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I’m guessing that the dispatch of US forces to Australia, announced this week during President Obama’s Pacific tour, is not going to be a major topic on any of the so-called “Sunday shows.” I also acknowledge that I wouldn’t really know, since I don’t watch these shows or even get the significance they are assigned; all seems rather archaic to me. Still, I feel safe in guessing that Newt Gingrich or the “Supercommittee” will be much more-discussed topics, with “Marines to Oz” given minimal attention if any.

So I’ll fix this oversight, because I think it is an oversight and that it deserves a lot more discussion, along with all the related issues it touches.

As the BBC reports, essentially

Australia has agreed to host a full US Marine task force in the coming years, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced at a news conference with US President Barack Obama in Canberra.

She said about 250 US Marines would arrive next year, eventually being built up to 2,500 personnel.

The deployment is being seen as a move to counter China’s growing influence.

And, boy, is this just confounding, disappointing, dismal news for a bunch of reasons. (more…)

China China China China China China, China China China China China China China China China China China China China China China China China China, China China China China China China.

That’s what the news feels like, some times, lately. Is this what America has been like for the rest of the world, I wonder? Powerful, omnipresent, and requiring regular attention (even if one had any way to avoid it)? Maybe we finally learn what that’s like, too, in the 21st century.

Of course, to some extent this feels familiar. One of the rewards, perhaps, of living past a certain age is that, if one has been paying attention, one can appreciate that seemingly unprecedented new phenomena aren’t always entirely new. I feel like I’m just old enough to remember, from my early years, a previous “yellow peril” which provoked a similar crisis of confidence in America: Japan.

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I generally can’t bring myself to write much about climate change any more, these days. It just seems pretty much hopeless. I don’t want to dwell on it (which is what I just said, I guess), but I basically see two big problems.

One: Preventing dangerous climate change has, for whatever reason, become as pure a “wedge” issue as any; the reactionaries are 100% set against anything of the sort. Which leaves… us. But liberals/Democrats and our causes seem to have hit our high water mark, with the White House, the House of Representatives and (at one point, allegedly) a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. And we still can’t seem to do much of anything. This is as good as it seems likely to get in the foreseeable future (which depresses me more deeply than I can really describe) and it seems very unlikely that any kind of adequate climate change legislation will be passed. Even if it were, the GOP would very likely swear up and down their determination to repeal it and, unlike health care reform, I think that would be a very real prospect.

Second, however much one feels that the United States and other first-world industrialized nations should bear the bulk of the responsibility for containing greenhouse warming—and I’m personally willing to go along with that argument fairly far—we simply can’t do it alone.

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