The New York Times is reporting President Obama has just passed a little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than any president in U.S. history—longer than George W. Bush, longer than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, longer than Abraham Lincoln. Obama has taken military action in at least seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Just last month, President Obama announced the deployment of 250 more Special Operations troops to Syria in a move that nearly doubles the official U.S. presence in the country.
As war spreads across the globe, a record 60 million people were driven from their homes last year. Experts warn the refugee crisis may also worsen due to the impacts of global warming. Over the weekend, NASA released data showing 2016 is on pace to be by far the hottest year ever, breaking the 2015 record. April became the seventh month in a row to have broken global temperature records. Meanwhile, many fear a new nuclear arms race has quietly begun, as the United States, Russia and China race to build arsenals of smaller nuclear weapons. These multiple crises come as voters in the United States prepare to elect a new president.
Noam Chomsky talking:
Who Rules the World? to a certain extent, up to us. It is possible for populations to rule the world, but they have to struggle to achieve that. And if they don’t, the world will be ruled by concentrations of power—economic power, state power—closely linked with consequences that are of the kind that you describe. But that’s a choice.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States had a level of power and comparative wealth that had never existed in history. It had literally half the world’s wealth. It had an incomparable position of security—controlled the hemisphere, controlled both oceans, controlled the opposite sides of both oceans. In military terms, it was overwhelmingly preeminent. Other industrial societies had been devastated or severely weakened. The war had actually greatly benefited the U.S. economy. It ended the Depression. Industrial production virtually quadrupled. There was a debt, which you could easily grow out of it by growth. So the United States was in fact in a position to pretty much set the terms for virtually the entire global system.
It couldn’t stay that way, of course, and it began to erode pretty quickly, though, with all the changes over the past years, the United States still is in a preeminent position with incomparable advantages and maybe now a quarter of the world’s wealth. In military terms, on that dimension, the United States is completely alone. It’s the only country that has hundreds, maybe a thousand, military bases around the world, troops all over the world. U.S. military spending is almost as great as the rest of the world combined, technologically much more advanced. And within that context of the past 70 years or so, the United States has had a—usually, a pretty dominant role in world affairs and setting the framework within which others operate—not without conflict, of course.
the two major threats facing the world today: nuclear war and climate change.
Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a clock that’s—since 1947, shortly after the atomic bombing, they established a Doomsday Clock. Every year, a panel of specialists make an estimate of how close we are to midnight. Midnight means termination for the species. It’s moved up and back over the years. Right now, it—just last year, it was moved two minutes closer to midnight because of the two threats that you mentioned, stayed there this year. That’s three minutes to midnight, close as it’s been since the early 1980s, when there was a major war scare. It was recognized then to be serious. Now that Russian archives have been opened, we see that it was far more serious than was assumed. We were at one point literally minutes away, several points in fact, minutes away from nuclear war. That’s where the Doomsday Clock stands now.
The nuclear threat is the threat of—on the Russian border, which happens to be the invasion route through which Russia was virtually destroyed twice last century by Germany alone—well, Germany as part of a hostile military alliance—on that border, both sides are acting as if a war is thinkable. The U.S. has just sharply increased; it quadrupled military expenses on its side. The Russians are doing something similar. There are constant near collisions, jets coming close to colliding with one another. A Russian jet a couple months ago virtually hit a Danish commercial airliner. U.S. troops are carrying out maneuvers virtually on the Russian border. That threat is escalating and very serious. William Perry, a respected nuclear specialist, a former defense secretary, recently estimated that the threat is higher than it was during the 1980s. There are also confrontations near the Chinese around China, South China Sea and so on. That’s one major threat.
The other is what you just described. The threat of global warming is very serious. Every time one reads a science journal, there’s an even more alarming discovery. Virtually all the ice masses are melting. The Arctic ice mass, which was assumed to be pretty stable, is actually melting very fast, much more than was thought. The glaciers are melting. There’s severe droughts. Right now already, about 300 million people in India are on the edge of starvation from drought, which has been going on for years. The groundwater is depleted as the Himalayan glaciers melt, as they’re doing. It will undermine the water supply for huge areas in South Asia. If people think there’s a migration crisis now, they haven’t seen anything. The sea level is rising. Chances are it could rise three to six feet, maybe more, by the end of the century—some estimate even sooner. It will have a devastating effect, not just on coastal cities, but on coastal plains, like, say, Bangladesh, where hundreds of millions of people will be severely threatened. I mean, this is a—we’re already killing other species at the level of the so-called fifth extinction. Sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth, devastating consequences ended the age of the dinosaurs, opened the way for small mammals to develop, ultimately evolve, finally evolve into Homo sapiens, which now is acting the same way the asteroid did. That’s the fifth extinction. It’s going to get worse. All of these are—the rate of global warming today is far faster, maybe a hundred or more times as fast as any moderately comparable period that can be estimated in the geological record.
And to make it worse, of these two huge threats, we have an electoral—the quadrennial electoral extravaganza is going on right now, of course. And it’s pretty remarkable to see how the worst threats that the human species has ever faced, the most important decisions it must make—and soon—are virtually absent from the discussions and debates. On the Democratic side, there’s a couple of comments about it here and there, not much. On the Republican side, it’s much worse. Every single candidate either denies global warming altogether or, in one case, Kasich, admits that it’s taking place but says we shouldn’t do anything about it, which is even worse.
Donald Trump is a kind of a loose cannon. All kind of statements come out, sometimes some statement plus the negation of that statement within a few minutes. It’s kind of a con job.
But there are some pretty steady features of his position, which, in fact, were expressed in the clip that you ran. One, “There isn’t any global warming. Give me a break. That’s not an issue.” So what he’s saying is, “Let’s race to the precipice as quickly as we can.” And we should not—this is not abstract. It’s already having major effects, the Republican position. And notice it’s not Trump; it’s 100 percent of the Republican candidates taking essentially the same position. What they’re saying, “Let’s get rid of the EPA. Let’s get rid of regulations. It’s all a joke. It’s a liberal hoax,” and so on. That’s having an effect. The Paris conference last December—the signing was just a couple days ago—aimed at establishing a treaty, which countries would be committed to adhere to, which would put fixed limits on global warming. The limits were nowhere near enough, but at least it was something. But even that could not be reached—for one clear, explicit reason: the Republican Congress, which would not accept a treaty. That was recognized worldwide, therefore a hope for a treaty was abandoned, in place was put voluntary agreements, obviously much weaker. When the Republicans on the Supreme Court just recently beat back a pretty moderate proposed Obama regulation on coal, that again is a message to the world, says, “Don’t bother doing anything. The biggest, most powerful country in the world just isn’t going to—doesn’t care, so you go ahead and do what you like.” This is all literally saying, “Let’s race to the precipice.” And it’s not remote. It’s not a matter of centuries; it’s a matter of decades. It’s just shocking to see this happening.
Now, Trump did mention—correctly—that nuclear weapons are a very serious threat. And he picked the absolute worst possible example. Iran is not a threat, period. The world doesn’t regard Iran as a threat. That’s a U.S. obsession. You look at global—polls of global opinion taken by Gallup’s international affiliate, the leading U.S. polling agencies—agency, one of the questions that they ask is, “Which country is the greatest threat to world peace?” Answer: United States, by a huge margin. Iran is barely mentioned. Second place is Pakistan, inflated by the Indian vote, that’s way behind the United States. That’s world opinion. And there are reasons for it. Americans are protected from this information. The media literally did not report it. You could read it—you hear it on BBC, or you could pick it up on the international press. Iran, there’s never been any—the threat of Iran, so-called, is actually described, pretty clearly, by U.S. intelligence. What they’ve made clear is that the threat of Iran’s nuclear programs—not nuclear weapons, they don’t have any, but the threat of Iran’s nuclear programs—is that they might serve as a deterrent in the region. What does that mean? It means that the states that carry out regular aggression and violence in the region might be deterred if Iran has a capability of someday producing nuclear weapons. Which states are those? The United States and Israel. So Iran might be a deterrent to the two rogue states that rampage in the region. That’s the threat.
If there was any concern for the threat, real concern, there would be clear, straightforward ways to eliminate it—namely, move to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Now that—there are countries that advocate that. Primary among them is Iran. As head of the Non-Aligned Movement, it’s been leading the call for a nuclear weapons-free zone. It’s strongly supported by the Arab states, has been for decades. In fact, it’s supported by about the whole world. Why aren’t we making steps towards it? Because the United States blocks it. And why does the U.S. block it? Well understood: wants to protect Israel’s nuclear weapons capacity from scrutiny and accountability. That’s the nuclear threat in the region, not Iran.
So, yes, there—and, in fact, Trump did not go on to give his answer. What he says, if he means it, is we have to rapidly build up our military forces, which are already overwhelming. Obama already has a $1 trillion program outline for modernization of nuclear weapons, which includes what you mentioned correctly earlier, small nuclear weapons, which are regarded by specialists—correctly—as a very serious threat, because there will be a temptation to use them. And it’s almost certain that any use is going to quickly escalate, and that Doomsday Clock goes right to midnight.
So Trump is saying, “Yeah, let’s make the global warming problem as dangerous and imminent as possible. Let’s march towards destruction of the species, like we’re destroying everyone else. And let’s escalate militarization and, at the same time, sharply cut down resources by radical tax cuts, mostly for the rich, which means essentially eliminate pretty much the rest of the government.” Incidentally, in that position, he’s not very different from Paul Ryan, who’s considered the intellectual on the Republican side. This is a really astonishing moment in human history, if you look at it.
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Noam Chomsky
world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years. His latest book is titled Who Rules the World?
— source democracynow.org