s most populous nation is markedly different from the one that prevailed just two decades ago when the US, both political parties and corporations, was keen to open up trade with China in the belief that this would liberalise both the Chinese economy and its political system.

Sanders was one of the few voices opposing this at the time, he explains in the article. “What I knew then, and what many working people knew, was that allowing American companies to move to China and hire workers there at starvation wages would spur a race to the bottom, resulting in the loss of good-paying union jobs in the United States and lower wages for American workers. And that’s exactly what happened.”

And he goes on: “In the roughly two decades that followed, around two million American jobs were lost, more than 40,000 factories shut down, and American workers experienced wage stagnation—even while corporations made billions and executives were richly rewarded.”

Now, China is viewed no longer as a market but as a threat, economically and militarily. But, argues Sanders, if the US now organises its foreign policy around a global confrontation with China it will fail to produce better Chinese behaviour and be politically dangerous and strategically counterproductive. A better way forward is to work with all wealthy nations to raise living standards around the world, to tackle economic inequality and thereby undermine the simplistic populism of authoritarian forces.

Sanders praises the Biden Administration for deciding to provide 500 million Covid vaccine doses to poorer countries and for backing an international intellectual property waiver that would allow poorer countries to produce the vaccines themselves.

And in a telling phrase he comments: “When people around the world see the American flag, it should be attached to packages of lifesaving aid, not drones and bombs.”