No New Cold Wars Campaign Statement
- With the Obama/Biden Administration’s “Asia Pivot” against China, its preoccupation with regime-change in Syria, and its support for a coup in Ukraine,
- with the Trump/Pence Administration’s racist anti-Chinese trade war, its blatant and illegal intervention in Syria, and its fierce antagonism toward multiple Russian allies on several continents,
- and with both major U.S. parties trading inflammatory rhetoric and stunningly implausible conspiracy theories about both China and Russia,
the United States is well embarked upon two devastatingly wasteful and profoundly dangerous new Cold Wars.
- With climate change promising untold economic and military chaos,
- with a rising global eruption of fascism and protofascism unseen since the 1930s, and
- with the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals drastically reducing the species’ margin for doomsday error through unprecedented hypersonic missile technology,
humanity cannot afford any new Cold Wars and should not expect to survive the existing/current ones for long.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists rightly puts their famed “Doomsday Clock” at twenty seconds past 11:58pm: nearer to nuclear midnight than humanity has ever come. General Lee Butler, commander of America’s nukes as the last Cold War ended, reports that “we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention—probably the latter in greatest proportion…. Because skill and luck certainly don’t account for it.”
Chicago Area Peace Action’s “No New Cold Wars” campaign will educate the public and its legislators concerning the betrayal of America’s and the world’s future implicit in letting superpower rivalry and demagogic domestic politics distract humankind from collectively solving our gravest existential problems. Climate change, WMDs, and a fanatic backlash to global inequality are problems desperately requiring the mutual cooperation of a multipolar world – a world that is through with empire. Our campaign will seek concrete steps to arrest America’s slide through Cold War II into World War III.
Take Action!
Our campaign is just beginning. In the middle of COVID lockdown, much of our immediate presence will be online.
- We’ve assembled our first draft of a U.S.-China Cold Wars Resource List to include background articles and video arranged by topic, links to news sites informatively covering U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relations, contact lists for allied national and global organizations leading on this issue, and information on pending webinars and Chicago-area street actions.
- An ongoing calendar of dates and events requiring letters to the editor will provide talking points from our resource list to our growing team of dedicated op-ed writers, ready to barrage Chicagoland media with our concerns regarding the apocalyptic peril of renewed superpower rivalry.
- We have endorsed – and will immediately focus on supporting – the Roots Action organization’s call for public resistance to the apparently imminent appointment of failed Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as the U.S. ambassador either to China or to Japan. Rahm and diplomacy are words impossible to credibly link, and his manifest contempt for ordinary citizens of any country must keep him from involvement in the growing risk of U.S.-China confrontation.
- We are planning a series of online video and panel discussion events, the first of them showcasing famed reporter and author John Pilger’s film, The Coming War on China.
Join the No New New Cold Wars Campaign by emailing Sean Reynolds at joveismad@juno.com or call him at (773) 865-6042