Thoughts on Gaza, China, and Afghan drug lords.

Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. A former Marine and State Department official who resigned in protest over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Cross-posted from Matt’s Substack

Transcripts have been edited for clarity.

On Gaza:

…The genocide continues. The Israelis have been victorious, if you will. They haven’t defeated the Palestinian people. They haven’t broken the Palestinian people, but they have reduced Gaza.

The Israelis now control more than 60% of Gaza. Some estimates are that they control 70% of Gaza. 2.2 million people remaining in Gaza are in less than 40% of the land, and that will be further reduced by the Israelis as the months and years go on. That’s the idea.

The Israelis will continue to strangle the Palestinian people in Gaza, continue to immiserate them, continue to murder them.

In the last year, roughly, since the ceasefire, we’ve seen more than 1,400 Palestinians murdered, including more than one child a day murdered by the Israelis.

We have seen a fraction of the assistance and aid that is required in Gaza be let in by the Israelis. I think it’s roughly about 20% of what is needed has been let in.

And so you see this slow destruction, genocide, at a reduced rate, but it still occurs, and the goal is still there for the Israelis, and the pathway to a full ethnic cleansing of Gaza won’t be realized by the Israelis as complete next year or five years from now [or ten years from].

But I think the Israelis are patient. And we’ve seen that from their leadership. And they continue to work on the idea, their goal of eventually there’ll be some nation that will want to curry favor enough with the Americans that will be willing to take whatever bribe is being offered, and then we could send 100,000 Palestinians to them.

And I think that idea of that eventually some type of evacuation of Gaza will occur, and then Israel will finally have achieved what it’s been going for these last three years.

That is one thing [that always must be said] with October 7th, it was an attack that the Palestinians had absolutely every right to carry out.

An occupied people has a right under international law to armed resistance. This is not debatable. An occupied people has a right to armed resistance against the occupier, and that’s what occurred on October 7th.

Did crimes happen? Were innocent people killed?

Absolutely. Of course, that’s war. I don’t want to be glib with that either, but that’s—that occurred, and that was horrible. That was horrific. [note: I hate that I said “that’s war” and the rote and grotesque apology it provides].

But understanding how it got to that point, what other choice did the Palestinian resistance have?

The fact—as we’re now learning more and more about what occurred in the months and the year before October 7th, that the Israelis were basically betraying negotiations with the Palestinians, that the Palestinians had tried to negotiate with the Israelis and the Israelis had no interest in honoring those negotiations.

You need to understand that as well as, the geopolitical climate, the way the Palestinians saw one nation after another turning their back on them, certainly with the Abraham Accords, but then also, too, the reality of the Biden administration towards the Palestinians, the reality of the Saudi government and the Qataris and others towards—I shouldn’t say really Qataris, but certainly the Saudis towards the Palestinians.

The Palestinians were up against the wall. What other option did they have?

They could continue to die slowly, immiserated under the siege in Gaza. They could continue to suffer every few years the Israeli attacks that killed hundreds or thousands of people.

They could continue to be humiliated in this way, or they could act. And that’s what we saw happen on October 7th.

They acted, and then, of course, that gave the Israelis the reason, the excuse, the opportunity to carry out their ethnic cleansing, to carry out this genocide.

And so here we are now, three years later. The destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza continues.

The Israelis have a pathway or a plan or a strategy they are following, and they assume that they will be victorious. They don’t see anything stopping them from achieving that.

Even a reduction in American support won’t prevent them from achieving what they’re looking to achieve in Gaza.

On China:

…With regards to China, this is a case of—I don’t know if I want to call it the Thucydides Trap, like a lot of people like to describe it—but this is a case of a declining power, a declining empire, recognizing its rivals, recognizing its competitors, recognizing who will overtake it, and trying to do everything it can to stop it.

You certainly watch the American attitude towards China throughout the 1990s, beginning under the Clinton administration.

It’s militarization of the relationship between the United States and China. Bill Clinton sending the American aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Strait, essentially trying to not just bully but humiliate the Chinese (after all we know about China’s century of humiliation).

Here we have the Americans in the ‘90s behaving in a similar way. This idea of trying to keep China down, trying to keep China essentially as the factory for the United States.

And then the prioritization of China as America’s number one national security threat.

I think there is a lot of Orientalism that goes into that. A lot of racism, as well as maybe some actual correct understanding of China’s trajectory, in a sense of it will be a competitor to the United States and it will overtake the American Empire.

So you saw what happens then, say, when the George W. Bush administration comes in and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, in January of 2001, she’s saying the number one national security priority for the United States is China.

So there has been this focus, this emphasis, this obsession on China by the Americans for 35 years. For 35 years this has been going on.

It starts in the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration comes in saying we are going to focus on China. That’s our great priority.

Now that focus can’t be carried out into execution very well because the American Empire can’t get out of its own way.

So we have Afghanistan, we have Iraq, we have Libya, we have Syria, Yemen, etc., etc., etc.

And I had a friend of mine who went to China in 2010 and he met with Ministry of Foreign Affairs folks there and he asked them, “What policies do you think you would like to see the United States carry out that would best help China?”

And these folks at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied very candidly and honestly, and they said, “We hope to see the United States continue to carry out these unending wars in the Middle East.”

So you have had, I think, over these decades, this desire for the United States to confront China, to suppress China, to put China back in its place.

It’s become an obsession in many parts of the American political class, foreign policy community, media, etc.

Of course, the idea of fighting China is a cash cow for the weapons industry.

So there are all types of inputs that come into this hysteria about China.

But at this point the game’s done. The game’s over.

The Chinese invested in themselves. The Chinese invested in their people. The Chinese prioritized their infrastructure. They prioritized their education. They prioritized lifting people out of poverty.

While the United States has done the exact opposite.

And the United States, this empire, has committed to simply militarization as its way of remaining in control.

And now you see the United States in this war with Iran exposing how superficial the American military actually is.

So economically, the game’s long been done in terms of who will be the great economic power.

Politically, you see many nations aligning with China, having relations with China, developing relationships with the Chinese that will outlast the American relationships, because the American relationships are often built upon bullying and lecturing.

The idea of either you will have American bases in your country or we will sanction you, and the Chinese approach has been different.

So I think to surmise the issue you have here is you have a United States that has only a past and a China that has a future, and that dissonance is going to continue to grow, and the United States will do everything it can to try and maintain control.

The United States is even perplexed by China because China is a superpower that doesn’t behave like past superpowers. So it’s very difficult for the United States to even understand and engage with China.

The United States, as one example, has 800 military bases around the world. I think most people would say it’s in line with what an empire does.

The Chinese just opened their second military base overseas. They’ve had a base in Djibouti for a number of years, which had a lot to do with an international campaign to stop piracy.

They just opened literally last month their second military base overseas. Not even overseas, it’s in Laos.

So I think you have this continuation of this hostility between the United States, pushed by the United States against the power that is supplanting it.

And how the United States decides to try and maintain control, I think, will mean whether or not we end up in war with China.

A war that the United States can’t win, a war the United States would lose.

On US foreign policy:

…One of the reasons why American foreign policy is not just so vapid and superficial, but also ineffective and counterproductive, is because the willingness to understand and appreciate what is actually occurring runs counter to the American narrative.

And so if you have a narrative that’s essentially based upon American exceptionalism, of a Manichean struggle, of good versus evil, of us—we have the white hats on, they have the black hats on—to dig deeper and understand what is occurring, who these people actually are, what’s the history, that becomes very problematic.

For example, say in Afghanistan, where this idea that we essentially, with the occupation beginning in 2001, put into power not just warlords, but the drug lords. [The war lords and drug lords were often one and the same.] That these are the very same people who were so predatory against the Afghan people in the 1990s, they caused the Afghan people to support the Taliban, because they needed relief from the predation of those warlords and drug lords.

And those are the very men that the United States puts back in power, arms, gives money, provides resources to, etc. So, what happens at the end of the story of the American occupation of Afghanistan, you see essentially the Afghan people, if not providing overt support for the Taliban, at least not standing in their way, and favoring the Taliban over the Afghan government because the Afghan government was so predatory.

This was nothing that was hidden. This was not secret knowledge. This was nothing that it would take you years there to find out, or you’d have to go through a PhD program to fully understand. This was all right there out in the open from day one.

But that’s too complex. That’s too difficult. That upends this narrative that we’re in Afghanistan putting Jeffersonian Democrats into power, that we are there enabling Afghan women, we are there preventing another 9/11.

None of that stuff holds up when you actually look at what’s occurring. And so that’s just not Afghanistan or Yemen. I think we could argue that’s a case in point for the entirety of American foreign policy. And not just modern times, but stretching back through, let’s just cut it off at the end of World War II, the Cold War, to keep it simple.

And certainly, if you talk to those, say, the Vietnamese who fought the Americans during the American occupation of that country, it wasn’t a question of communism. It wasn’t a question of whether or not – do these people follow Khrushchev or do they follow Mao? It wasn’t that. It was a question of liberation. It was a question of fighting the foreign occupier, just as my father had, just as my grandfather had, or I should say my father and mother, or my grandfather and my grandmother, because the Vietnamese, certainly women participated evenly, equally in their struggle for national liberation.

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