US gearing up for another Cold War: Analyst

An American political analyst says US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s sailing into the South China Sea aboard an American aircraft carrier suggests that the United States is gearing up for another Cold War.

The Pentagon chief toured the USS John C. Stennis, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, as it cruised through the South China Sea on Friday near waters claimed by China.

Carter said the visit was meant to underscore the US commitment to strengthening its Asia-Pacific alliances and moving more military hardware and troops there to counter China.

He said his presence on the Stennis, the flagship of Carrier Strike Group 3, was to send “a message to the region.”

Scott Bennet, a former US army psychological warfare officer, told Press TV on Saturday that “Ashton Carter going onto an aircraft carrier into [the South China Sea] is simply making China see that the United States is gearing up for another Cold War, which of course has been the agenda of the military-industrial complex since it was badly disappointed with the end of the prior one.”

“So Ashton Carter jumping on an aircraft carrier, sailing out there, making noise, and appearing clownish and threatening to destabilize the Pacific Ocean,  and solidarity of some of the Oceanic nations, really should be taken with a degree of defense and aggressive intolerance by the Oceanic nations, because they got a good track record to go by,” he added.

“They simply need to look at the recent history that the United States under Ashton Carter and previously of course under George W. Bush, but really under Obama and Ashton Carter, what they have done in the Middle East that they would soon try to do in the [Asia-Pacific] region,” the analyst continued.  

“It is a very real triangulation.  They got Syria. They got Libya. And now they have resumed operations in Iraq, and of course they [are involved in] Ukraine, and the mobilization of the United States’ military in the Baltic, in the eastern European, and Scandinavian countries in preparation for some sort of confrontation with Russia,” he stated.

“But China situation of course is the US gearing up to try influencing the region. It should be met with the Chinese taking their quintessential public relations coup as they did, back I believe it was in seventieth, or sixteenth century, where they sailed their Navy around the world to display who they were,” the commentator noted.

“The Chinese leadership needs to do the same thing today. They need to essentially, symbolically sail around the world and make their presence known in multidimensional hybrid information warfare,” he observed.

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