My Take | US military and security enter the realm of nation’s ‘one percenters’

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney was briefly back in the news. A lifelong Republican, he declared his support for Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race.

What may be more significant, though, but falling under the radar with Cheney – who may have been America’s first imperial vice-president – is a national security principle sometimes derisively called “the One Percent Doctrine”.

The thinking behind the idea, which became de facto policy under George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, has made a comeback. It permeates the ongoing alarmist calls by Pentagon generals and congressional honchos about the unpreparedness of the US military vis-a-vis the China threat, the Iranian-led axis of resistance in the Middle East, the Russian-Chinese alignment and worse, a potential Russian-Chinese-Iranian-North Korean military alliance.

How does it all work? Let’s learn from the master himself. “It’s all about treating a possible threat, however unlikely, as a near-certain threat,” Cheney once said.

“If there’s a 1 per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” That’s the kind of thinking being applied to China today, but also other threats, whether real or imaginary.

That’s why you need to ban TikTok because Chinese communists could access the data of ordinary Americans and use it for nefarious purposes, however implausible; impose 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese-made electric cars even though there are hardly any on US roads; destroy Huawei and its Chinese peers because they could take over the world of 5G; target ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers for possible spying even though they are no more likely to do so than any other ethnic group in the US.