Ritter Demonstrates How the U.S. Projects Its Own Bad Behavior on China

Sept. 3, 2020 (EIRNS)—Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in a commentary published by RT, yesterday, said the Pentagon China military report was the product not of any threat represented by China but of “Washington’s nervous psychological state.” Missing from the assessment of China’s military power, Ritter writes, “is any reflection on the role played by the U.S. in triggering this Chinese military buildup.” He cites as two examples, the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the insistence that China participate in three-way arms control talks with the U.S. and Russia. Then, there’s the constant provocations in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

Ritter argues that the U.S. is, in fact, in decline, marked among other things, by the disastrous military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan which demonstrate that U.S. leadership is waning and has been for at least two decades (in other words, it began long before Trump arrived at the White House).

“The gloomy assessment contained in the ‘Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China’ report is causally linked to this decline,” Ritter writes.

“There is a psychological disorder known as ‘projection,’ which refers to the unconscious act of taking emotions or traits one finds disagreeable about themselves, and attributing them to someone else. The Department of Defense is guilty of this psychological projection when it comes to its assessment of China.

“As a nation in decline, the U.S. is unable and/or unwilling to accept this new reality, and as such is incapable of carrying out the kind of self-diagnosis necessary to slow or halt this decline. As other nations, such as China, step into the breach created by a U.S. power in retrograde, American policymakers—rather than attribute the Chinese actions as a logical cause-effect manifestation of reality—instead project onto China the very behavioral traits about the U.S. that have helped bring about its shrinking global reach and influence.”

In an academic environment, such projection would make good fodder for further discussion, Ritter concludes, but “in the real world it can lead to the kind of miscalculations that lead to confrontations that might otherwise be avoided. Seen in this light, this new report exposes the fact that the real threat to global peace and security is not Chinese military expansion, but U.S. psychological projection which defines Beijing’s actions as an existential threat that must be confronted.”