ment of the country is dependent upon providing suitable
international conditions through interactional and
constructive orientation. The development of a country
depends on the creation of an environment without any
tension in foreign relations and with profitable global
facilities like high technology and international financial
facilities, as much as possible, as well as a foreign
policy that is based on constructive interaction with the
world, as it is in ‘The 20-Year Vision Plan’ document.
This document can provide a suitable environment by
creating balanced relations without any tension and
moving toward creating trust, security, and peace, so
that foreign investment and new technologies may develop
the country.”
Dr. Vaezi also argues for matching utterances of the
policy with the aims of the nation, rather than achieving
rhetorical effects and gaining populist sympathy: “As a
country that makes developmental progress its main
goal in the next 20 years, Iran needs a constructive foreign
policy to make the required infrastructure for the
country’s development in this light. On this route, in the
first instance, the progress of development should be
treated as one of the main priorities in both the words
and attitude of foreign policy, in a way that it often is
not.”
Vaezi lists 15 objectives of Iran’s new foreign policy,
all of which are relevant; however, we take objective
number 9 as representative of the general approach:
“9. The necessity of interaction with the world
economy for the realization of development: Since, in
the new world, realization of development on national
levels, through constructive interaction with the world
economy, is easier and quicker, every government that
has adopted development as a necessity and an end of
its foreign policy, should make a constructive and active
interaction with elements of global economy.”
Lyndon LaRouche and EIR have long emphasized
the key concept of “peace through economic development,”
especially with regard to the war-torn, but strategically
important areas of the world. In Iran, it seems
that this concept has met a matured host.
These presidential elections and a definite positive
shift in Iran’s outlook has to be met with openness and
trust from the United States specifically, and the West
generally. Diplomacy and the pursuit of happiness of
every nation lies in the realization that the “benefit of
the other,” and scientific and cultural progress, are the
universal language that should be spoken by all nations
and peoples.
June 28, 2013 EIR
Leading U.S. Institutions Warn
‘Air-Sea Battle’ Is a
Plan for War on China
by Michael Billington
June 20—Over recent weeks, several leading analysts
and institutions in Washington have released studies
which directly challenge the operative U.S. war-fighting
doctrine under the Obama Administration, known
as Air-Sea Battle (ASB), demonstrating that the very
existence of the doctrine threatens to bring the United
States into a confrontation with China which would
lead, perhaps quickly, into a thermonuclear war. While
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, both in his practice and in his public
presentations, has made abundantly clear that confrontation
with China is neither necessary nor wise,
and that he would continue building ties between the
two nations, and between their military forces, the fact
remains that the Air-Sea Battle doctrine has been put
in place and is influencing policy decisions which, in
the words of one leading analyst, have “no good outcome.”
EIR has consistently warned of the danger and insanity
of the ASB doctrine, 1 tracing its origin to the
work of Andrew Marshall—the 91-year-old director of
the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, who has, for
the past 20 years, been painting China as the military
threat of the future—and of his kindergarten of think-
tankers, notably Andrew Krepinevich, now the head of
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
who is largely responsible for formulating the ASB
doctrine.
This role of Marshall and Krepinevich in creating
and implementing this doctrine was noted by Amitai
Etzioni, a professor of international affairs at George
Washington University, in a paper, titled “Who Authorized
Preparations for War with China?,” published in
the current issue of the Yale Journal of International
Affairs, On July 10, a forum under the same name as
1. For example, see Carl Osgood, “Obama’s Asia Pivot Is Aimed at
China,” EIR, May 3, 2013.
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Carnegie Endowment
Michael Swaine: Anyone who thinks China will just throw up
its arms and say “game’s up—we give up,” is crazy. “There is
no good outcome for this,” Swaine concluded.
Etzioni’s paper is scheduled to take place at the Segur
Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University
in Washington, D.C., co-sponsored by the Institute
for Communitarian Policy Studies, and the
Kissinger Institute on China and the United States,
featuring Etzioni, together with former U.S. Ambassador
to China Stapleton Roy—perhaps the most
senior of American diplomats—and National Defense
University senior fellow T.X. Hammes. The issue of
ASB leading to war is clearly being taken quite seriously.
“The Pentagon has concluded that the time has
come to prepare for war with China,” Etzioni writes,
noting that the Pentagon has adopted the policy as part
of its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. He calls this a
“momentous conclusion” that “will shape the United
States’ defense systems, force posture and overall strategy
for dealing with the economically and militarily resurgent
China.” He warns that this “may well lead to an
arms race with China, which could culminate in a nuclear
war.”
Etzioni points out, as have other critics, that ASB’s
purpose is to defeat China, and that this is a “long cry
from containment or any other strategies that were seriously
considered in the context of confronting the
USSR after it acquired nuclear arms.” The Cold War,
Etzioni notes, was characterized by mutual deter
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rence, and was structured around a series of red lines
that each side knew they were not to cross. “In contrast,
ASB requires that the United States be able to
take the war to the mainland with the goal of defeating
China, which quite likely would require striking first,”
he writes. “Such a strategy is nothing short of a hegemonic
intervention.” He quotes Joshua Rovner of the
U.S. Naval War College, who said that deep inland
strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese
as preemptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons,
thus cornering them into “a terrible use-it-orlose-
it dilemma.” That is, ASB is prone to lead to nuclear
war.
A 13-page unclassified report by the Air-Sea Battle
Office within the Pentagon, titled “Air-Sea Battle—
Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access and Area
Denial Challenges,” acknowledges that the doctrine is
not a strategy, but a battle plan to counter an adversary
which has the potential to prevent access (using the
now ubiquitous acronym A2/AD, for Anti-Access/Area
Denial) to some or all of the U.S. military capacities—
air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. The report describes
in simple, but hair-raising terms, how to use the
full array of U.S. military power to take out all aspects
of this adversary’s A2/AD capacities, at sea and on
land. While not naming China, the constant refrain of
the “China threat” being trumpeted by the governments
and the media in the U.S. and Europe, repeating ad nauseum
that China is developing dangerous A2/AD capacities,
removes any doubt of the intended target of
this U.S. military doctrine.
Carnegie’s Warning
The second major intervention against this madness
was made by a team of nine analysts at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in May, in a
study titled “China’s Military and the U.S.-Japan Alliance
in 2030: A Strategic Net Assessment.” The project
was headed by Michael Swaine, a former RAND
analyst, who spoke on aspects of the report at a a Sigur
Center forum on June 18, on “Japan as a Global
Power.” Swaine said that, if you ask Pentagon or other
government officials what the ASB policy actually is,
you get a different answer from each one. The Japanese
and the Chinese, he said, are asking, “What is
this,” questioning if it really is a plan for a preemptive
strike on China, as it appears to be. Some in Japan support
this, he said, and want to prepare Japan to block
China’s access to the Pacific by fortifying the Ryukyu
EIR June 28, 2013
Islands. Anyone who thinks China will just throw up
its arms and say “game’s up—we give up,” he said, is
crazy, concluding: “There is no good outcome for
this.”
its arms and say “game’s up—we give up,” he said, is
crazy, concluding: “There is no good outcome for
this.”
Swaine also emphasized that the U.S. presumption
that it has the right and the necessity to have absolute
domination and military superiority over the entire
Pacific, right up to the 12-mile territorial limit of
China, and that China’s efforts to establish its own security
in the East China Sea and the South China Sea
translates into a threat to the United States and its
allies, is simply false. China is emerging as a major
power, as everyone recognizes, and therefore, has serious
security concerns in its immediate neighborhood.
Here it is important to recall that General Dempsey,
in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment in May of 2012,
engaged in a masterly war-avoidance intervention regarding
precisely this issue of dealing with China’s rise.
Dempsey warned the West not to get caught in the
“Thucydides trap.” This trap, he said, “goes something
like this: It was Athenian fear of a rising Sparta that
made war inevitable. Well, I think that one of my jobs
as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and as an advisor to
our senior leaders, is to help avoid a Thucydides trap.
We don’t want the fear of an emerging China to make
war inevitable. So, we’re going to avoid the Thucydides
trap.”
Also, as Etzioni points out in his paper, former JCS
vice chairman Gen. James Cartwright stated in 2012
that “Air-Sea Battle is demonizing China. That’s not in
anybody’s interest.”
The Carnegie report makes the following points regarding
the Air-Sea Battle doctrine:
“Many Chinese defense analysts are increasingly
concerned that the United States will adopt (or has
already adopted) the goal of acquiring all the elements
of a so-called Air-Sea Battle (ASB) operational
military concept, designed to neutralize China’s A2/
AD type capabilities, using bomber strikes at tactical
inland C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications,
Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance—
ed.] targets, along with precision-guided
munitions, stealth, cyber, and other capabilities. . . .
Although still largely undefined, the ASB concept
would ostensibly involve a networked, domain-integrated,
deep-strike-oriented force structure designed
to disrupt, destroy, and defeat all relevant Chinese
A2/AD-type capabilities, encompassing both offshore
June 28, 2013 EIR
weapons systems and supporting onshore assets. . . .
“Such doctrines could fuel a level of Chinese hostility
and distrust that would make efforts at establishing
credible, inclusive multilateral security assurances virtually
meaningless. Indeed, a likely mid- to high-capacity
China would almost certainly respond to the military
aspects of this strategy by developing more potent,
and escalatory, countermeasures. . . . This robust approach
could also empower hardline leaders in Beijing,
who could more easily rationalize their arguments for
adopting a more assertive approach toward Japan and
the region by pointing to evidence that the alliance is
being utilized in an effort to contain and encircle the
PRC.”
U.S.-China Relations
The June 7-8 Summit in California between President
Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping was
generally successful, with the two sides finding
common ground on a desire to de-nuclearize the
Korean Peninsula, setting up regular 2+2 talks between
the military and foreign ministers/secretaries,
and other important issues. Of course, any intentions
by Obama’s team to bash China at the summit, for alleged
Chinese cyber warfare against the U.S., as trumpeted
in the press for weeks leading into the conference,
were neutered in the days leading up to the
summit, by the exposure of massive U.S. surveillance
and cyber-spying.
Nonetheless, the Air-Sea Battle doctrine is in place,
and, as Etzioni argues, as military acquisition decisions
are increasingly shaped by the ASB doctrine, and the
force structure is shifted in that direction, it becomes
increasingly locked in. Etzioni makes the mistake of
covering for President Obama, arguing that he appears
to be oblivious to the existence of the ASB doctrine,
despite his role as Commander in Chief. To support this
argument, Etzioni foolishly claims that the so-called
Pivot (Rebalancing) of U.S. military and economic
power to the Asia-Pacific is not related to the Air-Sea
Battle plan against China.
In fact, as Lyndon LaRouche noted in response to
these recent institutional attacks on the ASB policy,
as the world becomes increasingly aware of, and
alarmed by, the madness of Obama’s war policies,
both in Southwest and East Asia, the more rapidly he
is being discredited, and thus, subject to removal from
office.
mobeir@aol.com
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