Alfred McCoy: The Epic Struggle over the Epicenter of Global Power

Great Britain’s dominion over the oceans began with an historic naval triumph over a combined French-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar in 1805 and only ended when, in 1942, a British garrison of 80,000 men surrendered their seemingly impregnable naval bastion at Singapore to the Japanese — a defeat Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”

Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.”

In the early 1950s, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong forged a Sino-Soviet alliance that threatened to dominate the continent. Washington, however, countered with a deft geopolitical gambit that, for the next 40 years, succeeded in “containing” those two powers behind an “Iron Curtain” stretching 5,000 miles across the vast Eurasian land mass.

As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam….

https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/17/the-epic-struggle-over-the-epicenter-of-u-s-global-power/

The destructive origins of capitalism: Role of the ‘military revolution’ in 16th century Europe. By Robert Kurz

FORUM: The Military in World History

Partha Chatterjee: No one, not even Indians, can claim to be part of an ancient nation

Vasili Arkhipov, the man who stopped nuclear war in 1962

Stanislav Petrov, who averted possible nuclear war, dies at 77

Hitler’s annihilation of the Romanis (the Gypsies of Europe)

Book review: The secret trauma that inspired W.G. Sebald

Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs review – high-impact reminder of our insatiable desire for destruction

Book review: The Tragic sense by Algis Valiunas

Dan Diner – Memory displaced: Re-reading Jean Améry’s “Torture”

Books reviewed: Pope Pius XII, Hitler’s pawn?