Coffee Break: Gaza as Dress Rehearsal for War With China

The U.S. military legal establishment has big plans to use Gaza as a model for future large scale conflicts, including with China.

As Colombian President Petro Gustavo said a The Hague Group Summit: “Gaza is an experiment by the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how to respond to a rebellion of humanity; they plan to bomb us all.”

No one with any skepticism about America’s war machine and its intentions could have been happy to see this New Yorker headline:

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 23, 2025

And the full article, if anything, is even worse.

The piece starts with a portrait of “Geoffrey Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech and a former judge advocate general in the U.S. Army” where he was “the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law (I.H.L.), or the law of armed conflict (LOAC).”

From there it tells us of a delegation of “retired three- and four-star generals, on a trip sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America” that Corn joined which produced a report that “found that the I.D.F.’s implementation of civilian-risk mitigation “reflects a good-faith commitment” to comply with the laws of war, whereas Hamas acted as a pervasive and intentional violator of the law.”

But wait, there’s more:

This idea, that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in line with the U.S. military’s understanding of its own legal obligations, has become the general consensus among American military lawyers and their allies in the academy in recent years. That is the argument at the heart of a new paper by Naz Modirzadeh, a professor at Harvard Law School and the founder of its Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. As Modirzadeh writes, in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard National Security Journal, the U.S. government has been evasive about whether Israel has violated the laws of war. Where some have seen hypocrisy and geopolitical calculation, credit for this should also be given to “a deeper transformation within the U.S. military and its legal apparatus.”

In the past several years, the Department of Defense has become fixated on how the United States might fight a major war against an enemy that rivals the American military in force and technology. In such a scenario—known as a large-scale combat operation, or L.S.C.O.—combat would take place across land, sea, air, and into the thermosphere. Command of the air could not be taken for granted. Intelligence may be spotty.

Casualties could soar into the hundreds of thousands, and whole cities could be flattened. “In short,” Modirzadeh writes, the U.S. military has begun “preparing for an all-out war with China.” And, with such conflagrations burning in the mind, “LSCO lawyers,” as Modirzadeh calls them, have been arguing that the laws of war are far more permissive than many of their peers and the public seem to appreciate. From that vantage, Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat U.S. soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.

Well, that certainly opens up a world of possibilities, doesn’t it.

And if you think there’s no possible comparison between the IDF’s conflict with Hamas and the civilian population of Gaza and a potential war between the United States and China, you probably haven’t read “China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China” a new policy blueprint from The Hudson Institute.

It’s certainly an exercise in wishful thinking that’s shocking in its malevolence and disconnection from reality.

From the executive summary:

While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has weathered crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable. Policymakers need to consider what might happen and what steps they would have to take if the world’s longest-ruling Communist dictatorship and second-largest economy collapses due to its domestic and international troubles.

With chapters written by experts in military affairs, intelligence, economics, human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional governance, this report examines the initial steps that should be taken in the immediate aftermath of the CCP regime’s collapse and the long-term trajectory China might take after a stabilization period. Drawing on historical analysis, strategic foresight, and domain-specific expertise, this anthology describes these challenges as an exercise in possibilities. The different chapters explore how a single-party system collapses in key sectors of the country and how political institutions transform, as well as China’s unique political, economic, and social situation. Taken together, they assess the daunting tasks of stabilizing a long-repressed country after it has collapsed, in addition to the forces shaping China’s future. In so doing, the authors hope to offer policy recommendations for managing the risks and opportunities of a transition.

China resident Arnaud Bertrand has a more concise summary of the report:

which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S.

Bertrand, a French CEO who currently lives in China is admittedly a relentless booster of the CCCP, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong when he points out that the report:

…reveals so much about the diseased soul of the American empire and some of the key reasons behind its decline – the comical detachment from reality, the inability to learn from past failures, the zero-sum worldview, the denial of agency in others and, more than anything else, the fact that this report screams of desperation.

There’s a common pattern well known to political sociologists: when groups face existential threats to their status and identity, they often exhibit compensatory extremism – becoming caricatured versions of themselves as a defense against irrelevance. It was for instance famously the case with the Southern Confederacy prior to the American civil war, which responded to growing abolitionist pressure by becoming more fanatically committed to slavery and “Southern honor” than it had ever been before.

This Hudson Institute report reads a bit like this: witnessing the end of American primacy, some in the imperial establishment are transforming into a grotesque caricature of themselves, taking every toxic aspect of U.S. foreign policy and amplifying them to absurd extremes, becoming more imperially ambitious and delusional than ever before, planning interventions of unprecedented scope and audacity as if doubling down on their worst impulses could somehow restore their fading dominance.

As such, this report shouldn’t be read as an actual blueprint for policy – its analysis of China is so wildly detached from reality as to be completely worthless. Instead, it should be read as an anthropological specimen, a fascinating window into the fever dreams and neuroses of a dying empire, where the compensatory extremism strips away all pretense and reveals what American hegemony has always really been about – just as the Confederacy’s fanatical doubling down on slavery exposed the moral rot that had always defined the system.

Perhaps that’s why America’s global standing has eroded so badly in recent years, per a recent survey of 111,273 people in 100 countries by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 23, 2025

And as Yves posted this week, America’s allies in the Pacific, Japan and Australia are anything but enthusiastic about joining the U.S. in a war on China.

But never fear, the RAND Corp. says, “The People’s Liberation Army remains focused on upholding Chinese Communist Party rule, not preparing for war.”

Ok, so even CNN was able to find that “other experts scoffed at (RAND’s) conclusions.”

Perhaps that was because RAND used Russia vs. Ukraine as an example of an army failing to “effectively use its advanced armaments in battle.”

Or perhaps the seeming blindness of American “military thought leaders” has more to do with the personal profit motive than with an actual strategic assessment of the situation.

As United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese said when her report “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” with Chris Hedges, “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”

Jonathan Cook wraps it all up:

The stakes in Gaza are high for western governments precisely because they are so high for the business world growing fat on Israel’s genocide.

Governments and corporations have an overwhelming shared interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny and criticism: it serves as their colonial attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East, and it acts as a cash-cow for the weapons, surveillance and incarceration industries.
…
Israel’s indispensability to the corporate sector and a captured western political class extends far beyond tiny Gaza. Israel is playing an outsize role as a war-industries incubator on a global battlefield in which the West seeks to ensure its continuing military and economic primacy over China.

Last month the global business elite – comprising tech billionaires and corporate titans, joined by political leaders, media editors, and military and intelligence officials – met once again at the publicity-shy Bilderberg summit, this year hosted in Stockholm.

Prominent were the CEOs of major “defence” suppliers and arms manufacturers such as Palantir, Thales, Helsing, Anduril and Saab.

Drone warfare – being used in innovative ways by key military clients like Israel and Ukraine – was high on the agenda. The greater integration of AI into drones appears to have been a mainstay of the discussions.

The subtext this year, as in recent years, was a supposed rising threat from China and an associated “authoritarian axis” comprising Russia, Iran and North Korea. This threat is seen chiefly in economic and technological terms.

In May, Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google and a Bilderberg board member, wrote with alarm in the New York Times: “China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier.”

He added that the West was in a race against China over the imminent development of super-intelligent AI, which would give the winner “the keys to control the entire world”.
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Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is seen as playing a critical role in opening up the “battlescape”.

The same corporations cashing in on the Gaza genocide stand to benefit from the more permissive environment – legally and militarily – created by Israel for future wars, ones where massacred civilians count only as “incidental deaths”.

…the genocidal violence being unleashed by Israel is opening up the “legal maneuver space” – the space needed to commit crimes against humanity in full view.

This is where much of the impulse comes from in western capitals to normalise the genocide – present it as business as usual – and demonise its opponents.

The arms makers and tech companies whose coffers have been swollen by Israel’s genocide in Gaza stand to make far greater riches from a similarly devastating war against China.

Whatever the script we are sold, there will be nothing moral or existential about this coming battle. As ever, it will be about rich people keen to get even richer.

Ah ok, as Navin Johnson said, “it’s a profit deal,” suddenly it all makes sense.