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On the heels of the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ scare, the US is now being invaded by unidentified aerial craft – just in time for the new budget bill
After the so-called “Chinese spy balloon” passed over the US last week and was shot down, the US claimed that multiple “UFO’s” have since appeared in its airspace, as well as above Canada.
Without blaming these so-called UFOs on a certain country, the US has continued to shoot them down, arousing mystery and suspicion over their origin. Whatever their origin and purpose, the (intended) end result for Washington will be increased mass fear, a boost in military spending, further escalated tensions with both China and Russia and the manufactured compliance of Washington’s allies. The rest of 2023 is going to be a bumpy year.
As argued in an earlier piece, Biden is not like Trump, he is much worse. Trump’s was a mercantilist presidency owing to his business-like and transaction-based mindset, and his decisions were not militaristic at root. Trump disliked China for economic and commercial reasons, while he also took pragmatic positions on negotiating with Russia and North Korea. This pragmatic stance earned him the contempt of the US establishment, who sought to undermine him where possible, blocking his withdrawal from Syria or playing down his rhetoric on NATO.
Biden, on the other hand, is a highly militaristic neoconservative President who has unleashed a titanic geopolitical struggle. He has dramatically escalated tensions with China and Russia, in an attempt to advance the US military’s presence and alliance system wherever possible, with little thought of the costs of such policy decisions. His leadership is the opposite of Trump’s inward-focused rhetoric. While Trump enjoyed hypothetical, rhetorical notoriety on social media, such as by threatening Kim Jong-Un with “fire and fury,” Biden gives no second thought to actually creating military crises and using them to forcibly reassert power over American allies in a zero-sum manner.
Here we see a contrast between the methodologies of both presidents in relation to these so-called “spy balloons” or UFOs. The Trump administration reportedly had to deal with them too but chose not to publicize it. The Biden administration has decided to do so because it has spotted a golden opportunity to dramatically escalate global military tensions and, in turn, provide additional justification for increased defense spending. The Democrats will still have to push the policy through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but drumming up the China threat will be just what they need to persuade the anti-Beijing hawks among the GOP’s numbers.
This has been done before. Think back to the boom of UFOs as a science fiction trope, or the craze of UFO sightings in the United States which emerged in the 1950s. Believers will tell you that the US government has long known about extraterrestrial ships visiting Earth and has been covering it up. This has caused long standing theories and speculation about events such as the Roswell incident in 1947 (which, as it happens, was explained as a high altitude balloon), or the true nature of places such as “Area 51” in Nevada. However, the disappointing reality is that this whole sub-genre of fiction owes a lot of its popularity to the Cold War, its politics, and certainly the military exploits of the time.
After all, the 1950s and 60s were landmark decades when it comes to space exploration and new aerial and rocket technology. The United States was locked in a tense competition with the Soviet Union and tested many kinds of aerospace vehicles. It was public sightings of these strange and new phenomena, combined with the military-grade secrecy that surrounded these programs, which ultimately fed the public imagination of the time with an atmosphere of mystery and paranoia.
Now, history is repeating itself. The US government primarily wants you to fear Russia and China. It wants you to think that they have secret and cryptic surveillance capabilities which are infringing upon Americans, and that taxpayer dollars are being well spent in a dramatically increased defense budget. The US is actively manufacturing consent for military tensions. Not only is it trying to use Ukraine to destroy Russia on its own doorstep, but it is eyeing a dramatic escalation of tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, making every effort to recruit allies into a military struggle on its own terms, increasing the number of military bases, and essentially looking to “NATOize” the entire world.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Al-Ghadeer.
By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst
