My Take | Fearmongering Pentagon steps up its threat inflation of China
- Scare tactics about a manufactured foreign menace are the easiest way to gain support of public in a nation that is almost never intimidated
I was reading a mental health website the other day and came across an article about the toll taken on people living in constant fear. Apparently, fear can narrow our physical vision, turn us colour blind, weaken our depth perception and distort our sense of time.
But, perhaps more importantly, it can affect our ability to process information and react rationally based on available data. When people are scared, it’s often difficult for them to assess what’s best in their own interests; they may even act against them.
It’s no surprise, then, that incessant fearmongering is the easiest and cheapest way for politicians, whether democratic or authoritarian, to secure public compliance. American politicians have an instinctive understanding of the psychology of fear.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg, for example, famously advised US president Harry Truman and his secretary of state Dean Acheson to “scare the hell out of the American people” by, in Acheson’s words, painting a picture “clearer than the truth” about the emerging Soviet menace.
Otherwise, it might be difficult to get public support for the enormous defence increases, at the dawn of the global hegemonic role the Washington establishment perceived to be in America’s interest.
The United States is again gunning for enormous defence increases, no pun intended. According to Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a generation”.
He was, of course, referring to the Asia-Pacific region, in which the US military presence will be “more lethal, more mobile, more resilient and exactly reinforcing that kind of deterrence that we were talking about that make some of these rapid, low-cost invasions nearly impossible”.
