{"id":366263,"date":"2018-06-21T21:57:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/girding-for-confrontation-lewrockwell\/"},"modified":"2018-06-21T21:57:03","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:57:03","slug":"girding-for-confrontation-lewrockwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/girding-for-confrontation-lewrockwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Girding for Confrontation &#8211; LewRockwell"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t                            \t<!-- S3 Cache --><!-- S3:S3:Non-Original -->\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed,<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pacom.mil\/Media\/News\/News-Article-View\/Article\/1537107\/pacific-command-change-highlights-growing-importance-of-indian-ocean-area\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">explained<\/a>, reflects \u201cthe increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,\u201d as well as Washington\u2019s determination to remain the dominant power in both.<\/p>\n<p>What? You didn\u2019t hear about this anywhere?\u00a0 And even now, you\u2019re not exactly blown away, right? Well, such a name change may not sound like much, but someday you may look back and realize that it couldn\u2019t have been more consequential or ominous.\u00a0 Think of it as a signal that the U.S. military is already setting the stage for an eventual confrontation with China.<\/p>\n<p>If, until now, you hadn\u2019t read about Mattis\u2019s decision anywhere, I\u2019m not surprised since the media gave it virtually no attention \u2014 less certainly than would have been accorded the least significant tweet Donald Trump ever dispatched.\u00a0 What coverage it did receive treated the name change as no more than a passing \u201csymbolic\u201d gesture, a Pentagon ploy to encourage India to join Japan, Australia, and other U.S. allies in America\u2019s Pacific alliance system. \u201cIn Symbolic Nod to India, U.S. Pacific Command Changes Name\u201d was the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-usa-defense-india\/in-symbolic-nod-to-india-us-pacific-command-changes-name-idUSKCN1IV2Q2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">headline<\/a>\u00a0of a Reuters story on the subject and, to the extent that any attention was paid, it was typical.<\/p>\n<p>That the media\u2019s military analysts failed to notice anything more than symbolism in the deep-sixing of PACOM shouldn\u2019t be surprising, given all the attention being paid to other major international developments \u2014 the pyrotechnics of the Korean summit in Singapore,&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2018\/06\/no_author\/girding-for-confrontation\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed,\u00a0the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis\u00a0explained, reflects \u201cthe increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-366263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}