Bannon’s self-declared war is over

The war is over for former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The political combatant has won major battles but lost his selfdeclared war. Being forced to hear the line “you’re fired” and leave his last stronghold in Washington after his removal from the National Security Council in April, this advisor to the US president has been banished from the inner circle by the trend of history.

No doubt his startling phone conversation with Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, was the final straw that helped sink this warmonger. He would not have expected his desperate reaching-out to one more like-minded supporter to create such a stir.

The US president himself may not have liked it because Bannon’s confession that there is “no military solution” to the Korean Peninsula crisis compromised Donald Trump’s verbal claim that the United States would release “fire and fury” against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Other presidential aides, both his allies and foes in the White House, may have distanced themselves from Bannon as well for his revelation of the day-by-day backdoor fighting often veiled by his spokespersons.

The real reason for his fall, however, is that Bannon’s obsession with apocalyptic warfare between the US and Islamic and/or Chinese societies goes against facts, history and humanity. Such obsessive projections were doomed to fail as they are misplaced historically and misoriented in the internet era of global interconnection.

Bannon has been an avid provocateur for war, first against the establishment in Washington, then against Islamists and China. His sufferings during his growing-up years in Virginia and his navy drills toughened his youthful dream to fundamentally transform the country. His film productions In the Face of Evil and Generation Zero are manifestations of his ambition. And by means of his intuitive grasp of rising populism behind the facade of democracy in the US, he eventually won the most important battle of his life in 2016 by masterminding Donald Trump’s campaign.

Then, he couldn’t wait to get the White House engaged in the “wars” he had declared years ago in his videos and publications.

But the US and China are in the same economic boat and Bannon and his think-alikes should have first checked the facts. Take the iPhone for example, China acquires necessary materials and parts from all over the world with multinational capital including from the US, assembles them and exports the final products to the US and other countries where consumers eagerly purchase them. The US benefits. With the dollars it earns, China buys US bonds, thus lending money to the US for it to buy more Chinese goods at cheap prices, and the US gains again. For decades Chinese workers have sweated on production lines to send real products to the US, resulting in China holding US promises to pay back a loan that is often devalued. Moreover, China has been keen to buy US manufactured products, only to be limited by US policy restrictions and production line limits.

So the US-China trade deficit has been a product of US economic operations instead of China’s faults as the White House would have people believe. US protectionist policies only pile up the deficit. Meanwhile, China’s production lines link the world and everyone gains from the global production chains.

It seems Bannon does not take the global production chains seriously, but his belligerency was not limited to the economy alone. “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” he said in March 2016. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Again the ex-strategist got the facts upside down. Since the days before the birth of the US, the South China Sea had been calm and mostly peaceful until Washington “pivoted” its military to the West Pacific some years ago. Indeed, US warships have sailed close to Chinese isles in the South China Sea and conducted stealthy reconnaissance missions. It is the US military that has been challenging the interests of the Chinese in the region; it is the Chinese who have been conducting talks with nations involved in territorial disputes and advocating cooperation to jointly exploit the resources in the waters. If Chinese installations on some small isles in the South China Sea thousands of miles away from the US are taken as a threat, what should US aircraft carrier battle groups close to China’s door be regarded as?

Both on the economy and on the South China Sea, Bannon has picked China to fit into his belief that the US is approaching the Fourth Turning, as posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book of that title, which argues for “cycles of history telling about America’s next rendezvous with destiny”.

When shooting video of David Kaiser for one of his documentaries, Bannon tried hard to get the historian to predict a coming war. Kaiser quoted Bannon as saying in a PBS “Frontline” video, “Look we have the American Revolution, we have the Civil War, that’s bigger. Then we have WWII, that’s even bigger. So what’s the next one going to be like?”

However, such arguments for a bigger war are short-sighted. US history is short compared with that of other nations. If Bannon had broadened his sight further east to Asia or south to South America, he would have come to the right conclusion. Wars occur not because of a certain cycle but because of expansionist greed for capital and resources. Bannon should be reminded that the US has been in a war every month over the past decade and half.

The same logic of searching for or even creating enemies made George W. Bush jump into Iraq War in 2003, having coerced the West into believing Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and leaving the region in decades of chaos ever since.

Today, by projecting China as a target, Bannon has been jeopardizing not only US interests but the fate of the West Pacific and even the whole of humanity.

By dumping Bannon, it is hoped that Trump will make a sharp turn toward the right track of win-win partnership for development championed by the United Nations and advanced by China. There lies the future.

By dumping Bannon, Trump has made a sharp turn toward the right track of win-win partnership for development championed by the United Nations and advanced by China. There lies the future.

The author is a commentator with China Daily. wen@ chinadailyhk.com