The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia set a precedent for unilateral military
action by the United States and its allies outside of any framework of
international law — making clear that such wars would not be subject
to vetoes by China or Russia within the United Nations Security Council.
This was not an ‘accident’ necessitated by the urgency for
humanitarian intervention, as NATO claimed. The bombing was meticulously
planned many months in advance. The destruction of the post-World War
Two international political order was rather a central goal of the bombing
and the way in which it was launched.
This was confirmed by the explicit codification of the new doctrine
of unilateral US-led military action into NATO’s new strategic
concept adopted on 23 April, at the height of the bombing. This provides
for offensive NATO military action, with or without the endorsement of
the United Nations, anywhere in western Europe, eastern Europe or the
former Soviet Union. The new doctrine envisages the accelerated development
of NATO rapid deployment forces capable of projecting military force
far outside of NATO’s borders. This transformation of NATO — from
an avowedly ‘defensive’ alliance to an explicitly offensive
military posture — accompanied the integration of its first members
from eastern Europe, the conclusion of a parallel series of military
treaties in Asia.
These moves deeply threaten any state in the world which finds itself
in conflict with the economic, political or strategic interests of the
United States.
The alignment of states and governments during NATO’s 11 week
bombing campaign clearly demonstrated that all of the imperialist states — in
western Europe, Canada and Japan aim to share in the spoils of this new
age of colonialism, and, in addition, the new capitalist states in eastern
Europe would also like to get their snouts into the trough.
They were backed in this by leaderships of virtually every social democratic
party in western Europe — posing themselves as the champions of
the emerging European Union imperialism, and clarifying their utter incapacity
to stand up not only to European capital, but also to the United States.
Two states in particular now preoccupy US military planners — Russia
and China. Russia is a permanent US concern because it is the only state
capable of destroying the United States. But, since 1991, its government — the
Yeltsin administration — has been a puppet of Washington.
US goals towards Russia centre upon keeping the Yeltsin entourage or
an acceptable successor in power, while continuing to grind down the
country’s economic and military capacity through the operation
of the capitalist economic reform which commenced when Yeltsin took office.
Since 1991, the Soviet Union has been dissolved, NATO has expanded to
the borders of the former Soviet Union and occupied a large part of the
Balkans. Now the US is seeking military cooperation with states of the
former Soviet Union itself — building links with Ukraine, Georgia,
Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova with a view to pulling the Commonwealth
of Independent States apart and securing control of the export routes
for Caspian oil.
The delicate issue of tactics constraining the US, is the need to pursue
this course without provoking a reaction from the Russian population
so violent that Yeltsin and his would-be successors are ejected from
office. Such a development could set in motion a dynamic of convergence
of key states of the former Soviet Union to withstand the destruction
of their societies at the behest of the West and the mafiocracies it
has spawned. In such an event, which remains possible given the human
catastrophe which capitalism and the West have produced in Russia, the
US is already creating other means of pressure — notably the ability
to foment wars along the southern borders of Russia and the option provided
by NATO expansion, of deploying nuclear weapons right up to the former
Soviet borders.
Having achieved as much as is currently possible in Russia, however,
the central confrontation for which the United States is now preparing
is with China. Why?
China is not a capitalist state. Yet for more than twenty years it has
been the most successful large economy in the world in terms of economic
growth and rising living standards.
On its present rate of growth, the Chinese economy may reach the same
size as the United States as early as 2010-20. Although this will be
in a country far poorer than the US, in terms of income per head, American
military planners are obsessively aware of the fact that there is a direct
relationship between the size of any economy and its military potential.
US preparations for confrontation with China — which now form the
central axis of US strategic planning — are based on total determination
to do everything possible to forestall China becoming an economic, military
and political force capable of standing up to the United States in the
way in which the Soviet Union was able to do at the height of its power.
At its strongest, the Soviet economy was never more than roughly half
the size of the US economy. Yet the USSR, on that economic basis, acquired
the capacity to destroy the US many times over — even though, contrary
to CIA propaganda, its offensive military potential never approached
that of the US. While income per head in China in 2010 will be much lower
than that of the Soviet Union at the peak of its power, let alone the
US, the absolute size of its economy, if unchecked, will eventually enable
it to acquire a similar military level to that enjoyed previously by
the Soviet Union — more than enough to deter any attack.
Having spent 40 years and trillions of dollars in the so-called Cold
War — which included real wars, civil wars and military coups in
which millions of people were slaughtered by the US or its proxies in
Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East — the
US has no intention of allowing another military super-power capable
of constraining it to emerge in the world.
Indeed its entire military doctrine, adopted following the dissolution
of the USSR, is directed to that end.
The military capacity of the Soviet Union was the most important constraint
on the level of military force deployed by the United States in the post
world war two period — and that in turn had critical political
results. It helped a third of the population of the world break out of
capitalism altogether. It also made possible the fall of colonialism
as the European imperialist powers were forced to retreat for fear that
national liberation movements would radicalise in the direction of the
socialist revolutions which followed the second world in the Balkans,
Asia and ultimately Cuba.
Without the threat to the existence of the US posed by a nuclear armed
USSR, there can be little doubt that Washington would have used nuclear
weapons in Korea in 1950-53 and later in Vietnam. It could not do so
and, as a result, Korea became the first war which the US failed to win — ending
in stalemate — while Vietnam became the first war in history which
the US actually lost. The results of the latter were traumatic — making
it politically impossible for the US to use direct military intervention
to prop up the Shah of Iran, or its ally the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua
or, following the 1975 fall of the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal,
to prevent the Cuban assistance to the MPLA in Angola which defeated
the South African army and triggered the process which culminated in
the collapse of the Apartheid regime.
Although none of the post-second world war socialist revolutions and
national liberation struggles were instigated by the Soviet bureaucracy,
and many, like the Chinese and Yugoslav revolutions were explicitly opposed
by it, Soviet military assistance, whether in the form of arms supplies
or indirectly in deterring a higher level of US violence, was critical
to their success. That is why the central goal of US foreign policy,
between the immediate aftermath of the second world war and the dissolution
of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to contain, roll back and eliminate the
Soviet Union. That is why trillions of dollars were spent on the Cold
War, millions of lives sacrificed in Korea and Vietnam, proxy wars fought
around the globe and US military bases established along the entire perimeter
of the Soviet Union. In particular, following its defeat in Vietnam,
the US drew the conclusion that the only way to avoid future such catastrophes
would be to intensify its pressure upon the Soviet Union — above
all through the new spiral in the arms race under Reagan — with
a view to weakening or if possible eliminating it. It succeeded in this.
But the victory in the Cold War posed the US with the necessity of re-defining
its strategic objectives. The resources necessary to fund the final twist
to the arms race which cracked the Soviet economy, bought Gorbachev to
power and ultimately bought down the USSR, had been beyond the means
of the United States alone. The US was only able to finally defeat the
Soviet Union because it was able to mobilise the resources of the international
capitalist economy to fund Reagan’s new arms race. Even so, the
strain was immense and contributed to the transformation of the US from
the world’s biggest creditor state to its biggest debtor by the
end of the 1980s.
Moreover, by the end of the Cold War, even though the most powerful
non-capitalist state in the world had been dissolved, the fundamental
bases of US global hegemony were also being eroded.
Bases of US power
US dominance of the capitalist world after the second world war had been
based upon three pillars. First, it was by far the most dynamic capitalist
economy in the world — two of its main rivals, Germany and Japan,
were in ruins and the third, Britain, was totally dependent on US financial
support. Second, the US effectively controlled the linch-pins of the
emerging world capitalist economic system — symbolised by the
role of the dollar. Third, only the US had the military capacity to
fight a war with the Soviet Union — making German and Japanese
imperialisms totally militarily dependent on the United States.
Each of these pillars came under threat. One, by the end of the Cold
War, while the US remained by far the largest economy in the world — with
more than double the GDP of Japan and more than four times that of Germany — its
relative dominance had declined dramatically vis a vis Germany and what
was then the European Community through the 1950s and 1960s and then
Japan and South East Asia through the 1970s and 1980s.
Second, the launch of the Euro in 1999 marked the first potential threat
to the supremacy of the dollar in the world economy.
Third, on the military and political level, the cement of the threat
of the Soviet Union and socialist revolution, which had bound Japan and
Germany to the US throughout the Cold War, was enormously weakened by
the restoration of capitalism into eastern Europe in 1989, the capitalist
reunification of Germany in 1990 and dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
In this context, the framework within which the debate on the redefinition
of US strategic objectives took place was absolutely explicit: how to
retain US world dominance in the post-Cold War world. This was spelled
out with brutal clarity, showing just how laughable is the idea peddled
by some western journalists of the supposed ‘threat’ of a
US retreat to isolationism: ‘In a broad new policy statement the
Defense Department asserts that the US political and military mission
is the post cold war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is
allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former
Soviet Union. The draft takes the position that ‘no collection
of nations can aspire to regional dominance because that would put them
on the path to global rivalry with the American super-power.’.
The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one super-power.
The new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military
power whose leaders “must maintain the mechanisms for deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role.’ (International Herald Tribune, 9 March 1993)
Having established itself as the world’s sole superpower the US
was, and is, determined to retain that position by all means necessary.
Thus the United States’ new strategic doctrine took account not
simply of socialist threats to its world dominance — particularly
in the event of an anti-US regime coming to power in Russia — but
also of the need to forestall any potential capitalist competitor to
the US. For example, emerging in the form of a German led European Union
or a Japanese led East Asian regional alliance deciding to acquire nuclear
weapons.
These threats exist precisely because the balance of forces between
the imperialist powers which emerged from the second world war has changed.
This is indeed why it is impossible to abolish inter-imperialist conflict.
As Lenin put it, writing during the first world war:
‘The only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division
of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc, is a calculation of
the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial,
military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the
division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development
of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries
is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable
insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with the
Britain of the time; Japan compared with Russia in the same way. Is it ‘conceivable’ that
in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist
powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question.’ (Collected
Works, volume X, p295)
The United States ruling class has no intention of allowing its position
to be displaced by the rise of its capitalist rivals. It has deployed
all of the weapons at its disposal — economic, financial, political
and military to resist its relative decline. In this it has, to date,
had considerable success. In particular, its has been able to use its
position as the economic, political and military linchpin of the international
capitalist system to draw upon not only its own resources, but also those
of its capitalist rivals. From the point of view of US imperialism this
is precisely the function of the global financial liberalisation of the
last two decades — to allow it to draw upon surplus value generated
elsewhere in the world to fund investment in the United States.
As a result, from the locomotive of the world capitalist economy in
the 1950s and 1960s, the US has been transformed into a parasite upon
it — whereby its economic growth takes place at the expense of
its capitalist rivals. Thus, first western Europe from the mid-1970s,
then Japan from the end of the 1980s, have fallen behind the US in terms
of their rates of economic growth. For the weakest capitalist states
the results have been catastrophic — with Africa and the Middle
East from the beginning of the 1970s, Latin America from the 1980s, and
eastern Europe from the beginning of the 1990s, being thrown backwards.
The most powerful capitalist states have inevitably tried to resist
this process. That is the significance, on the economic plane, of the
launch of the Euro and the continuing obstacles being placed in the way
of the attempts by American capital, particularly since the financial
crash in the summer of 1997, to penetrate East Asia and Japan. While
the third world states have less power to resist, such diverse phenomena
as the attempt of Iraq to halt the fall in oil prices by invading Kuwait
in 1990, the imposition of exchange controls by Malaysia in response
to the East Asian financial crash and the rise to power of the left bourgeois
populist regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, are all manifestations of
the pressure to resist the economic exactions of the United States.
The strategy of the United States in these circumstances is to use not
only all of the economic levers at its disposal, but also to exploit
its dominance on the one field where its pre-eminence over all of its
rivals remains entirely unchallenged — the military — to
further its economic and strategic interests.
Thus the Gulf war was used to demonstrate that only the US can defend
the access to the oil reserves of the Middle East upon which both the
European and Japanese economies are totally dependent.
Similarly, the US intervened into the crisis in Yugoslavia where Germany
was intent upon creating a new sphere of influence. In Bosnia, it blocked
every attempt at a peaceful resolution, to demonstrate that only Washington
had the military capacity to defeat the Bosnian Serbs, with the result
that under the Dayton Agreement Bosnia is now effectively a NATO colony.
In relation to Kosovo, by encouraging the KLA with the promise of eventual
NATO intervention, and engineering the Rambouillet talks to present Yugoslavia
with demands which no sovereign state could accept, the US created the
conditions for the NATO military intervention which once again made clear
the complete military dependence of the European Union upon the United
States. Tony Blair has sought to utilise this situation to try resolve
the contradictions of British imperialism’s relations with the
EU and the US, by bidding for the position of privileged US ally, championing
US strategic dominance in Europe, within the framework of European Monetary
Union.
Finally, in this regard, the geo-strategic position of Japan adjacent
to both a non-capitalist China and a Russia where capitalism is far from
assured of stabilising itself, makes it utterly militarily dependent
on the US.
Asserting military might
Thus the overall balance sheet of the struggle of the US to re-assert
its dominance over its potential imperialist competitors following
its victory in the Cold War is as follows. While on the economic field
the struggle continues, the United States has succeeded in using its
military pre-eminence to re-assert its hegemony over both Japan and
the European Union. The outcome of the bombing of Yugoslavia is that
the US controlled NATO, not the European Union, has been established
as the leadership of the capitalist colonisation of eastern Europe
and the drive to penetrate the former Soviet Union. In Asia, Japan
has concluded a new security treaty with the United States providing
for increased Japanese participation in and funding of military operations,
including the construction of an anti-missile shield directed against
China, under total US control and leadership.
These trends are now set to deepen precisely because the US is on the
verge of a new period of economic weakening. By abandoning the original
advice of the IMF, the East Asian economies have resumed rapid economic
growth and ultra-Keynesian intervention in Japan is also having some
success. As a result the flow of funds from Asia, which have funded the
biggest US balance of payments deficit in history and in the process
helped to inflate the present bubble on US stock markets, is starting
to slow.
In essence, Asia is trying to use its capital to finance investment
in its own economies rather than the US. At the same time, economic revival
in Asia is pushing up international commodity prices — with oil
up by 100 per cent in a year. This is generating inflationary pressures
in the US. With the flow of funds from Asia into the US slowing, the
dollar coming under downward pressure and long term interest rates rising,
US economic growth has started to turn down accompanied by the threat
of a serious collapse on Wall Street. The Dow Jones index saw its biggest
weekly decline in a decade in the second week of October 1999.
In these circumstances, with a new period of economic enfeeblement looming
for the US, the drive to reassert itself by utilising its military capacity
will deepen and this strategic subordination of the European Union and
Japan to the United States will set the limits within which their economic
conflicts unfold. As Perry Anderson put it in another context, but correctly: ‘one
of the basic axioms of historical materialism [is that] the secular struggle
between classes is ultimately resolved at the political — not at
the economic or cultural — level of society.’ (Lineages
of the Absolutist State).
With the economic pillars of US global dominance eroding and its dependence
on its military power consequently accentuated, the US is constrained,
increasingly, to seek to pose conflicts on the military level. The two
key strategic problems for the US in this regard are how to manage, what
it hopes will be, Russia’s irreversible decline, on the one hand,
and how to block the rise of China, on the other.
The Pentagon’s strategic planners are under no illusions that
capitalism has stabilised itself in Russia. They believe, correctly,
that a Communist or other anti-western regime, could come to power. Indeed,
such forces were represented, for a short period following the August
1998 financial collapse, in Yevgeny Primakov’s government. This
was actively working towards a strategic alliance of Russia, China and
India as a proposed counter-weight to US global hegemony, while domestically
launching the actions against the Kremlin centred mafiocracy which have
culminated in the recent revelations. That was why Primakov was removed
by Yeltsin at the height of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, was correctly interpreted by the
Russian military as a dry run, and threat, of the kind of operations
NATO would like to be able to project into the former Soviet Union. The
eastward expansion of NATO, and military pacts with some of the former
Soviet states, are precisely designed not only to safeguard western expansion
but also to contain Russia. As the Pentagon document quoted above put
it: ‘In the event of a resurgent threat from Russia, “we
should plan to defend against any such threat” further forward
on the territories of eastern Europe.’ (IHT, 9 March 1993)
But, the US is also aware that the Russia economy has been so devastated
by the capitalist economic reform carried out under US-guidance since
January 1992, that while the country retains its ability to destroy the
US with nuclear weapons, its ability to conduct any kind of aggressive
foreign policy has been enormously weakened. Thus, Primakov’s position
on the bombing of Yugoslavia was perfectly realistic. He condemned it — as
did 95 per cent of the Russian population — but he had little ability
to do very much more than give diplomatic assistance to Yugoslavia. Thus,
the US strategy towards Russia remains to try to weaken it as much as
possible, prevent any recreation of the USSR, utilise economic and military
pressure — such as its ability via Turkey to kindle serious military
conflicts in the Caucasus and Central Asia — in order to try to
also prevent the more immediate threat of an alliance between China and
Russia.
China’s rise
China has risen to the top of the US strategic agenda because, one, it
is not a capitalist state and, two, it has had been the most successful
major economy, with the most rapidly rising living standards, in the
world since 1978. Some western economists, most of the media and many
on the left, argue that China is carrying out a transition to a capitalist
economy — albeit more rationally and successfully than the disasters
which followed the re-introduction of capitalism into eastern Europe
and the USSR.
The Pentagon labours under no such illusions. They understand that the
industrial core of China’s economy remains publicly owned, that
the largest growth sector of the economy has been the development of
collective property forms owned by town and village governments, that
land remains publicly owned and leased to farmers and that the economy
is planned. There has been no large scale privatisation of industry in
China.
In reality, the success of the Chinese economic reform is precisely
based upon the introduction of market mechanisms within the overall framework
of a planned economy, which has allowed the reorientation of the economy
to prioritise the consumer goods and agricultural sectors, allowing a
rapid increase in living standards, to create a virtuous circle of rapid
economic growth which in turn has resulted in a vast expansion of the
infrastructure and, given its rate of growth and sheer size, made China
so attractive for foreign investment that the local and national governments
can play western states and companies off against each other to negotiate
the most favourable possible terms for their domestic economic development.
This strategy has allowed China to correct some of the main failings
of the Soviet and Chinese central planning, notably to develop the consumer
goods sector of the economy, without abandoning the planned industrial
core of the economy.
As a result, at its present rate of economic growth, which at 7-8 per
cent a year is lower than its peak of 12-13 per cent, China will overtake
the US as the largest economy in the world within 10-20 years and on
this basis can acquire a military capacity equivalent to that of the
former USSR.
For US imperialism China has to be stopped before it acquires the ability
to defend itself — which would only be possible with nuclear weapons.
At present, although a nuclear power, China only has a handful of nuclear
armed missiles capable of reaching American targets. That is why the
US intends to move rapidly.
This has nothing to do with the foreign policy orientation of China — which
from the end of the Vietnam war until relatively recently sought to systematically
accommodate the US. Indeed, the de facto alliance of China with the US
against the Soviet Union was decisive in derailing the left in east Asia
and allowing the US to focus its resources on cracking the USSR in the
1980s. The shift in Chinese foreign policy over the last decade — moving
to equidistance with the Soviet Union, then seeking to ally with Russia
against the threat of the US, opposing NATO’s eastward expansion,
the recent bombing of Iraq and the war on Yugoslavia, has been in response
to the fact that it is now more threatened by the US.
US strategy towards China is proceeding on three fronts simultaneously.
First, its preferred option, because the least risky and expensive would
be to assist in an internal political disintegration of the country akin
to that produced by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. The difficulty is
that there is no sign of such a current coming to power and the Chinese
have undoubtedly learnt from the experience of the Soviet Union and have
no intention of willingly going down the same path to national collapse.
Second, the US has already launched an arms race against China with
the conclusion of new security agreements for enhanced Japanese participation
in any US-led military conflict in East Asia, similar agreements with
the Philippines, the supply of advanced military aircraft and other weapons
to Taiwan, plans for a theatre missile defence system in the region and
for a national anti-ballistic missiles defence shield for the United
States itself — in defiance of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missiles
Treaty with the Soviet Union. The purpose of this arms race is to put
political pressure on China, to force it to divert resources from economic
growth to military spending thereby hoping to provoke political instability.
But also to the third option, that of a military conflict involving China
and the US — which would almost inevitably involve the use of nuclear
weapons — a credible threat.
The means to provoke such a conflict already exist — by engineering
a declaration of independence from China by Taiwan, the area occupied
under US protection after 1949 by the remnant of the Chiang Kai Shek
regime overthrown in 1949. China has repeatedly threatened to resort
to force in such circumstances, and the US is committed to military intervention
on the side of Taiwan. This option depends on China being unable to retaliate
effectively against the US. That in turn depends on (a) China not having
had time to develop its own nuclear potential and (b) China not being
in a military alliance with Russia against the US.
Events this year have confirmed this dynamic. In the spring, despite
big concessions offered by China, the Clinton administration scuppered
talks on Chinese accession to the World Trade Organisation. During the
bombing of Yugoslavia it announced that its new Ambassador in Beijing
would be Admiral Joseph Preuer, Naval commander in the Pacific from 1996
to March 1999. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade is now
widely believed to have been deliberate. Far from seeking to calm the
resulting tensions with China, Washington followed up the bombing with
the claim that China had stolen virtually all of the United States’ nuclear
weapons designs.
Following a sharp escalation of tensions with Taiwan, after the latter
took a step towards declaring independence by announcing that in future
relations with China would be conducted ‘state to state’,
the US increased its arms sales to Taiwan. This was followed in the second
week of August with the threat military intervention in the event of
a conflict between Taiwan and China delivered in the most direct possible
way. The Commander of one of the two American aircraft carrier battle
groups in the region, Rear Admiral Timothy Keating, said: ‘China
will know if they attempt any kind of operation, whether its Taiwan or
anything, that they are going to have the US navy to deal with.’
Shortly afterwards the agreement for joint US research with Japan to
develop a regional anti-missile defence shield was announced.
China’s response to these threats was typified by an article which
appeared on 19 August, in Global Times, a weekly magazine associated
with the official People’s Daily newspaper. The article was entitled ‘USA,
do not mix it’ said: ‘China’s neutron bombs are more
than enough to handle aircraft carriers.’
Beijing is vigorously pursuing cooperation with Russia to counter the
escalation of US military pressure in the region and to oppose the development
of anti-missile defence systems — whose significance, if they prove
technologically feasible, would be that they would allow the US to use
nuclear weapons against other states without the fear of retaliation — which
is why they have previously been outlawed as a colossal escalation of
the arms race.
US tactics elsewhere in the world are directly related to this rising
tension with China. As there is considerable reason to doubt the practical
ability of the US to carry out its military doctrine of being able to
fight two regional wars simultaneously, it needs to confront any potential
problems it will face elsewhere in order to free the maximum possible
resources for pressure upon China.
This was part of its objectives in bombing Yugoslavia — to dragoon
its allies into acceptance that the post-second world war political order
had to be dismantled to allow wars to be launched without the acquiescence
of Russia or China, and to demonstrate that no power on earth had the
capacity to prevent the US from doing this.
Although, as a result of the international opposition which the bombing
provoked, the US has not yet succeeded in disposing of Yugoslavia, and
will continue to use economic and military means to try to install a
pro-Nato government in Belgrade, the intervention in the Balkans was
explicitly conceived as opening the way for similar NATO operations in
eastern Europe and into the former USSR. This is for both economic purposes
of securing access to oil reserves in the former Soviet states, and in
order to put military pressure on Russia — warning against any
attempt to recreate the former USSR and against any moves towards an
alliance with China against the US.
This latter objective has not been achieved. On the contrary, because
the very existence of Russia is now threatened, the pressures for an
alliance with China as a counterweight to the US are enormous. For China,
this is decisive because Russia is its only possible source of advanced
weapons, and, at the same time, protects its northern flank against attack.
For the Russian military and working class, it makes sense in terms of
bolstering its own strategic position and because there is an obvious
complementary economic relationship in terms of the exchange of Russian
weapons and energy for Chinese consumer goods. An alliance with China
is backed by the left in Russia, the army, the military-industrial complex
and even some sectors of the oil and gas industry.
The second big obstacle to US planning for strategic confrontation with
China is the consequence for Asia. Here China has two big weapons of
which the South East Asian capitalist governments are all too aware.
First is the sheer economic weight of China in the region. Had China
devalued its currency at the time of the financial crash from summer
1997, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the economic
crisis in the region to have been turned around so rapidly. China paid
a very big price for that decision — in terms of increased competition
for the South East Asian economies which had carried out devaluations
of up to 50 per cent — which has slowed the Chinese economy, put
enormous competitive pressures on key sectors of its economy, resulted
in rapid deflation and pressure on living standards. It traded political
kudos with the US and Japan, by propping up the East Asian economy, for
downward pressure on its own economic growth. The rapid intensification
of US hostility since, has shown that price was not worth paying. Now
China has put the possibility of a devaluation of its currency on the
agenda. If it does so the economic shock waves will reverberate throughout
east Asia.
Second, China also has enormous potential political influence in the
region. In the event of a looming confrontation with the United States,
the Chinese leadership would have the option of promoting political instability
within East Asia by helping to rebuild Communist Parties and left wing
opposition in the region.
So, with the exception of Taiwan, the east Asian regimes have their
own agenda — which does not include a massive confrontation with
China because it would slow down their economies and simultaneously increase
the threat of Chinese backed revival of their domestic class struggles.
Third, there is clearly now a strategic debate taking place in India,
the second most populous country on earth. Although the BJP government
originally stated that its first nuclear test was directed first and
foremost against China, India responded to the bombing of Yugoslavia
by pointing out that countries now needed nuclear weapons to protect
themselves if the US could flout international law to launch wars with
impunity. Its project of acquiring nuclear weapons and a seat at the
UN Security Council was clearly undermined by the bombing of Yugoslavia.
During the Kashmir conflict earlier in the year between Pakistan and
India, China did not back Pakistan. Indeed, the US finally ordered Pakistan
to pull out its soldiers because it feared the consequences for its relations
with India of explicitly backing its traditional client state Pakistan
on that occasion.
These are the circumstances in which the Australian role in leadng the
UN intervention force in East Timor must be understood. Needless to say
it has nothing to do with humanitarianism — Australia recognised
the occupation of East Timor by the US-backed Suharto dictatorship in
Indonesia when it was directed against a leftist national liberation
movement. Today, with the Indonesian regime in deep crisis, the Australian
Prime Minister explicitly explained the new Australian role as acting
as Washington’s deputy: ‘It is already being called the Howard
doctrine and would mean a radical shift in Australia’s relations
with its Asian neighbours. John Howard, the Australian PM said, in an
interview this weekend that Australia should adopt a far more aggressive
approach to regional peacekeeping and act as America’s “deputy” global
policeman in Asia.’ (Independent on Sunday, 26 September 1999)
Howard, himself, put it like this: ‘We have been seen by counties,
not only in the region but around the world, as being able to do something
that probably no other country could do; because of the special characteristics
we have; because we occupy that special place — we are a European,
western civilisation, with strong links with North America, but here
we are in Asia.’ (quoted in International Herald Tribune, 27 September
1999). However, notwithstanding Howard’s racist rhetoric, with
a population of just 20 million, Australia can, in reality, be little
more than a useful staging post in the event of a serious clash between
China and the US.
In sum, an economically weakened US imperialism is seeking to utilise
its military pre-eminence to counteract its economic decline. It retains
its absolute dominance and no other imperialist power is remotely approaching
the position where it could challenge the US for world supremacy in the
way Washington displaced London between 1914 and 1945. Such a displacement
in the centre of capitalist world dominance would indeed require convulsions,
and blood-letting on at least the scale of that last period of change
in capitalist world leadership.
At present, the absolute size of its economy and its overwhelming military
preponderance, allow the US to continue to subordinate its imperialist
rivals. Only within this framework does their economic competition unfold.
Those on the left who hope for a social democratic European challenge
to the US will be cruelly disappointed. At the same time, its relative
economic decline requires the US to continually re-assert its strategic
leadership as the only force capable of defending the common interests
of the imperialist powers by the means of provoking military conflicts.
Within that framework, the chief strategic concern of the US is now the rise of China and the possibility of it defending itself through an alliance with Russia against the US. The US is actively attempting to forestall such an alliance by strengthening and expanding the NATO threat to Russia in Europe, war and direct colonisation of the Balkans, detaching parts of the Caucasus (particularly via its relay Turkey), extending the scope of its military alliances in Asia and launching a new spiral of the arms race as part of an overall course towards confrontation with China. This rising conflict, and Washington’s moves to clear the ground for it, are going to become the central axis of world politics.
The left wing of the international workers’ movement should prepare
accordingly by constructing a united front of every possible force to
oppose the next wave of US imperialist aggression.