The Pentagon’s Obsession With China Puts Hawai‘i at Risk
The Intercept · L · trust 37/100
To prepare for a possible war with China, the U.S. military has put Hawai’i on the front lines of a potential nuclear conflict.
Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp The Pentagon is reportedly overhauling its nuclear strategy, focusing on shorter-range tactical nukes rather than longer-range, higher-yield missiles, for possible regional wars with China and Russia. The man drafting this madness masquerading as a plan is policy chief and China hawk, Elbridge Colby. (You may remember him as the Pentagon official who wasn’t sure the U.S. was at war with Iran more than a month into the conflict.)
“I think it’s empirically true that China is preparing for war, and we do have the possibility of a multi-front war and the possibility of a World War III in the coming years,” Colby predicted in 2024. He appears to be hard at work to make that prophecy come true with a strategy that one former Pentagon analyst told TomDispatch would make nuclear war “more, not less” likely.
If the U.S. and China start lobbing nuclear weapons at each other, Hawai‘i is likely to find itself on the front lines of that conflict. It would be the latest and worst outcome of more than a century of ill treatment of the archipelago by the U.S. military, as TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung explains today.
Colby, the grandson of former CIA director and ruthless assassination maven William Colby, said: “We need to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.” Hartung, on the other hand, offers an antidote to such lunacy.
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President Donald Trump and self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, a sum so obscenely high that it is almost impossible to comprehend. The proposed $600 billion increase alone is almost twice the total annual military budget of America’s closest rival, China.
That supposed rivalry, despite the big spending gap, makes China central to justifying the Pentagon’s bloated budget. And Hawaiʻi is, in turn, central to the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific military strategy which assumes that deterring China requires a forward, offensive strike posture anchored by the archipelago. This not only puts a target on Hawaiʻi — as was the case during World War II, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan — but it also deepens long-standing economic hardships and environmental degradation produced by more than a century of U.S. military occupation, according to “ The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi ,” a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
The report finds that as the Pentagon has shoved Hawaiʻi toward the front lines of a potential nuclear conflict, it has also poisoned the islands’ land and waters, lied about its economic benefits, tied Hawaiʻi’s financial well-being to an inefficient use of tax dollars, and failed to pay more than $130 billion in back rent. And now the Trump administration is extending its buildup in Hawaiʻi — which has long “been central to the architecture of U.S. imperial power” to expand facilities, build new bases, and secure access to air and naval bases from Guam to the Pacific island chain to the Philippines to Australia. And these moves in the Pacific are just one part of that multifaceted $600 billion boost being sought for the Pentagon.
In addition to greed, grift and pork-barrel politics — practices that have reached an astonishing level due to the unapologetic corruption and feverish insider dealings of the Trump family and its hangers-on — the biggest driver of the Pentagon’s enormous budget is America’s quest for unrivaled global military dominance. At the center of that effort are preparations to “win” a war with China , a mission that is likely impossible and would be extremely dangerous to undertake.
The probable outcome of a war with Beijing — which is, after all, a sophisticated technological power armed with nuclear weapons — would be unprecedented devastation for all concerned , especially the people of Taiwan, the independent island nation of the coast of the mainland that China considers a breakaway province. Hawai‘i, Guam, and the other launching pads for a U.S. military operation against China would undoubtedly be targets, with dire consequences for the residents of those islands.
Exaggerating the threat posed by China is a foolproof marketing scheme for those who profit handsomely from preparations for war with Beijing.
Well before recentering China as national security adversary No. 1, America’s quest for military supremacy was not going well, to put it mildly.
As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has shown , America’s post-9/11 wars have been an unmitigated disaster, costing or causing long-term obligations of an astonishing $8 trillion , as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the displacement of tens of millions more, Meanwhile, these wars failed miserably in meeting their stated objectives, leaving in power a sectarian regime in Iraq that opened the door to the rise of ISIS and a Taliban-led government in Afghanistan , a status quo ante bellum after more than 20 years of war.
It’s hard to envision a more complete mismatch between stated war aims and real-world results than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until we take a hard look at the illegal , immoral, and ill-conceived conflict with Iran which is fast becoming a new forever war .
Despite this dismal record, the Trump regime — and the Biden administration before it — has chosen to double down on a military-first foreign policy, with the demonization of China fueling the fire.
The Pentagon refers to China as the “ pacing challenge ,” even as military spending far outpaces Beijing’s defense budget. And in its most recent assessment, the Pentagon outlined a strategy to cow China into submission by…
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