Finding new wars post-Afghanistan

It's what too many people have their sick, dark hearts set upon.

Why are so many otherwise sane people, including Joe Biden’s foreign policy team, already rattling sabers in preparation for a new faceoff with China, one that would be eminently avoidable with judicious diplomacy and an urge to cooperate on this embattled planet of ours?

...Looking at the U.S. from across an ocean, a British friend of mine was bemused by this country’s propensity for turning rivals into dangers of the worst sort. He asked me whether the very unity of the United States hinges on hyping and then confronting external enemies, an “artificially contrived military commonality,” as he put it, that may serve to prevent this country’s states from performing their own little “Brexits.”

He has a point. What is it about this country that makes our leaders so regularly revel in inflating threats to our well-being? War profits, of course, as well as the kinds of dangers that seem to justify an ever more colossal military. Still, I suggested to my friend that inflating such dangers hasn’t induced a sense of national unity, though it has, at least, provided a major distraction from what, so late in the game, can still only be called class warfare...They also, of course, offer our oligarchs and kleptocrats yet more opportunities to plunder taxpayer dollars. - TomDispatch