At State Department, the Fools for War Are in Charge

Sept. 26, 2021 (EIRNS)—The neocon weekly Foreign Policy for Sept. 21 carried a report by its Pentagon/defense and National Security/diplomacy correspondents entitled “State Department Plans ‘China House’ To Counter Beijing.” They report that “the U.S. State Department is planning to expand the number of officials dedicated to monitoring China, a bid to track Beijing’s growing footprint in key countries around the world,” including adding 20-30 staff members, some of them “regional China Watch” officers in embassies around the world. The plan may include still more personnel being detailed to monitor China’s technological development and acquisitions.

The Defense Department has recently done the same thing, called a “China Hub” policy, according to Foreign Policy. The State Department action “follows a move at the U.S. Defense Department to create a central hub to handle Washington and Beijing’s military relationship.”

Interestingly, the decision in the State Department was already “made” in 2018 and deployment of such “China officers” began in 2019, the authors wrote, but then was stymied by Trump appointees fighting it. Susan Thornton, Trump’s envoy for East Asia, strongly opposed it. Thornton told Foreign Policy that the program “takes people assigned to embassies around the world and tasks them with ‘watching’ what China is doing in that country. It gives rise to the kind of hype and distortions that we see now around Chinese activities, which is why I thought it was a bad idea.”

So this mad provocation is not a Biden White House creation, if this report is accurate, but another move toward war of the geopoliticians’ war party in the departmental bureaucracies.