Events are unfolding at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we are looking to our most respected and renowned thought leaders for an honest assessment of both U.S. foreign and military policy to offer their most current thoughts and insights. We know they have some ideas for improving the prospects for peace. Professor Klare's responses below of are not edited but exactly as he provided.
Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts; defense correspondent of The Nation magazine; and author of The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources (2012), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (2009), and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (2000). He has a BA and MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Union Institute & University.
The questions here are not philosophical or abstract. They focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time. They directly address the role of the U.S. in the escalating tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We also probe the role of everyday citizens in affecting the relationship the U.S. now has and will have with the rest of the world community.
Here is what Michael T. Klare had to say.
Q. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has recently put the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds before midnight. Midnight means all out war, probably nuclear holocaust. This is the closest it has every been. Do you agree with this dire assessment?
A. Well, the closest we've come until now was during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I just read the book "Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis" by Martin Sherwin, and as he demonstrates, we came perilously close to nuclear war back then. In fact, he shows that it was sheer dumb luck that we weren't engulfed in a nuclear holocaust at that time. But I would say we're moving close to that point today, because of growing tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine and the US and China over Taiwan. Either of those conflicts could produce a Cuban Missile Crisis-like event - and this time we may not be so lucky.
Q. The U.S. always portrays itself as the greatest force on the planet for peace, justice, human rights, racial equality, etc. Polls tell us that most other nations actually regard the U.S. as the greatest threat to stability. What in your view is the truth here?
A. In my view, instability today is largely created by the three-way military rivalry between the US, China, and Russia. All three are nuclear-armed states seeking to expand their geopolitical advantage at the expense of the others, and are willing to employ military means in doing so. All three assert they have legitimate reasons for this - China to restore its legitimate role as the dominant power in Asia, Russia to restore its dominant position in Eastern Europe, and the US seeking to retain its role as the world's preserver of global norms and stability - but all three are acting in a provocative and destabilizing manner - China by militarizing contested islands in the South China Sea, Russia by threatening the independence of Ukraine, the US by creating an anti-China containment network in Asia.
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