Columnist Charles Krauthammer is a laureled megaphone for the multi-trillion dollar military-industrial-terrorism complex (MITC).
His sound track is all percussion and no strings.
Existential dangers to the United States requiring a military response are chronically appearing on the international stage. They breed faster than rabbits.
Masterly inactivity is not a choice. Force works. And more force works more.
We are God's chosen people destined to go abroad to cram our ideas of democracy and human rights down the throats of all who might object. If military force is not employed, our enemies will soon possess nuclear weapons to better our instruction during World War II over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Let the drums of war sound.
Krauthammer's leitmotiv never changes. His latest megaphonic homage to the MITC appeared in The Washington Post (Feb. 26, 2016) under the banner "While Obama fiddles..."
He is terrified that China is militarizing the South China Sea with the audacity to seek "Hegemony in East Asia." He points to military equipment positioned on disputed island specks 1,000 miles from the Chinese mainland.
But his analysis of China's threat is like a review of the play Hamlet without considering the Prince of Denmark.
More than 6,000 miles from the United States mainland, we possess a military base on Guam with 6,000 military personnel and growing; we have deployed more than 48,000 troops in Japan; we have stationed more than 27,000 troops in South Korea and we are planning a missile defense system there; we have stationed troops and weapons in the Philippines; we have marine training bases in Australia; and, we project the United States Pacific Fleet into the western Pacific, which includes six core battle groups and eight destroyer squadrons.
We have militarized East Asia far more than China despite our remote proximity. We are the hegemon there far outside traditionally recognized spheres of influence for major powers. We are provoking China by encircling it, not the other way around as Krauthammer insinuates.
China aims to replace the United States as the regional hegemon. Its motives are as self-interested as are the contrary motives of the United States. All nations subordinate justice to power.
How can the MITC and Krauthammer complain?
China is simply following our example, which they applaud.
The United States began to assert its sphere of influence in Latin America and the Caribbean with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. It continued with the Mexican-American War, which General U.S. Grant condemned in his War Memoir and elaborated: "I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
Then came the Spanish-American War; the Platt Amendment authorizing United States intervention in Cuba to protect property or otherwise; the perpetual lease of Guantanamo Bay; collaboration in the secession of Panama from Colombia and the building and ownership of the Panama Canal; chronic military interventions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; General John Pershing's Punitive Military Expedition in Mexico; the overthrow of Guatemala President Jacobo Arbenz; the attempted overthrow of Cuba's Fidel Castro followed by multiple assassination attempts against him in Operation Mongoose; collaboration in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende by the murderous General Augusto Pinochet; the 1989 invasion of Panama to overthrow former C.I.A. informant Manual Noriega; intervention in Grenada in opposition to a Marxist-Leninist government; and, the operation of the School of the Americas to keep Latin American leaders on a short United States leash.
We asserted a sphere of influence in Asia with the annexation of Hawaii, followed by the conquest of Guam and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.
Krauthammer and the MITC alarmed at China doing today what the United States has been doing for nearly two centuries in asserting a sphere of influence beyond its borders because it would diminish their power, money, and celebrity.
At present, the foreign policy lodestar of the United States, China, and all other nations is the same: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
If we expect China or any other nation to refrain from spheres of influence, we must begin by ending our own.