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The US economic war on China

The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival.

China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown is the result of US measures that aim to slow China’s growth. Such US policies violate World Trade Organization rules and are a danger to global prosperity. They should be stopped.
The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival. The first and most obvious application of this playbook was the technology blockade that the US imposed on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was America’s declared enemy and US policy aimed to block Soviet access to advanced technologies.

At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. This may seem surprising, as Japan was and is a US ally. Yet Japan was becoming “too successful,” as Japanese firms outcompeted US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles.

The second application of the playbook is less obvious, and in fact, is generally overlooked even by knowledgeable observers. At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. This may seem surprising, as Japan was and is a US ally. Yet Japan was becoming “too successful,” as Japanese firms outcompeted US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles. Japan’s success was widely hailed in bestsellers such as Japan as Number One by my late, great colleague, Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, US politicians limited US markets to Japan’s exports (via so-called “voluntary” limits agreed with Japan) and pushed Japan to overvalue its currency. The Japanese Yen appreciated from around 240 Yen per dollar in 1985 to 128 Yen per dollar in 1988 and 94 Yen to the dollar in 1995, pricing Japanese goods out of the US market. Japan went into a slump as export growth collapsed. Between 1980 and 1985, Japan’s exports rose annually by 7.9 percent; between 1985 and 1990, export growth fell to 3.5 percent annually; and between 1990 and 1995, to 3.3 percent annually. As growth slowed markedly, many Japanese companies fell into financial distress, leading to a financial bust in the early 1990s.

In the mid-1990s, I asked one of Japan’s most powerful government officials why Japan didn’t devalue the currency to re-establish growth. His answer was that the US wouldn’t allow it.

Now the US is taking aim at China. Starting around 2015, US policymakers came to view China as a threat rather than a trade partner. This change of view was due to China’s economic success. China’s economic rise really began to alarm US strategists when China announced in 2015 a “Made in China 2025” policy to promote China’s advancement to the cutting edge of robotics, information technology, renewable energy, and other advanced technologies. Around the same time, China announced its Belt and Road Initiative to help build modern infrastructure throughout Asia, Africa and other regions, largely using Chinese finance, companies, and technologies.

After winning the 2016 election on an anti-China platform, Trump imposed unilateral tariffs on China that clearly violated WTO rules. To ensure that WTO would not rule against the US measures, the US disabled the WTO appellate court by blocking new appointments.

The US dusted off the old playbook to slow China’s surging growth. President Barrack Obama first proposed to create a new trading group with Asian countries that would exclude China, but presidential candidate Donald Trump went further, promising outright protectionism against China. After winning the 2016 election on an anti-China platform, Trump imposed unilateral tariffs on China that clearly violated WTO rules. To ensure that WTO would not rule against the US measures, the US disabled the WTO appellate court by blocking new appointments. The Trump Administration also blocked products from leading Chinese technology companies such as ZTE and Huawei and urged US allies to do the same.

When President Joe Biden came to office, many (including me) expected Biden to reverse or ease Trump’s anti-China policies. The opposite happened. Biden doubled down, not only maintaining Trump’s tariffs on China but also signing new executive orders to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies and US investments. American firms were advised informally to shift their supply chains from China to other countries, a process labelled “friend-shoring” as opposed to offshoring. In carrying out these measures, the US completely ignored WTO principles and procedures.

The US strongly denies that it is in an economic war with China, but as the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The US is using a familiar playbook, and the Washington politicians are invoking martial rhetoric, calling China an enemy that must be contained or defeated.

The results are seen in a reversal of China’s exports to the US. In the month that Trump came into office, January 2017, China accounted for 22 per cent of US merchandise imports. By the time Biden came into office in January 2021, China’s share of US imports had dropped to 19 per cent. As of June 2023, China’s share of US imports had plummeted to 13 per cent. Between June 2022 and June 2023, US imports from China fell by a whopping 29 per cent.

Of course, the dynamics of China’s economy are complex and hardly driven by China-US trade alone. Perhaps China’s exports to the US will partly rebound. Yet Biden seems unlikely to ease trade barriers with China in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Unlike Japan in the 1990s, which was dependent on the US for its security, and so followed US demands, China has more room for maneuver in the face of US protectionism. Most importantly, I believe, China can substantially increase its exports to the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, through policies such as expanding the Belt and Road Initiative. My assessment is that the US attempt to contain China is not only wrongheaded in principle but destined to fail in practice. China will find partners throughout the world economy to support a continued expansion of trade and technological advances.

Feature Image Credit: The limits of US-China Economic Rivalry www.setav.org

September 4, 2023
BRICS++: The West tries playing ‘catch-up’, but it’s too late

Until recently, the West has largely derided the BRICS project. But it finally is awaking to the fact that the BRICS initiative possesses the potential to turn both geo-politics, and the international monetary system, upside-down.

The seismic Geo-Political event of this era is the explosion of BRICS membership and of even bigger potential BRICS membership. This movement has crossed a key threshold. It has transited from ‘vanilla’ multipolarity to being an anti-colonial expression — a shift that should not be underestimated. It is an ethos drawing energy from deep layers of passionate feeling that was stifled in the immediate post-war years, but which is re-surfacing to invest the multi-polar framework with evident dynamism.

There are currently eight nations that have formally applied for membership and 17 others that have expressed interest in joining. If Saudi Arabia and Russia are both members, that is two of the three largest energy producers in the one camp.

If Russia, China, Brazil and India are all members, there will be four of the seven largest countries in the world measured by landmass — possessing 30% of the Earth’s dry surface and related natural resources — as BRICS members.

Almost 50% of the world’s wheat and rice production, as well as 15% of the world’s gold reserves, are in the BRICS.

Meanwhile, China, India, Brazil, and Russia are four of the nine highest-population countries on the planet with a combined population of 3.2 billion people or 40% of the Earth’s population.

“China, India, Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia have a combined GDP of $29 trillion or 28% of nominal global GDP. If one uses purchasing power parity to measure GDP, then the BRICS share is over 54%. Russia and China have two of the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world”.

“By every measure then — population, landmass, energy output, GDP, food output and nuclear weapons — BRICS is not just another multilateral debating society. They are a substantial and credible alternative to Western hegemony”, Jim Rickards asserts.

With a new trading currency framework likely to be fore-shadowed in August at the BRICS summit, the currency will descend upon a highly receptive audience. It will fall into an increasingly sophisticated network of capital and communications. This network will greatly enhance its chances of success.

The key mistake is the failure to distinguish between the respective roles of a payment (trading) currency and a reserve currency. Payment currencies are used in trade for goods and services. Nations can trade in whatever payment currency they want; it doesn’t have to be dollars. However, in so doing – in a large way – the demand for the dollar incrementally is drained away. Ultimately this loss of foreign demand for dollars circumscribes the ability of the US to go on spending well above its income.

What has defined a reserve currency has been a large, well-developed sovereign bond market. No country in the world comes close to the US Treasury bond market in terms of breadth and convertibility.

And Western finance personnel, therefore, snort in derision at the prospects of the US dollar ever losing its hegemony. But they forget perhaps that there was no US bond market until WW1 when Woodrow Wilson authorized Liberty Bonds to help finance the war. There were bond rallies and Liberty Bond parades in every major city. It became a patriotic duty to buy Liberty Bonds. The effort worked, and it birthed the US bond market.

In short, the way to create an instant reserve currency is to create an instant bond market using your own citizens as willing buyers. As Jim Rickards earlier noted, were the BRICS to ‘use a patriotic model’ (by drawing on today’s anti-colonial spirit sweeping the BRICS countries) it would be possible to create international reserve assets denominated in the BRICS+ (trading) currency.

Also, the recent Bank for International Settlements (BIS)-led experiments in real-time and digital Central Bank foreign exchange transactions promises to transform such a project – and to lessen substantially the need for a large reserve-asset reservoir.

Until recently, the West has largely derided the BRICS project. But it finally is awaking to the fact that the BRICS initiative possesses the potential to turn both geo-politics and the international monetary system, upside-down.

This month, the Chair of the Eurasia Group, Cliff Kupchan, wrote in Foreign Policy that “6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics”

“Middle powers today have more agency than at any time since World War II. These are countries with significant leverage in geopolitics. Much more interesting [however] are the six leading middle powers of the global south: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. These swing states of the global south are not fully aligned with either superpower and are therefore free to create new power dynamics. These six also serve as a good barometer for broader geopolitical trends”.

“… the question remains whether the BRICS states are going to become a more formal institution under China’s direction … that prospect is a clear challenge to the West…But the threat is unlikely to materialize. These countries may have tacked away from the United States — but that’s different from joining a Chinese-directed, Russian-assisted body actively opposing the United States. As of now, BRICS has not shown the ability to develop and implement a common agenda, so there is very little institutional strength for China to co-opt”

The blinkers are on. The Western Establishment just doesn’t ‘get it’. Kupchan’s article’s conclusion: “the US has been playing catch-up – and not doing very well at even that”. It needs a well-crafted strategy toward each of the key Swing States (to halt their ‘tacking away’ from the US, towards the Russia-China axis), he warns. Arm-twisting, threats and coercion, presumably, as usual.

‘Catching-up’? The horse already has bolted. The stable is empty.

Feature Image: Indian Express

This article was published earlier in Al Mayadeen English.

July 21, 2023
An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

Former President Trump sidelined NATO to such an extent that European members were disillusioned with American leadership and NATO was in a state of fragmentation. With Biden’s presidency unleashing its Ukraine strategy and war against Russia, NATO has solidified with blind subservience to American leadership. Building on imagined threats from Russia and China, the US is now seeking to make a NATO alliance format for security across Asia as well. On the eve of the 33rd summit at Vilnius on 11-12 July 2023, Türkiye dropped its objections for Sweden to become the 33rd member of NATO, abandoning its 150-year tradition of proud neutrality and peace in favour of war-mongering. With an eye on Asia, the summit invited four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – as observers at the summit. The summit statement is, as expected, replete with anti-Russian rhetoric but more importantly extensive in its focus on the ‘China threat’ thus paving the way for NATO’s role in Asia. Jeffrey Sachs, in a speech in Australia in early July (reproduced below), has warned forcefully about the peril that NATO poses to global peace and security. – TPF Editorial Team

“My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable. I’m not sure who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president.”, says Jeffrey Sachs in a speech at a Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) seminar, Melbourne, Australia. “U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine.”

“the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.”

Jeffrey Sachs
Speech to Shape (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth)
July 5, 2023

Good afternoon to everybody. I want to thank you for inviting me and to thank SHAPE for its leadership. I just had the privilege to listen to Alison Broinowski and Chung-in Moon. We have been treated to brilliant and insightful statements. I absolutely agree with all that has been said. The world has gone mad but especially the Anglo-Saxon world, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether there is any sense in our little English-speaking corner of the world. I’m of course speaking of the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British Imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable now compared even to 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read anymore. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100 per cent repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.

it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

And they are cheer-led by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States for U.S. hegemony and for war. Whatever the U.S. says, Britain will say it ten times more enthusiastically. The U.K. leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It is the great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.

Now, how Australia and New Zealand fall for this idiocy is really a deep question for me and for you. People should know better. But I’m afraid that it is the Five Eyes and the security establishment that told the politicians, to the extent that the politicians are involved in this, ‘well this is how we have to do it’. This is our Security State and I don’t think our politicians necessarily have much role in this. By the way, the public has no role in U.S. foreign policy at all. We have no debate, no discussion, no deliberation, no debates over voting the hundred, now $113 billion, but in fact much more money spent on the Ukraine War.

So far there’s not been an hour of organised debate even in the Congress on this, much less in the public, but my guess is that your security establishment is really the driver of this in Australia, and they explain to the Prime Minister and others: ‘you know this is the utmost National Security, and this is what America has told us. Let us, your security apparatus, explain what we’re seeing. Of course, you cannot divulge this to the broader public, but this is, at the essence, a struggle for survival in the world’.

Everything I see myself, and I’m now 43 years in this activity as an economic advisor all over the world, suggests that this message is nonsense. One thing that would be interesting for people to look at, in order to understand these developments, is a very telling article by a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Ambassador Robert Blackwell and Ashley Tellis, written for the Council on Foreign Relations in March 2015. I want to read a couple excerpts from it because it laid out the plan of what’s happening right now pretty directly. This is how things work in the U.S., in which future plans are laid out to the establishment in such reports.

“Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally. Preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

– Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a March 2015 article for Council on Foreign Relations.

We’re basically told in 2015 what’s going to happen in US-China relations. The deterioration of relations was planned — it’s not ad hoc. So, here’s what Blackwell and Tellis wrote in 2015. First, “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally.” And then they argue that “preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

So, what’s the U.S. goal? The goal is very straightforward, it is the primacy of the United States globally. Blackwell and Tellis lay out the game plan for China. They tell us what to do.

Here’s the list, though I’m only excerpting: “Creating new preferential trading arrangements among U.S. friends and allies to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China.” This is the game that Obama already started with TPP, though he couldn’t get it through domestic political opposition. Second, “create, in partnership with U.S. allies, a technology control regime vis-à-vis Beijing,” to block China’s strategic capabilities. Third, build up “power-political capacities of U.S. friends and allies on China’s periphery,” and “improving the capability of U.S. military forces to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition.”

This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history.

What I find especially remarkable about this list is that it was made in 2015. It’s the step-by-step plan of action actually being carried out. This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history. In 1997 in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out with precision the intended timeline for NATO enlargement and specifically the intention to include Ukraine in that NATO enlargement. Of course, that NATO enlargement plan has led us directly to the Ukraine War, which is indeed a proxy Russia-US war over NATO enlargement.

Now the friends and geniuses that brought you the Ukraine War are on their way to bringing you a new war in your neighbourhood. As Professor Moon noted, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is starting to open its offices in East Asia, which is not exactly the North Atlantic.

So, this is where we are. It’s not absolutely simple to see through for one main reason, at least in the U.S. I’m not sure what it’s like in Australia but I expect that it’s pretty much the same as in the U.S., where we have no honesty or public deliberation about any of this. The policies are owned entirely by the security establishment, the military-industrial complex, the network of “think tanks” which are in fact non-think tanks in Washington, with almost all funded by the military-industrial complex.

The military-industrial complex and its corporate lobby have taken over the East Coast universities where I teach. I taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, and now I teach at Columbia University. The influence of the intelligence agencies on the campuses is unprecedented, in my experience. All of this has happened without much public notice, almost a silent coup. There is no debate, no public politics, no honesty, no documents revealed. Everything is secret, confidential and a bit mysterious. Since I happen to be an economist who engages with the heads of state and ministers around the world, I hear a lot of things and see a lot of things that help me to pierce through the official “narratives” and pervasive lies.

You will not find any of this in our public discourse. And just a word, if I may, about the Ukraine War. The war was completely predictable, and resulted from a U.S. plan for hegemony based on NATO enlargement that dates back to the early 1990’s. The U.S. strategy was to bring Ukraine into the U.S. military orbit. Brzezinski, again in 1997 in his book The Global Chess Board, laid out the strategy. Russia without Ukraine is nothing, he argued. Ukraine, he wrote, is the geographical pivot for Eurasia. Interestingly, Brzezinski warned American policymakers to ensure that they don’t push Russia and China into an alliance. In fact, that would be so antithetical to U.S. interests that Brzezinski clearly believed that it would never happen. But it has, because U.S. foreign policy is incompetent as well as profoundly dangerous and misconceived.

During 1990-91, I happen to have been an advisor to Gorbachev, and during 1991-94, to Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, spanning the late days of perestroika and the early days of Russian and Ukrainian independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I watched very closely what was happening. I saw that the United States was absolutely uninterested in any way in helping Russia to stabilise.

The idea of the U.S. security establishment from the early 1990s was U.S.-led unipolarity or U.S. hegemony. In the early 1990s, the U.S. rejected measures to help stabilise the Soviet economy and then the Russian economy, while it also began planning NATO enlargement, in direct contradiction to what the U.S. and Germany had promised Gorbachev and Yeltsin. So, the issue of NATO enlargement, including to Ukraine, is part of a U.S. game plan that started in the early 1990s, and eventually led to the Ukraine war.

By the way, the U.S. was deeply involved in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014. Yes, this was a coup, and to an important extent, a regime change operation of the United States. I happen to have seen a part of it, and I know that U.S. money poured into supporting the Maidan. Such U.S. meddling was disgusting and destabilising, and all part of the game plan to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.

When one looks at the map it’s indeed Brzezinski’s 1997 idea: surround Russia in the Black Sea region. Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia would all be members of NATO. That would be the end of Russian power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. So it went for these “security” geniuses.

Putin put forward diplomatic responses that were repeatedly rejected by the U.S. and its NATO allies, including the Minsk II Agreement endorsed by the U.N Security Council, but then ignored by Ukraine.

On December 17, 2021, Putin put on the table a perfectly reasonable document as the basis for negotiation, A Draft U.S.-Russia Security Agreement. At the core was Russia’s call for an end to NATO expansion. Tragically, the U.S. blew it off. I called the White House at the end of December 2021, spoke with one of our top security officials, and pleaded, “Negotiate. Stop the NATO enlargement. You have a chance to avoid war.” Of course, to no avail. The United States’ formal response to Putin was that NATO enlargement was non-negotiable with Russia, a matter in which Russia has absolutely no say.

This is a mind-boggling way to pursue foreign affairs because it is a direct road to war. I hope everybody understands this war in Ukraine was close to ending as early as March 2022 with a negotiated agreement just one month after Russia invaded on February 24th. The negotiated agreement was stopped by the U.S. because it was based on Ukraine’s neutrality. The U.S. told Ukraine to fight on, end negotiations, and reject neutrality.

And so we are in a war that continues to escalate towards possible nuclear war, which is what would happen if Russia were to suffer deep defeats on the battlefield. Russia is not losing on the battlefield just now, but if it did, it would likely escalate to nuclear war. Russia is not going to be pushed out of the Donbas and Crimea and meekly go home with apologies. Russia is going to escalate if it needs to escalate. So, we are right now in a spiral that is extremely dangerous.

Japan plays utterly into this spiral. And Australia does as well. It’s so sad to watch Australia accepting to be used in this reckless way. To pay a fortune for new military bases in a reckless, provocative, and costly way, that will feed the U.S. military-industrial complex while weighing heavily on Australia.

Such U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine. Only an Asia-Pacific war would be even more disastrous. The whole idea of the U.S. and its allies fighting China is mind-boggling in its implications, its stupidity and its recklessness. All of this is utterly divorced from Australia’s real security interests. China is not a threat to Australia. It is not a threat to the world.

I don’t know of a single Chinese overseas invasion in its history, by the way, except when the Mongols briefly ruled China and tried to invade Japan. Other than the Mongol invasion, defeated by a typhoon, China has not launched overseas wars. It’s just not part of China’s statecraft, nor would such wars be in China’s national interest.

What worries me about the world is a deeply neurotic United States (in)security leadership that aims to be number one, but that can’t be number one in the way that it believes. This is pathetic, yet is applauded each day in London, a place that still dreams of the glory of global empire from a long bygone era.

RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

Permit me, in conclusion, to take one minute to say what should be done.

First, the war in Ukraine could end the day Biden steps up and says NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. The basis for a negotiated security arrangement has been there for 30 years, but has been rejected so far by the U.S.

Second, the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.

Third, the U.S. approach to arming Taiwan is profoundly dangerous, provocative and deliberately so.

Fourth, what is needed most in the Asia-Pacific is regional dialogue amongst Asia-Pacific nations.

Fifth, the Asia-Pacific should build on RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement]. RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

Sorry to have run on so long but it’s so important what SHAPE is doing. You’re completely on the right track and all best wishes to your efforts.

This transcript of Jeffrey Sach’s speech was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

Feature Image Credit: bnn.network

Cartoon Credit: Global Times

July 16, 2023
The Asymmetric Indo-US Technology Agreement Points to India’s Weak R&D Culture

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the USA resulted in four significant agreements and the visit is hailed as one of very important gains for India and Indo-US strategic partnership. The focus has been on defence industrial and technology partnership. Media and many strategic experts are seeing the agreements as major breakthroughs for technology transfers to India, reflecting a very superficial analysis and a lack of understanding of what really entails technology transfer. Professor Arun Kumar sees these agreements as a sign of India’s technological weakness and USA’s smart manoeuvring to leverage India for long-term defence and technology client. The visit has yielded major business gains for USA’s military industrial complex and the silicon valley. Post the euphoria of the visit, Arun Kumar says its time for India to carefully evaluate the relevant technology and strategic policy angles.

The Indo-US joint statement issued a few days back says that the two governments will “facilitate greater technology sharing, co-development and co-production opportunities between the US and the Indian industry, government and academic institutions.” This has been hailed as the creation of a new technology bridge that will reshape relations between the two countries

General Electric (GE) is offering to give 80% of the technology required for the F414 jet engine, which will be co-produced with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). In 2012, when the negotiations had started, GE had offered India 58%. India needs this engine for the Light Combat Aircraft Mark 2 (LCA Mk2) jets.

The Indian Air Force has been using LCA Mk1A but is not particularly happy with it. It asked for improvements in it. Kaveri, the indigenous engine for the LCA under development since 1986, has not been successful. The engine development has failed to reach the first flight.

So, India has been using the F404 engine in the LCA Mk1, which is 40 years old. The F414 is also a 30-year-old vintage engine. GE is said to be offering 12 key technologies required in modern jet engine manufacturing which India has not been able to master over the last 40 years. The US has moved on to more powerful fighter jet engines with newer technologies, like the Pratt & Whitney F135 and GE XA100.

India is being allowed into the US-led critical mineral club. It will acquire the highly rated MQ-9B high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles. Micron Technologies will set up a semiconductor assembly and test facility in Gujarat by 2024, where it is hoped that the chips will eventually be manufactured. The investment deal of $2.75 billion is sweetened with the Union government giving 50% and Gujarat contributing 20%. India is also being allowed into the US-led critical mineral club.

There will be cooperation in space exploration and India will join the US-led Artemis Accords. ISRO and NASA will collaborate and an Indian astronaut will be sent to the International Space Station. INDUS-X will be launched for joint innovation in defence technologies. Global universities will be enabled to set up campuses in each other’s countries, whatever it may imply for atmanirbharta.

What does it amount to?

The list is impressive. But, is it not one-sided, with India getting technologies it has not been able to develop by itself.

Though the latest technology is not being given by the US, what is offered is superior to what India currently has. So, it is not just optics. But the real test will be how much India’s technological capability will get upgraded.

Discussing the New Economic Policies launched in 1991, the diplomat got riled at my complaining that the US was offering us potato chips and fizz drinks but not high technology, and shouted, “Technology is a house we have built and we will never let you enter it.”

What is being offered is a far cry from what one senior US diplomat had told me at a dinner in 1992. Discussing the New Economic Policies launched in 1991, the diplomat got riled at my complaining that the US was offering us potato chips and fizz drinks but not high technology, and shouted, “Technology is a house we have built and we will never let you enter it.”

Everyone present there was stunned, but that was the reality.

The issue is, does making a product in India mean a transfer of technology to Indians? Will it enable India to develop the next level of technology?

India has assembled and produced MiG-21 jets since the 1960s and Su-30MKI jets since the 1990s. But most critical parts of the Su-30 come from Russia. India set up the Mishra Dhatu Nigam in 1973 to produce the critical alloys needed and production started in 1982, but self-sufficiency in critical alloys has not been achieved.

So, production using borrowed technology does not mean absorption and development of the technology. Technology development requires ‘know-how’ and ‘know-why’.

When an item is produced, we can see how it is produced and then copy that. But we also need to know how it is being done and importantly, why something is being done in a certain way. Advanced technology owners don’t share this knowledge with others.

Technology is a moving frontier

There are three levels of technology at any given point in time – high, intermediate, and low.

The high technology of yesterday becomes the intermediate technology of today and the low technology of tomorrow. So, if India now produces what the advanced countries produced in the 1950s, it produces the low-technology products of today (say, coal and bicycles).

If India produces what was produced in the advanced countries in the 1980s (say, cars and colour TV), it produces the intermediate technology products of today. It is not to say that some high technology is not used in low and intermediate-technology production.

The high technologies of today are aerospace, nanotechnology, AI, microchips and so on. India is lagging behind in these technologies, like in producing passenger aircraft, sending people into space, making microchips, quantum computing, and so on.

The advanced countries do not part with these technologies. The World Trade Organisation, with its provisions for TRIPS and TRIMS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Trade-Related Investment Measures), consolidated the hold of advanced countries on intermediate and low technologies that can be acquired by paying royalties. But high technology is closely held and not shared.

Advancements in technology

So, how can nations that lag behind in technology catch up with advanced nations? The Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow pointed to ‘learning by doing’ – the idea that in the process of production, one learns.

So, the use of a product does not automatically lead to the capacity to produce it, unless the technology is absorbed and developed. That requires R&D.

Schumpeter suggested that technology moves through stages of invention, innovation and adaptation. So, the use of a product does not automatically lead to the capacity to produce it, unless the technology is absorbed and developed. That requires R&D.

Flying the latest Airbus A321neo does not mean we can produce it. Hundreds of MiG-21 and Su-30 have been produced in India. But we have not been able to produce fighter jet engines, and India’s Kaveri engine is not yet successful. We routinely use laptops and mobile phones, and they are also assembled in India, but it does not mean that we can produce microchips or hard disks.

Enormous resources are required to do R&D for advanced technologies and to produce them at an industrial scale. It requires a whole environment which is often missing in developing countries and certainly in India.

Enormous resources are required to do R&D for advanced technologies and to produce them at an industrial scale. It requires a whole environment which is often missing in developing countries and certainly in India.

Production at an experimental level can take place. In 1973, I produced epitaxial thin films for my graduate work. But producing them at an industrial scale is a different ballgame. Experts have been brought from the US, but that has not helped since high technology is now largely a collective endeavour.

For more complex technologies, say, aerospace or complex software, there is ‘learning by using’. When an aircraft crashes or malware infects software, it is the producer who learns from the failure, not the user. Again, the R&D environment is important.

In brief, using a product does not mean we can produce it. Further, producing some items does not mean that we can develop them further. Both require R&D capabilities, which thrive in a culture of research. That is why developing countries suffer from the ‘disadvantage of a late start’.

A need for a focus on research and development

R&D culture thrives when innovation is encouraged. Government policies are crucial since they determine whether the free flow of ideas is enabled or not. Also of crucial importance is whether thought leaders or sycophants are appointed to lead institutions, whether criticism is welcomed or suppressed, and whether the government changes its policies often under pressure from vested interests.

Unstable policies increase the risk of doing research, thereby undermining it and dissuading the industry. The result is the repeated import of technology.

The software policy of 1987, by opening the sector up to international firms, undermined whatever little research was being carried out then and turned most companies in the field into importers of foreign products, and later into manpower suppliers. Some of these companies became highly profitable, but have they produced any world-class software that is used in daily life?

Expenditure on R&D is an indication of the priority accorded to it. India spends a lowly 0.75% of its GDP on R&D. Neither the government nor the private sector prioritises it. Businesses find it easier to manipulate policies using cronyism. Those who are close to the rulers do not need to innovate, while others know that they will lose out. So, neither focus on R&D.

Innovation also depends on the availability of associated technologies – it creates an environment. An example is Silicon Valley, which has been at the forefront of innovation. It has also happened around universities where a lot of research capabilities have developed and synergy between business and academia becomes possible.

This requires both parties to be attuned to research. In India, around some of the best-known universities like Delhi University, Allahabad University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, coaching institutions have mushroomed and not innovative businesses. None of these institutions are producing any great research, nor do businesses require research if they can import technology.

A feudal setup

Technology is an idea. In India, most authority figures don’t like being questioned. For instance, bright students asking questions are seen as troublemakers in most schools. The emphasis is largely on completing coursework for examinations. Learning is by rote, with most students unable to absorb the material taught.

So, most examinations have standard questions requiring reproduction of what is taught in the class, rather than application of what is learned. My students at JNU pleaded against open-book exams. Our class of physics in 1967 had toppers from various higher secondary boards. We chose physics over IIT. We rebelled against such teaching and initiated reform, but ultimately most of us left physics – a huge loss to the subject.

Advances in knowledge require critiquing its existing state – that is, by challenging the orthodoxy and status quo. So, the creative independent thinkers who generate socially relevant knowledge also challenge the authorities at their institutions and get characterised as troublemakers. The authorities largely curb autonomy within the institution and that curtails innovativeness.

In brief, dissent – which is the essence of knowledge generation – is treated as a malaise to be eliminated. These are the manifestations of a feudal and hierarchical society which limits the advancement of ideas. Another crucial aspect of generating ideas is learning to accept failure. The Michelson–Morley experiment was successful in proving that there is no aether only after hundreds of failed experiments.

Conclusion

The willingness of the US to provide India with some technology without expecting reciprocity is gratifying. Such magnanimity has not been shown earlier and it is obviously for political (strategic) reasons. The asymmetry underlines our inability to develop technology on our own. The US is not giving India cutting-edge technologies that could make us a Vishwaguru.

India needs to address its weakness in R&D. As in the past, co-producing a jet engine, flying drones or packaging and testing chips will not get us to the next level of technology, and we will remain dependent on imports later on.

This can be corrected only through a fundamental change in our R&D culture that would enable technology absorption and development. That would require granting autonomy to academia and getting out of the feudal mindset that presently undermines scientific temper and hobbles our system of education.

This article was published earlier in thewire.in

Feature Image Credit: thestatesman.com

July 6, 2023
The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. TheNew York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a c able to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

This article was published earlier in commondreams.org and is republished under Creative Commons(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Feature Image Credit: columbian.com

May 24, 2023
Towards a Conversation Across Civilisations

Alongside the BRICS, the construction of regional trade and development projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are not controlled by the Western states or Western-dominated institutions – including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001) the Belt and Road Initiative (2013), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (2011), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (2022) – heralds the emergence of a new international economic order.

It has become increasingly difficult to engage in reasonable discussions about the state of the world amid rising international tensions. The present environment of global instability and conflict has emerged over the course of the past fifteen years driven by, on the one hand, the growing weakness of the principal North Atlantic states, led by the United States – which we call the West – and, on the other, the increasing assertion of large developing countries, exemplified by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). This group of states, along with several others, have built the material conditions for their own development agendas, including for the next generation of technology, a sector that had previously been the monopoly of Western states and firms through the World Trade Organisation’s intellectual property rights regime. Alongside the BRICS, the construction of regional trade and development projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are not controlled by the Western states or Western-dominated institutions – including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001) the Belt and Road Initiative (2013), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (2011), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (2022) – heralds the emergence of a new international economic order.

Since the world financial crisis of 2007–08, the United States and its North Atlantic allies have become acutely aware that their hegemonic status in the world has deteriorated. This decline is the consequence of three key forms of overreach: first, military overreach through both enormous military expenditure and warfare; second, financial overreach caused by the rampant waste of social wealth into the unproductive financial sector along with the widespread imposition of sanctions, dollar hegemony, and control of international financial mechanisms (such as SWIFT); and, third, economic overreach, due to the investment and tax strike of a minuscule section of the world’s population, who are solely fixated on filling their already immense private coffers. This overreach has led to the fragility of the Western states, which are less able to exercise their authority around the world. In reaction to their own weakness and the new developments in the Global South, the United States has led its allies in launching a comprehensive pressure campaign against what it considers to be its ‘near peer rivals’, namely China and Russia. This hostile foreign policy, which includes a trade war, unilateral sanctions, aggressive diplomacy, and military operations, is now commonly known as the New Cold War.

In Western societies today, any effort to promote a balanced and reasonable conversation about China and Russia, or indeed about the leading states in the developing world, is relentlessly attacked by state, corporate, and media institutions as disinformation, propaganda, and foreign interference.

In addition to these tangible measures, information warfare is a key element of the New Cold War. In Western societies today, any effort to promote a balanced and reasonable conversation about China and Russia, or indeed about the leading states in the developing world, is relentlessly attacked by state, corporate, and media institutions as disinformation, propaganda, and foreign interference. Even established facts, let alone alternative perspectives, are treated as matters of dispute. Consequently, it has become virtually impossible to engage in constructive discussions about the changing world order, the new trade and development regimes, or the urgent matters which require global cooperation such as climate change, poverty, and inequality, without being dismissed. In this context, dialogue between intellectuals in countries such as China with their counterparts in the West has broken down. Similarly, dialogue between intellectuals in countries of the Global South and China has also been hampered by the New Cold War, which has strained the already weak communication channels within the developing world. As a result, the conceptual landscape, terms of reference, and key debates that are taking place within China are almost entirely unknown outside of the country, which makes the holding of rational cross-country discussions very difficult.

The New Cold War has led to an enormous spike in Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism in the Western states, frequently egged on by political leaders. The rise in Sinophobia has deepened the lack of genuine engagement by Western intellectuals with contemporary Chinese perspectives, discussions, and debates; and due to the immense power of Western information flows around the world, these dismissive attitudes have also grown in many developing countries. Although there are increasing numbers of international students in China, these students tend to study technical subjects and generally do not focus on or participate in the broader political discussions within and about China.

This diversity of thought is not reflected in external understandings or representations of China – even in the scholarly literature – which instead largely reproduces the postures of the New Cold War.

In the current global climate of conflict and division, it is essential to develop lines of communication and encourage exchange between China, the West, and the developing world. The range of political thinking and discourse within China is immense, stretching from a variety of Marxist approaches to the ardent advocacy of neoliberalism, from deep historical examinations of Chinese civilisation to the deep wells of patriotic thought that have grown in the recent period. Far from static, these intellectual trends have evolved over time and interact with each other. A rich variety of Marxist thinking, from Maoism to creative Marxism, has emerged in China; although these trends all focus on socialist theories, history, and experiments, each trend has developed a distinct school of thought with its own internal discourse as well as debates with other traditions. Meanwhile, the landscape of patriotic thinking is far more eclectic, with some tendencies overlapping with Marxist trends, which is understandable given the connections between Marxism and national liberation; whereas others are closer to offering culturalist explanations for China’s developmental advances. This diversity of thought is not reflected in external understandings or representations of China – even in the scholarly literature – which instead largely reproduces the postures of the New Cold War.

This article was published earlier in thetricontinental.org

May 21, 2023
U.S. Hegemony and its Perils

This analytical report on the perils of US hegemony was released by China on the 20th of February 2023. It is evident that much of the world is now alienated by the USA and the West. This is particularly so after the Ukraine-Russia conflict that erupted a year ago. The majority of the world remains non-commital but certainly does not support the US or Ukraine in this conflict nor do they condemn Russia. In effect, the non-western world has openly indicated that this unnecessary war is caused by the aggressive actions of NATO and the US to provoke Russia. The constant interventions and wars waged by the US and NATO in the name of democracy and disregarding the UN are now being questioned. China has cleverly utilised this sentiment to time its publication. The paper is very well analysed, crisply argued, and has flagged real questions to the world community. In short, the paper implies that the US and its allies pose the gravest threat to global stability and peace, and more so to the sovereignty of all countries.

This paper was published earlier in fmprc.gov.cn

Introduction

Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.

The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage “colour revolutions,” instigate regional disputes and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order.”

This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples.

I. Political Hegemony – Throwing Its Weight Around

The United States has long been attempting to mould other countries and the world order with its own values and political system in the name of promoting democracy and human rights.

◆ Instances of U.S. interference in other countries’ internal affairs abound. In the name of “promoting democracy,” the United States practised a “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America, instigated “colour revolutions” in Eurasia, and orchestrated the “Arab Spring” in West Asia and North Africa, bringing chaos and disaster to many countries.

In 1823, the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine. While touting an “America for the Americans,” what it truly wanted was an “America for the United States.”

Since then, the policies of successive U.S. governments toward Latin America and the Caribbean Region have been riddled with political interference, military intervention and regime subversion. From its 61-year hostility toward and blockade of Cuba to its overthrow of the Allende government of Chile, U.S. policy on this region has been built on one maxim-those who submit will prosper; those who resist shall perish.

The year 2003 marked the beginning of a succession of “colour revolutions” – the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. Department of State openly admitted playing a “central role” in these “regime changes.” The United States also interfered in the internal affairs of the Philippines, ousting President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 and President Joseph Estrada in 2001 through the so-called “People Power Revolutions.”

In January 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released his new book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love. He revealed in it that the United States had plotted to intervene in Venezuela. The plan was to force the Maduro government to reach an agreement with the opposition, deprive Venezuela of its ability to sell oil and gold for foreign exchange, exert high pressure on its economy, and influence the 2018 presidential election.

◆ The U.S. exercises double standards on international rules. Placing its self-interest first, the United States has walked away from international treaties and organizations and put its domestic law above international law. In April 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would cut off all U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with the excuse that the organization “supports, or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” The United States quit UNESCO twice in 1984 and 2017. In 2017, it announced leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2018, it announced its exit from the UN Human Rights Council, citing the organization’s “bias” against Israel and failure to protect human rights effectively. In 2019, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to seek the unfettered development of advanced weapons. In 2020, it announced pulling out of the Treaty on Open Skies.

The United States has also been a stumbling block to biological arms control by opposing negotiations on a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and impeding international verification of countries’ activities relating to biological weapons. As the only country in possession of a chemical weapons stockpile, the United States has repeatedly delayed the destruction of chemical weapons and remained reluctant in fulfilling its obligations. It has become the biggest obstacle to realizing “a world free of chemical weapons.”

◆ The United States is piecing together small blocs through its alliance system. It has been forcing an “Indo-Pacific Strategy” onto the Asia-Pacific region, assembling exclusive clubs like the Five Eyes, the Quad and AUKUS, and forcing regional countries to take sides. Such practices are essentially meant to create division in the region, stoke confrontation and undermine peace.

◆ The U.S. arbitrarily passes judgment on democracy in other countries and fabricates a false narrative of “democracy versus authoritarianism” to incite estrangement, division, rivalry and confrontation. In December 2021, the United States hosted the first “Summit for Democracy,” which drew criticism and opposition from many countries for making a mockery of the spirit of democracy and dividing the world. In March 2023, the United States will host another “Summit for Democracy,” which remains unwelcome and will again find no support.

II. Military Hegemony – Wanton Use of Force

The history of the United States is characterized by violence and expansion. Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii. After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives. In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded $700 billion, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined. The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.

According to the book America Invades: How We’ve Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth, the United States has fought or been militarily involved with almost all the 190-odd countries recognized by the United Nations with only three exceptions. The three countries were “spared” because the United States did not find them on the map.

◆ As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world. According to a Tufts University report, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A new Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776-2019,” the United States undertook nearly 400 military interventions globally between those years, 34 percent of which were in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific, 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13 percent in Europe. Currently, its military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise.

Alex Lo, a South China Morning Post columnist, pointed out that the United States has rarely distinguished between diplomacy and war since its founding. It overthrew democratically elected governments in many developing countries in the 20th century and immediately replaced them with pro-American puppet regimes. Today, in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, the United States is repeating its old tactics of waging proxy, low-intensity, and drone wars.

◆ U.S. military hegemony has caused humanitarian tragedies. Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives, with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions. The 2003 Iraq War resulted in some 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, including over 16,000 directly killed by the U.S. military, and left more than a million homeless.

The United States has created 37 million refugees around the world. Since 2012, the number of Syrian refugees alone has increased tenfold. Between 2016 and 2019, 33,584 civilian deaths were documented in the Syrian fighting, including 3,833 killed by U.S.-led coalition bombings, half of them women and children. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reported on November 9, 2018, that the air strikes launched by U.S. forces on Raqqa alone killed 1,600 Syrian civilians.

The two-decade-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country. A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to the September 11 attacks were killed in U.S. military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced. The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution. After the “Kabul debacle” in 2021, the United States announced that it would freeze some 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank, a move considered “pure looting.”

In September 2022, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu commented at a rally that the United States has waged a proxy war in Syria, turned Afghanistan into an opium field and heroin factory, thrown Pakistan into turmoil, and left Libya in incessant civil unrest. The United States does whatever it takes to rob and enslave the people of any country with underground resources.

The United States has also adopted appalling methods in war. During the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, the United States used massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons as well as cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium bombs, causing enormous damage on civilian facilities, countless civilian casualties and lasting environmental pollution.

III. Economic Hegemony – Looting and Exploitation

After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centred around the U.S. dollar. In addition, the United States has established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules and arrangements of international organizations, including “approval by 85 percent majority” and its domestic trade laws and regulations. By taking advantage of the dollar’s status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting “seigniorage” from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America’s political and economic strategy.

◆ The United States exploits the world’s wealth with the help of “seigniorage.” It costs only about 17 cents to produce a $100 bill, but other countries had to pony up $100 worth of actual goods in order to obtain one. It was pointed out more than half a century ago that the United States enjoyed exorbitant privilege and deficit without tears created by its dollar and used the worthless paper note to plunder the resources and factories of other nations.

◆ The hegemony of the U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hikes, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies, such as the euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, John Connally, once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, “The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem.”

◆ With its control over international economic and financial organizations, the United States imposes additional conditions for assisting other countries. In order to reduce obstacles to U.S. capital inflow and speculation, the recipient countries are required to advance financial liberalization and open up financial markets so that their economic policies would fall in line with America’s strategy. According to the Review of International Political Economy, along with the 1,550 debt relief programs extended by the IMF to its 131 member countries from 1985 to 2014, as many as 55,465 additional political conditions had been attached.

◆ The United States willfully suppresses its opponents with economic coercion. In the 1980s, to eliminate the economic threat posed by Japan and control and use the latter in service of America’s strategic goal of confronting the Soviet Union and dominating the world, the United States leveraged its hegemonic financial power against Japan and concluded the Plaza Accord. As a result, the yen was pushed up, and Japan was pressed to open up its financial market and reform its financial system. The Plaza Accord dealt a heavy blow to the growth momentum of the Japanese economy, leaving Japan to what was later called “three lost decades.”

◆ America’s economic and financial hegemony has become a geopolitical weapon. Doubling down on unilateral sanctions and “long-arm jurisdiction,” the United States has enacted such domestic laws as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and introduced a series of executive orders to sanction specific countries, organizations or individuals. Statistics show that U.S. sanctions against foreign entities increased by 933 percent from 2000 to 2021. The Trump administration alone has imposed more than 3,900 sanctions, which means three sanctions per day. So far, the United States had or has imposed economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries across the world, including Cuba, China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela, affecting nearly half of the world’s population. “The United States of America” has turned itself into “the United States of Sanctions.” And “long-arm jurisdiction” has been reduced to nothing but a tool for the United States to use its means of state power to suppress economic competitors and interfere in normal international business. This is a serious departure from the principles of a liberal market economy that the United States has long boasted.

IV. Technological Hegemony – Monopoly and Suppression

The United States seeks to deter other countries’ scientific, technological and economic development by wielding monopoly power, suppression measures and technology restrictions in high-tech fields.

◆ The United States monopolizes intellectual property in the name of protection. Taking advantage of the weak position of other countries, especially developing ones, on intellectual property rights and the institutional vacancy in relevant fields, the United States reaps excessive profits through monopoly. In 1994, the United States pushed forward the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), forcing the Americanized process and standards in intellectual property protection in an attempt to solidify its monopoly on technology.

In the 1980s, to contain the development of Japan’s semiconductor industry, the United States launched the “301” investigation, built bargaining power in bilateral negotiations through multilateral agreements, threatened to label Japan as conducting unfair trade, and imposed retaliatory tariffs, forcing Japan to sign the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement. As a result, Japanese semiconductor enterprises were almost completely driven out of global competition, and their market share dropped from 50 percent to 10 percent. Meanwhile, with the support of the U.S. government, a large number of U.S. semiconductor enterprises took the opportunity and grabbed a larger market share.

◆ The United States politicizes and weaponizes technological issues and uses them as ideological tools. Overstretching the concept of national security, the United States mobilized state power to suppress and sanction Chinese company Huawei, restricted the entry of Huawei products into the U.S. market, cut off its supply of chips and operating systems, and coerced other countries to ban Huawei from undertaking local 5G network construction. It even talked Canada into unwarrantedly detaining Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, for nearly three years.

The United States has fabricated a slew of excuses to clamp down on China’s high-tech enterprises with global competitiveness and has put more than 1,000 Chinese enterprises on sanction lists. In addition, the United States has also imposed controls on biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other high-end technologies, reinforced export restrictions, tightened investment screening, suppressed Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, and lobbied the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of chips and related equipment or technology to China.

The United States has also practised double standards in its policy on China-related technological professionals. To sideline and suppress Chinese researchers, since June 2018, visa validity has been shortened for Chinese students majoring in certain high-tech-related disciplines, repeated cases have occurred where Chinese scholars and students going to the United States for exchange programs and study were unjustifiably denied and harassed, and large-scale investigation on Chinese scholars working in the United States was carried out.

◆ The United States solidifies its technological monopoly in the name of protecting democracy. By building small blocs of technology, such as the “chips alliance” and “clean network,” the United States has put “democracy” and “human rights” labels on high technology and turned technological issues into political and ideological issues to fabricate excuses for its technological blockade against other countries. In May 2019, the United States enlisted 32 countries to the Prague 5G Security Conference in the Czech Republic and issued the Prague Proposal in an attempt to exclude China’s 5G products. In April 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the “5G clean path,” a plan designed to build a technological alliance in the 5G field with partners bonded by their shared ideology on democracy and the need to protect “cyber security.” The measures, in essence, are the U.S. attempts to maintain its technological hegemony through technological alliances.

◆ The United States abuses its technological hegemony by carrying out cyberattacks and eavesdropping. The United States has long been notorious as an “empire of hackers,” blamed for its rampant acts of cyber theft around the world. It has all kinds of means to enforce pervasive cyberattacks and surveillance, including using analogue base station signals to access mobile phones for data theft, manipulating mobile apps, infiltrating cloud servers, and stealing through undersea cables. The list goes on.

U.S. surveillance is indiscriminate. All can be targets of its surveillance, be they rivals or allies, even leaders of allied countries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several French Presidents. Cyber surveillance and attacks launched by the United States, such as “Prism,” “Dirtbox,” “Irritant Horn” and “Telescreen Operation,” are all proof that the United States is closely monitoring its allies and partners. Such eavesdropping on allies and partners has already caused worldwide outrage. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a website that has exposed U.S. surveillance programs, said, “Do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honour or respect. There is only one rule: There are no rules.”

V. Cultural Hegemony – Spreading False Narratives

The global expansion of American culture is an important part of its external strategy. The United States has often used cultural tools to strengthen and maintain its hegemony in the world.

◆ The United States embeds American values in its products, such as movies. American values and lifestyle are tied to its movies, TV shows, publications, media content and programs by government-funded non-profit cultural institutions. It thus shapes a cultural and public opinion space in which American culture reigns and maintains cultural hegemony. In his article “The Americanization of the World,” John Yemma, an American scholar, exposed the real weapons in U.S. cultural expansion, Hollywood, the image design factories on Madison Avenue and the production lines of Mattel Company and Coca-Cola.

There are various vehicles the United States uses to keep its cultural hegemony. American movies are the most used; they now occupy more than 70 percent of the world’s market share. The United States skillfully exploits its cultural diversity to appeal to various ethnicities. When Hollywood movies descend on the world, they scream the American values tied to them.

◆ American cultural hegemony not only shows itself in “direct intervention” but also in “media infiltration” and as “a trumpet for the world.” U.S.-dominated Western media has a particularly important role in shaping global public opinion in favour of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.

The U.S. government strictly censors all social media companies and demands their obedience. Twitter CEO Elon Musk admitted on December 27, 2022, that all social media platforms work with the U.S. government to censor content, reported Fox Business Network. Public opinion in the United States is subject to government intervention to restrict all unfavourable remarks. Google often makes pages disappear.

The U.S. Department of Defense manipulates social media. In December 2022, The Intercept, an independent U.S. investigative website, revealed that in July 2017, U.S. Central Command official Nathaniel Kahler instructed Twitter’s public policy team to augment the presence of 52 Arabic-language accounts on a list he sent, six of which were to be given priority. One of the six was dedicated to justifying U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, such as by claiming that the attacks were precise and killed only terrorists, not civilians. Following Kahler’s directive, Twitter put those Arabic-language accounts on a “white list” to amplify certain messages.

◆The United States practices double standards on the freedom of the press. It brutally suppresses and silences the media of other countries by various means. The United States and Europe bar mainstream Russian media, such as Russia Today and Sputnik, from their countries. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube openly restrict official accounts of Russia. Netflix, Apple and Google have removed Russian channels and applications from their services and app stores. Unprecedented draconian censorship is imposed on Russia-related content.

◆The United States abuses its cultural hegemony to instigate “peaceful evolution” in socialist countries. It sets up news media and cultural outfits targeting socialist countries. It pours staggering amounts of public funds into radio and TV networks to support their ideological infiltration, and these mouthpieces bombard socialist countries in dozens of languages with inflammatory propaganda day and night.

The United States uses misinformation as a spear to attack other countries and has built an industrial chain around it; there are groups and individuals making up stories and peddling them worldwide to mislead public opinion with the support of nearly limitless financial resources.

Conclusion

While a just cause wins its champion-wide support, an unjust one condemns its pursuer to be an outcast. The hegemonic, domineering, and bullying practices of using strength to intimidate the weak, taking from others by force and subterfuge, and playing zero-sum games are exerting grave harm. The historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit are unstoppable. The United States has been overriding truth with its power and trampling justice to serve self-interest. These unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn growing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.

Countries need to respect each other and treat each other as equals. Big countries should behave in a manner befitting their status and take the lead in pursuing a new model of state-to-state relations featuring dialogue and partnership, not confrontation or alliance. China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics and rejects interference in other countries internal affairs. The United States must conduct serious soul-searching. It must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.

Feature Image: Photograph by M Matheswaran

Cartoon: canadiandimensions.com Caricature showing Uncle Sam lecturing four children labelled Phillippines (who appears similar to Phillippine leader Emilio Aguinaldo), Hawaii, Porto (sic) Rio, and Cuba in front of children holding books labelled with various US states. In the background are an American Indian holding a book upside down, a Chinese boy at the door and a black boy cleaning the window. Originally published on p. 8-9 of the January 25, 1899 issue of Puck magazine.

February 24, 2023
What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding Nato and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $ 2 trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralysing the banking system.

The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand Nato to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for Nato countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for vice president Biden in 2014.

The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The second is that Nato enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into Nato.

The US repeatedly asserts that Nato is a defensive alliance. Yet Nato bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. Nato forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept Nato in Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of Nato; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.

The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over Nato enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

Since then, the war has escalated. According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-Nato country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.

Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
Feature Image Credit: politico.eu

This article was published earlier in dailymaverick.co.za and is republished with the permission of the author.

February 20, 2023
‘World War 3 has already started’ between US and Russia/China, argues French scholar

Ben Norton reviews the interview given by the prominent French Scholar, Emmanuel Todd. The interview was in French and published in the major French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’. Emmanuel Todd argues the Ukraine proxy war is the start of WWIII, and is “existential” for both Russia and the US “imperial system”, which has restricted the sovereignty of Europe, making Brussels into Washington’s “protectorate”.

America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it – Emmanuel Todd

A prominent French intellectual has written a book arguing that the United States is already waging World War Three against Russia and China.

He also warned that Europe has become a kind of imperial “protectorate”, which has little sovereignty and is essentially controlled by the US.

Emmanuel Todd is a widely respected anthropologist and historian in France.

In 2022, Todd published a book titled “The Third World War Has Started” (“La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé” in French). At the moment, it is only available in Japan.

But Todd outlined the main arguments he made in the book in a French-language interview with the major newspaper Le Figaro, conducted by the journalist Alexandre Devecchio.

According to Todd, the proxy war in Ukraine is “existential” not only for Russia, but also for the United States.

The US “imperial system” is weakening in much of the world, he observed, but this is leading Washington to “strengthen its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

This means that “Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO”, Todd said, and NATO is really a “Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev” bloc.

US and EU sanctions have failed to crush Russia, as Western capitals had hoped, he noted. This means that “the resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice”, and “the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse”.

The French public intellectual pointed to UN votes concerning Russia, and cautioned that the West is out of touch with the rest of the world.

“Western newspapers are tragically funny. They don’t stop saying, ‘Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated’. But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small”, Todd observed.

He also criticized the GDP metrics used by Western neoclassical economists for downplaying the productive capacity of the Russian economy, while simultaneously exaggerating that of financialized neoliberal economies like in the United States.

In the Le Figaro interview, Todd argued (all emphasis added):

This is the reality, World War III has begun. It is true that it started ‘small’ and with two surprises. We went into this war with the idea that the Russian army was very powerful and that its economy was very weak.

It was thought that Ukraine was going to be crushed militarily and that Russia would be crushed economically by the West. But the reverse happened. Ukraine was not crushed militarily even if it lost 16% of its territory on that date; Russia was not crushed economically. As I speak to you, the ruble has gained 8% against the dollar and 18% against the euro since the day before the start of the war.

So there was a sort of misunderstanding. But it is obvious that the conflict, passing from a limited territorial war to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia backed by China on the other hand, has become a war world. Even if military violence is low compared to that of previous world wars.

The newspaper asked Todd if he was exaggerating. He replied, “We still provide weapons. We kill Russians, even if we don’t expose ourselves. But it remains true that we Europeans are above all economically engaged. We also feel our true entry into war through the inflation and shortages”.

Todd understated his case. He didn’t mention the fact that, after the US sponsored the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014, setting off a civil war, the CIA and Pentagon immediately began training Ukrainian forces to fight Russia.

The New York Times has acknowledged that the CIA and special operations forces from numerous European countries are on the ground in Ukraine. And the CIA and a European NATO ally are even carrying out sabotage attacks inside Russian territory.

Nevertheless, in the interview, Todd continued:

Putin made a big mistake early on, which is of immense sociohistorical interest. Those who worked on Ukraine on the eve of the war considered the country not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a ‘failed state’ in the making.

I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock, or even say ‘welcome Mom’ to holy Russia. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope. The Russians could not have foreseen it. No one could.

Todd said he shares the view of Ukraine of US political scientist John Mearsheimer, a realist who has criticized Washington’s hawkish foreign policy.

Mearsheimer “told us that Ukraine, whose army had been taken over by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate a NATO member Ukraine,” Todd said.

For Russia, this is there a war that is “from their point of view defensive and preventative,” he conceded.

“Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because, since this is an existential question for them, the harder it was, the harder they would hit. The analysis seems to hold true.”

Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

However, Todd argued that Mearsheimer “does not go far enough” in his analysis. The US political scientist has overlooked how Washington has restricted the sovereignty of Berlin and Paris, Todd said:

Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is nothing but a power “game” among others. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, one debacle more or less… What does it matter?

The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: ‘We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us’. Nothing would be existential for America. Insufficiency of analysis which today leads Biden to a series of reckless actions.

America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

The French public intellectual went on in the interview to argue that, by resisting the full force of Western sanctions, Russia and China pose a threat to “the American monetary and financial controls of the world”.

This, in turn, challenges the US status as the issuer of the global reserve currency, which gives it the ability to maintain a “huge trade deficit”:

If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained backed by China, the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund its huge trade deficit for nothing.

This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.

Todd warned that, while the United States is weakening in much of the world, its “imperial system” is “strengthening its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

He explained:

Everywhere we see the weakening of the United States, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates.

If we read [Zbigniew] Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard), we see that the American empire was formed at the end of the Second World War by the conquest of Germany and Japan, which are still protectorates today. As the American system shrinks, it weighs more and more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here).

The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the United States in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid.

As an example of a moment in recent history when Europe was more independent, Todd pointed out, “Let us remember the war in Iraq, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint press conferences against the war” – referring to the former leaders of France (Jacques Chirac) and Germany (Gerhard Schröder).

The interviewer at Le Figaro newspaper, Alexandre Devecchio, countered Todd asking, “Many observers point out that Russia has the GDP of Spain. Aren’t you overestimating its economic power and resilience?”

Todd criticized the overreliance on GDP as a metric, calling it a “fictional measure of production” that obscures the real productive forces in an economy:

War becomes a test of political economy, it is the great revealer. The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (the US, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), practically nothing. One can ask oneself how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles.

The reason is that GDP is a fictional measure of production. If we take away from the American GDP half of its overbilled health spending, then the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, by the most filled prisons in the world, then by an entire economy of ill-defined services, including the “production” of its 15 to 20 thousand economists with an average salary of 120,000 dollars, we realize that an important part of this GDP is water vapor.

War brings us back to the real economy, it allows us to understand what the real wealth of nations is, the capacity for production, and therefore the capacity for war.

Todd noted that Russia has shown “a real capacity to adapt”. He attributed this to the “very large role for the state” in the Russian economy, in contrast to the US neoliberal economic model:

If we come back to material variables, we see the Russian economy. In 2014, we put in place the first important sanctions against Russia, but then it increased its wheat production, which went from 40 to 90 million tons in 2020. Meanwhile, thanks to neoliberalism, American wheat production, between 1980 and 2020, went from 80 to 40 million tons.

…

Russia has therefore a real capacity to adapt. When we want to make fun of centralized economies, we emphasize their rigidity, and when we glorify capitalism, we praise its flexibility.

…

The Russian economy, for its part, has accepted the rules of operation of the market (it is even an obsession of Putin to preserve them), but with a very large role for the state, but it also derives its flexibility from training engineers, who allow the industrial and military adaptations.

This point is similar to what economist Michael Hudson has argued – that although Moscow’s economy is no longer socialist, like that of the Soviet Union was, the Russian Federation’s state-led industrial capitalism clashes with the financialized model of neoliberal capitalism that the United States has tried to impose on the world.

The Peninsula Foundation is happy to republish this article with the permission of the author, Ben Norton.

The article was published earlier in geopoliticaleconomy.com

Feature Image Credit: newstatesman.com

Portrait Sketch of Emmanuel Todd: Fabien Clairefond

January 25, 2023
Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO
President Vladimir Putin addressed an expanded meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board, Moscow on Dec. 21, 2022

The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia.

To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’ Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world… I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine… They understand it fully, but they’re not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third World War.”

Biden realised at that point that “I probably already said too much” and abruptly ended the press conference. He probably forgot that he was dwelling on the fragility of Western unity.

The whole point is that the western commentariat largely forgets that Russia’s core agenda is not about territorial conquest — much as Ukraine is vital to Russian interests —but about NATO expansion. And that has not changed.

Every now and then President Putin revisits the fundamental theme that the US consistently aimed to weaken and dismember Russia. As recently as last Wednesday, Putin invoked the Chechen war in the 1990s — “the use of international terrorists in the Caucasus, to finish off Russia and to split the Russian Federation… They [US]claimed to condemn al-Qaeda and other criminals, yet they considered using them on the territory of Russia as acceptable and provided all kinds of assistance to them, including material, information, political and any other support, notably military support, to encourage them to continue fighting against Russia.”

Putin has a phenomenal memory and would have been alluding to Biden’s careful choice of William Burns as his CIA chief. Burns was Moscow Embassy’s point person for Chechnya in the 1990s! Putin has now ordered a nationwide campaign to root out the vast tentacles that the US intelligence planted on Russian soil for internal subversion. Carnegie, once headed by Burns, has since shut down its Moscow office, and the Russian staff fled to the West!

The leitmotif of the expanded meeting of the Board of the Defence Ministry in Moscow on Wednesday, which Putin addressed, was the profound reality that Russia’s confrontation with the US is not going to end with the Ukraine war. Putin exhorted the Russian top brass to “carefully analyse” the lessons of the Ukraine and Syrian conflicts.

Importantly, Putin said, “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved. This year, the level of modern armaments in the strategic nuclear forces has already exceeded 91 per cent. We continue rearming the regiments of our strategic missile forces with modern missile systems with Avangard hypersonic warheads.”

Equally, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed at Wednesday’s meeting a military build-up “to bolster Russia’s security,” including:
- Creation of a corresponding group of forces in Russia’s northwest to counter Finland and Sweden’s induction as NATO members;
- Creation of two new motorised infantry divisions in the Kherson and Zaporozhya regions, as well as an army corps in Karelia, facing the Finnish border;
- Upgrade of 7 motorised infantry brigades into motorised infantry divisions in the Western, Central and Eastern military districts, and in the Northern Fleet;
- Addition of two more air assault divisions in the Airborne Forces;
- Provision of a composite aviation division and an army aviation brigade with 80-100 combat helicopters within each combined arms (tank) army;
- Creation of 3 additional air division commands, eight bomber aviation regiments, one fighter aviation regiment, and six army aviation brigades;
- Creation of 5 district artillery divisions, as well as super-heavy artillery brigades for building artillery reserves along the so-called strategic axis;
- Creation of 5 naval infantry brigades for the Navy’s coastal troops based on the existing naval infantry brigades;
- Increase in the size of the Armed Forces to 1.5 million service personnel, with 695,000 people serving under contract.
Putin summed up: “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past… We are not going to militarise our country or militarise the economy… and we will not do things we do not really need, to the detriment of our people and the economy, the social sphere. We will improve the Russian Armed Forces and the entire military component. We will do it calmly, routinely and consistently, without haste.”

If the neocons in the driving seat in the Beltway wanted an arms race, they have it now. The paradox, however, is that this is going to be different from the bipolar Cold War era arms race.

If the US intention was to weaken Russia before confronting China, things aren’t working that way. Instead, the US is getting locked into a confrontation with Russia and the ties between the two big powers are at a breaking point. Russia expects the US to roll back NATO’s expansion, as promised to the Soviet leadership in 1989.

The neocons had expected a “win-win” in Ukraine: Russian defeat and a disgraceful end to Putin’s presidency; a weakened Russia, as in the 1990s, groping for a new start; consolidation of western unity under a triumphant America; a massive boost in the upcoming struggle with China for supremacy in the world order; and a New American Century under the “rules-based world order”.

But instead, this is turning out to be a classic Zugzwang in the endgame — to borrow from German chess literature — where the US is under obligation to make a move on Ukraine but whichever move it makes will only worsen its geopolitical position.

Biden has understood that Russia cannot be defeated in Ukraine; nor are Russian people in any mood for an insurrection. Putin’s popularity is soaring high, as Russian objectives in Ukraine are being steadily realised. Thus, Biden is getting a vague sense, perhaps, that Russia isn’t exactly seeing things in Ukraine as a binary of victory and defeat, but is gearing up for the long haul to sort out NATO once and for all.

The transformation of Belarus as a “nuclear-capable” state carries a profound message from Moscow to Brussels and Washington. Biden cannot miss it. (See my blog NATO nuclear compass rendered unavailing, Indian Punchline, Dec. 21, 2022

Logically, the option open to the US at this point would be to disengage. But that becomes an abject admission of defeat and will mean the death knell for NATO, and Washington’s transatlantic leadership goes kaput. And, worse still, major west European powers — Germany, France and Italy — may start looking for a modus vivendi with Russia. Above all, how can NATO possibly survive without an “enemy”?

Clearly, neither the US nor its allies are in a position to fight a continental war. But even if they are, what about the emerging scenario in the Asia-Pacific, where the “no limits” partnership between China and Russia has added an intriguing layer to the geopolitics?

The neocons in the Beltway have bitten more than what they could chew. Their last card will be to push for a direct US military intervention in the Ukraine war under the banner of a “coalition of the willing.”

This commentary was published earlier on the author’s website – indianpunchline.com

Feature Image Credit: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
December 27, 2022