Steve Bannon, China, and the Committee on the Present Danger 4.0

By Kurt Nimmo

Steve Bannon is making himself useful. According to The New York Times, he has rekindled the paranoiac fire that fed the Cold War military-industrial complex and stoked red hysteria far and wide.

Fear of China has spread across President Trump’s Washington. Just one example: The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union, has been revived, with help from Stephen Bannon. https://t.co/NEdoPWCKmm

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 20, 2019

This is the fourth iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger. The first committee was originally formed in 1950 and produced the founding document of the manufactured Cold War—NSC-68, written by Paul Nitze.

He later wrote the Gaither Report. It argued that “nuclear deterrence”—including the insane idea of a nuclear first strike—was more important than protecting the public from a nuclear war through diplomacy, treaty, and the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Members of Nitze’s anti-detente group ended up in the Reagan administration.

Following Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and the commencement of the never-ending war on terror, the third CPD was formed and began a process of neoconization with the inclusion of Joe Lieberman, former CIA boss James Woolsey, neocon ideologue Laurie Mylroie, neocon founder Norman Podhoretz, Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, AEI adjunct fellow Danielle Pletka, and other associates of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the Boeing Company (see this web archived page).

The fourth and current iteration was established in March. It includes Bannon. The vice-chairman, remarkably, is the fringe neocon Frank Gaffney. CFR member and Claremont Institute fellow Mark Helprin, former CIA spook Clare Lopez, the aforementioned Woolsey, and Jianli Yang are also members. Yang is a mascot of sorts for the revived CPD’s anti-China agenda. He is said to be a survivor of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.

From the current CPD website:

“The Committee on the Present Danger: China” is a wholly-independent and non-partisan effort to educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party. Its purpose is to explain these threats that range from: the PRC’s accelerating military buildup; its active information and political warfare that targets the American people and our business, political and media elites; cyber warfare; and, economic warfare.

In other words, the latest CPD is little different than its predecessors. It is primarily a propaganda apparatus to transition the forever war state away from past enemies—the Soviet Union, Islamic terrorism—and focus hysteria on a new and much more formidable enemy.

Thus the need for even more military spending and the manufacture of outrageously expensive weapons systems—the F-35 boondoggle, Hellfire missiles, expeditionary seas bases, space-based weapons, missile systems galore, littoral combat ships, attack helicopters, etc., ad nauseam.

Kurt Nimmo is the editor of Another Day in the Empire, where this article first appeared. He is the former lead editor and writer of Infowars.com. Donate to ADE Here.

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