Ep 242 - The Disempowering Politics of 'Inevitability' Part 2: US Empire as Mysterious, Teleological Force

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
This is Citations Needed, with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:15)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:16)
You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast.
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. And not only are we 100% listener funded, but we've been listener funded. We have never run any commercials, never had any corporate sponsors, never had any foundation or nonprofit money coming into the show. We are solely supported by listeners like you. It keeps us independent, but we have been listener supported Adam since the very beginning. And by that, I mean, July of 2017 Yes, indeed, this episode marks the end of our ninth season of Citations Needed. We will take a short break for the rest of the summer and then be back in September with season 10 of Citations Needed.

**Adam Johnson** (1:15)
We are excited to wrap up our ninth season and very excited for our 10th season, although of course it does make us feel old.
But yeah, the media criticism game doesn't stop, keeps going forever because the media and the United States in particular. So we want to thank all y'all for your support over this past year. There is a lot we have planned in store for season 10 We're very excited about, we're working on those episodes right now. And so we're excited to see you in the next season starting in the fall.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:45)
America is still leading nuclear race, but Russia is gaining, announced the Associated Press in 1968 Be prepared to contain the Carthage of the 1990s, Japan. Warned Harvard fellow Christopher Lane in the Los Angeles Times in 1995
US General's prediction of war with China in 2025, risks turning worse fears into reality, declared Time Magazine in 2023

**Adam Johnson** (2:15)
So-called foreign policy news coverage in the US is all too often premised on the idea that conflict with one or more countries is inevitable. At any given time, the US is in a race, about to go to war, or strategizing some new way to police the world. Even when the stakes couldn't be higher, like when the COVID pandemic or Israel's genocide is killing substantial portions of the global population, the US default posture isn't to take stock of the situation and prioritize international cooperation, but with the help of our media, to double down on competition and aggression and to insist that there's simply no other way.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:47)
Not only is it often factually wrong, after all, the United States didn't go to war with Japan in the 1990s, for example, but it's also a reckless and violent means of situating global politics that raises a number of questions.
Why should the US public be conditioned to accept global competition and constant conflict as normal? How does this inevitability framing preserve US myth making and supremacism? And how does it foreclose critical thinking about other modes of international coexistence?

**Adam Johnson** (3:18)
Last week on part one of our two part series on manufactured inevitability, we examined how notions of inevitability are used by tech, energy and other industries to market resource intensive and oftentimes destructive and polluting products as modern and futuristic. Today for part two, we'll examine how inevitability framings are used in geopolitical media, coverage to convince an often war weary public that conflict and domination are inarguably and invariably going to happen with no serious alternatives on offer.

**Nima Shirazi** (3:48)
Later on the show, we'll be speaking with Tobita Chow, an organizer based in the Chicago area.
Toby researches progressive strategy, great power conflict and international climate politics. He was the founding director of Justice is Global, and currently serves on the Convergence Magazine editorial board.

**Tobita Chow** (4:06)
This narrative that conflict with China or even war with China is all but inevitable, it really has been received wisdom and a very dominant narrative in DC for a number of years now.
I've heard from folks who work in DC recently that confidence still remains high, that if it does escalate to war with China, that that could go really well for us. And I'm not sure how folks have confidence after what we've seen with Iran, but this is what I hear. So yeah, there is this notion that this is inevitable or all but inevitable, and that we should be confident about how the US military would perform in that scenario.

**Adam Johnson** (4:49)
So in last week's episode, which you should listen to, we discussed the ways in which the inevitability narrative is used to push through harmful inequality creating technologies and free trade agreements, and basically carry out the whims and desires of capital without really any discussion or public debate or democratic process, because there's some future that's cemented and we're heading towards it. And today we're going to talk about how that same logic also helps contribute to hostilities and militarism that promotes conflict with other countries. And this is done through a similar and oftentimes related means, which is, if I can't really defend something or argue for something on first principles or based on empirical evidence, what I do is I assert that it's going to happen with or without you because some other country is going to do it, or some other force of capital is going to do it. And we have to get ahead of it. We have to get ahead of this inevitable future. And this is a brilliant, urgent sales tactic that creates a sense that this is going to happen with or without you, and your job is to get on board. As we noted in part one of this two part episode, it is a infomercial sales tactic. It's all in the next 10 minutes, or the deal's off. There's a sense of we need to hurry up and do the future, and we don't really have time to kind of quibble over who this harms, whether it has any externalities, whose lungs it pollutes. We just got to kind of go hurdle towards the future, move fast, break things, things in this case being poor, minoritized in people's lives who are not in the halls of power.