Forget China, America is the biggest warmonger by far

Name: Washington’s hardened position on Beijing’s claims in South China Sea heightens US-China tensions
Uploaded: 2020-09-18T21:30:16.000Z
Duration: 2 min 32 s
Description: Washington’s hardened position on Beijing’s claims in South China Sea heightens US-China tensions

Since 2001, the US ‘war on terror’ has killed, injured and displaced millions across 24 countries, while America’s defence spending is nearly 40 per cent of the global total. In contrast, China has waged one foreign war in the past 50 years

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

US President Donald Trump rallies the troops during a surprise Thanksgiving visit at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan on November 28, 2019. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 5:30am, 19 Sep 2020Updated: 6:49am, 19 Sep 2020

Am I becoming paranoid, or is there an upswelling of war talk? The rediscovery of the Thucydides trap, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Manichaean campaign to quash China as a modern-day evil empire has brought to centre-stage the idea that Beijing is set on military expansion – into the South China Sea, recovering Taiwan, and even crossing swords with India on its Himalayan border.

Then remember in March how Donald Trump called himself a “wartime president” in fighting the pandemic? Remember how US military and intelligence communities have emerged from the shadows to describe Chinese national security threats emerging from every nook and cranny – whether it is Huawei and its 5G leadership or gay dating site Grindr supposedly tracking gays in the military susceptible to blackmail.

Thoughts about war converged last week with the publication of “The Costs of War”, a sobering study from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, led by Professor David Vine from the American University in Washington, and a taster for his forthcoming book The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.

The report calculates that the US “‘war on terror’” since the September 11 attacks has cost not only millions of lives and injuries, but also forcibly displaced at least 37 million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria: “The US military has waged war continuously for almost two decades,” it said.

“US forces have fought in wars or participated in other combat operations in at least 24 countries. The destruction inflicted by warfare in these countries has been incalculable for civilians and combatants, for US military personnel and their family members, and for entire societies.”

02:32

Washington’s hardened position on Beijing’s claims in South China Sea heightens US-China tensions

Vine added: “US involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”