These are increasingly dangerous times. Several years ago, Walden Bello wrote a book about counterrevolution. With Trump and Vance, two classical fascists, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and the Heritage Foundation Project 2025, we are approaching the climax of an American counterrevolution.

Bello has also recently reminded us of Antonio Gramsci’s insight about the time that we are living through: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Like Ulysses, we have to navigate the rapids between Scylla and Charybdis.

It is not going to be pretty.

Clearly President Joe Biden is no gift to the world. Recently a senior arms control diplomat who is close to Ron Klain, Biden’s first Chief of Staff, said that only three people can convince the president to step aside: Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Biden’s sister. There are reports that Pelosi will inform Biden that it’s time to go, but there are no guarantees that she will or that if she does he will step aside, or if he does step aside that the Democrats will be able to come up with a candidate who can beat Trump and his dishonest lackey Vance.

Little noticed here in the United States has been the immensely powerful and dangerous lattice-like network of U.S. military alliances assembled by the Biden Administration in the desperate, probably futile, and multi-faceted U.S campaign to contain China. As the NATO Summit Declaration put it, the threat as seen from Washington is “global and interconnected.” With the passing of the post Cold-War’s unilateral era and the relative decline of U.S. power, Washington has become increasingly dependent on alliances, across the Indo-Pacific and in Europe to contain Chinese and Russian ambitions. Hence the increasing integration of NATO with the array of U.S. Indo-Pacific alliances, some of which date from World War II’s transformation of the Pacific Ocean into an American Lake and others of more recent vintage.

Don’t expect this to change if, as seems likely, Trump regains the Oval Office. Over the last two and a half decades there has been remarkable continuity in U.S. Republican and Democratic administrations. The U.S. elite has understood, as Biden’s National Security Statement put it, that China “is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” Bush the Lesser planned to focus on China but was distracted by 9/11. Kurt Campbell and Obama gave us the Pivot to Asia. Trump doubled down on the Pivot. And despite the Ukraine and Gaza Wars, the People’s Liberation Army has been Biden’s military pacer, driving us toward what former Australian President Rudd terms “an avoidable war.”

A place to begin is Biden’s statement that the outcome of Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s recent state visit to Washington was “the most significant upgrade in our alliance since it was first established.” You can forget Japan’s Peace Constitution—the Japanese government has!—but do recall that the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was secretly forced on Tokyo in 1952 as a requirement to end the United States’s post-war occupation of Japan. It didn’t end the occupation. Okinawa remained occupied until reversion in 1972, but even the U.S. Consul General in Naha said several years ago that the entire island remains a U.S. military base. And while U.S. bases are concentrated in Okinawa, they extend across the Japanese archipelago, including a massive U.S. air base in the nation’s capital.

The summit with Kishida was designed in part to Trump-proof the alliance and it deepened military cooperation, including joint development of AI, space technology, and semiconductors. It was formally announced that Tokyo will be purchasing 400 Tomahawk missiles as part of its now preemptive strike doctrine against China and North Korea. In something of a role reversal, Tokyo will now export of weapons to the U.S. to replenish depleted U.S.........

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