Sept 18, 2021, 11:03
The US is devising policies to contain the political, economic and strategic ascendancy of China. It seems this containment will be the central plank of US foreign and security policy in the coming years. This competition and confrontation between the two countries, though short of a new Cold War, will keep many regional states on tenterhooks. The US government is trapped domestically and internationally in their China-obsessed politics stemming from their weakening capacity to oversee world matters.
The reckless US involvement in military excursions in far-off lands since World War II has resulted in countless deaths and spending of dollars. It has also left these places in utter humiliation and damaged its image of a dependable world leader. Direct US military interventions and proxy wars in regions ranging from Latin America to Africa, and the Middle East to Southeast Asia, have left bitter legacies including political anarchy, intractable hostilities, militancy and terrorism.
Meanwhile, over the past four decades, China has been busy strengthening its political, economic and strategic position at the regional and global levels in ways that align with its national blueprint embedded in peace, stability, good neighborliness and economic development.
However, the economic and military rise of a regional state, in political and strategic terms, is deemed a threat to the world hegemon. This is how the US government perceives China.
China has concentrated on realizing its economic potential, putting its political, ideological and territorial issues with other countries on the backburner and adopting a policy of patience and restraint in international affairs. This policy stemmed from the late Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms starting in 1978 and continuing with more liberal economic plans under successive leaders. Within a decade or so, the world started witnessing the dividends of this focused economic development. China became the second largest economy by nominal GDP in 2010, and already overtook the US in terms of purchasing power parity in 2020.
Following its economic development, China has become the top trading partner of East Asian countries and signed regional economic deals that include free trade agreements with Australia, Singapore, South Korea, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and others. China's trade with Africa and Latin America also leapfrogged, the former of which grew from only around $10 billion in 2000 to $220 billion in 2014. Between 2000 and 2014, Chinese financing to Africa peaked at $122 billion, dwarfing the US amount of $106.7 billion.
The past few years have witnessed China building institutional infrastructure to share its affluence with other countries. In 2014, China, in collaboration with other BRICS countries, created the $100 billion New Development Bank, and the following year, set up the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which 103 countries have since joined.
In 2015, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which seeks to interconnect over 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. The Initiative envisages development of interconnecting roads and railways for overland transportation and seaports to facilitate shipment of commercial goods. The BRI also promises financial assistance and investment in regional communication, agricultural infrastructure and natural resources. This is a game changer.
In this context, the West accuses China of employing its soft and hard power to intimidate neighboring countries. Interestingly, the US and other Western states have followed the same playbook to acquire superpower status. For instance, the US employed all state power to establish itself as the central economic player in Latin America, used finances through American banks as a powerful tool, and finally controlled the trade in agriculture, fruits, minerals, sugar and tobacco in the region.
The US also created a string of development institutions including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, US Agency for International Development and the Export-Import Bank, all of which advanced its political and economic interests.
The 20th century witnessed increased US political and military intervention in Central American, African and Asian countries. Frequent military excursions and violent regime changes erupted. Only governments pliant to Washington could stay in power.
Specifically, the US blockaded Cuba in 1962, the Dominican Republic in 1965, mined Nicaraguan harbors in 1980, and invaded Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. It also applied financial pressure to weaken Chilean President Salvador Allende and embargoed Nicaragua to undermine the Sandinista government. Congo, Angola, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Cambodia, Vietnam, both Koreas, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan can safely be added to the list of victims of US overt or covert military interventions.
China has not gone to war for decades. It has been unassumingly pursuing its policies without posing any threat to other countries. It will unfailingly continue to do so in the future unless its strategic sensitivities, already clearly outlined, are challenged. (Source: CGTN)
M. Alam Brohi is a former member of the foreign service of Pakistan who retired after serving seven years as Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic and the Islamic Republic of Sudan.
A person with a good heart and progressive culture will not be zealous of others doing well.
And if they happen to do better than him no matter how different they are from him, then, from a global humanity perspective, he should also celebrate those achievements until they can become a platform for more international cooperation.
After all, one who says he cares for human values should only welcome others who achieve these things through their own system of progressive reforms that enable human values to grow through economic improvements sustained by state mechanisms to tap private enterprise, as is practised by all emerging nations, including the US itself when drained of narratives to the contrary.
The US has shown it doesn't subscribe to any such altruisms. Towards others and for all its sonorous platitudes about democracy and better way of life, it neither practices honest diplomacy nor constructive international relations.
Scratch its epidermis and one will only see its festering endothermic self-interest as its overriding core essence which will explain its zero-sum mentality to extract as much benefit for itself so as to deny anyone else of sustainable win-win relationships. Wherever suits its primary interests, It writes its contracts with others but only in invisible ink.
The US sees China as its threat because it is zealous of her rising, it cannot compete with her system of making progress, yet it refuses to accept anyone doing better than itself.
The way it is stomping Huawei down over 5G, and all the other China high-tech companies, is one clear example of utterly vehement bullying no one can deny. It even practices its ideological hegemony in sparse outer space by denying China, one-fifth of humanity and permanent member of the terrestrial UN security council, participation in the international celestial space station program. Look what China on her own did subsequently.
And all that is because the US believes in its own propaganda of self-supremacy and exceptionalism so much so it cannot accept others can do just as well if not better through their own ways and means.
China has put paid to the US' tortured delusion. After all, if her Shangshan peoples in Zhejiang's Qiaotou were already drinking rice wine from pottery of 9,000-year old vintage, as unearthed recently, her lineage of civilization is markedly longer than most, one reckons.
Today, the world has seen through the US. It no longer has any credible explanation for its past actions in the international arena.
Domestically, it remains divided. It is now trying to salvage its build-better vision, divided by partisan concerns over debt, taxation and inflation issues the new budget will engender even as its central bank grapples with how to dangle macroeconomic policies to stop its economy from tanking so that its currency won't fall off the cliff, pulling the rest of the trading world with it because it had engineered its currency to control theirs by diminishing their currency sovereignty.
Meanwhile it is facing the specter of its mRNA vaccines being rendered increasingly ineffective by the Delta variant, as may be surmised from new spikes in m-RNAed Israel. Furthermore, a sizable number of its population is so against any vaccination that any post-vaccination herd immunity will remain a pipedream.
And its international reputation is now in tatters. It attacked Iraq on a lie, drew its European allies into the carnage, then attacked Afghanistan to target crossborder terrorism only to leave with its tail between its legs after twenty years of another carnage but not after killing a supportive Afghan family including children in revenge which its media now tries to gloss over by saying the relatives forgive the attack.
To draw attention away from its miasmic crudities at the same time salvage its tenuous relations with increasingly disgruntled European Nato allies over its unilateral Afghanistan fiasco, it explains away everything by turning its guns on China, the historical bogeyman of its anglo-saxon racist fixation.
But what has China done to the US that the US can consider her a threat to it, whether existential or consequential?
She has only gone about her business of building her economy so that more of her peoples of all ethnicities, including those from her Tibet, Xinjiang, HongKong and Taiwan, can come up in life to become a greater united China middle-class group as buyers of global goods which in turn will increase the recovery of other economies and also present a viable business case for cleaner energy sources that will push back global climate change.
She has not sold any of her system of government to anyone else. Nor has she invaded any country, or bombed anyone to smithereens. She has just been doing her own thing, tending to her Voltairean garden, minding her own business, cooperating with everyone else in trade and investments, building an Eurasian trade infrastructure, and participating in peacekeeping and amicable consultation.
How can all this be construed as a threat to anyone, let alone the US, purveyor of the biggest armaments of mass destruction in history yet safely separated as part of a continental mass by two oceans?
But, no, the US tries to persuade itself this can't be accepted. It insists China must be seen as the enemy of the 'free' world. A world, however, sanctionable by the US, muscled by its military, blackmailable by its tariffs, entity lists and visa cancellations.
Its focus is now on Asia. But Asians know the global locus of economic recovery has moved from west to east, the region of maximum manufacturing that will draw resources from elsewhere so that the supplier countries can also recover their economies.
And China is the world's biggest manufacturer, trader, financier and innovator, besides being the world's richest nation on PPP terms with the biggest consumer market and most sophisticated STEM population, domestic infrastructure and global supply chains by far, furthermore with increasingly critical and credible climate change solutions in rapid progress.
Therefore in trying to stop China's rise by any and all means at its disposal, the US will end up (a) hurting its own industries and peoples, (b) hurting the rest of the world, (c) increasing regional tensions amounting to cold war conflicts, that will (d) devastate economies struggling to recover from the pandemic, while (e) climate change and shipping scarcities will reduce food production, causing (f) social disruption and starvation, such as already seen in Afghanistan, whose money the US still withholds.
To inanely add to that hurt, the US is doing nothing to address its own household income disparity, the bane of most of its diversified population. Its poor are homeless while its middle-class is being denuded by inflation, unemployment and deurbanization.
On the other hand, China has gone on to her next phase of social capitalism with Chinese characteristics in order to redress income disparities by a common prosperity program to elevate society to the age-old altruistic egalitarianism that says what one has earned through society must be returned to it for having supported private enterprise, and this through a distillation process that will filter out disenablers of more individual growth whose filtration will be augmented with focused impact by practical state planning. Her works are always people-centric, surely the first priority of any government, whether democratic or socialist. Can one say the same of the US, UK, Australia, Japan even?
On this score, China is not a threat to the US. On the other hand, the US has become the global threat to everyone else.
Like a snakeoil non-EV fuel-guzzling used-car salesman impatiently trying to meet his last day quota so that he can pay his upcoming mortgage installment, the US is busy trying to disrupt Asia again. It's not enough that it screws others and leaves without even paying the room bill.
The last time was Obama's pivot to the Far East after the carnage in the Middle East and West Asia. Now it's the SChina Sea expanded to the Indo-Pacific. Failing with the tenuous response from India and Europe's Nato for Quad, it is now doing naval drills in Asian waters, sneaking its warships through the China(Taiwan) straits, egging Lithuania to change 'Taipei' to 'Taiwan' office while hypocritically saying it accepts the One-China policy which remains the basic foundation of US-China relations. It seems the US is instead trying to sneak in an adultery but may end up getting a hysterectomy.
Which has come in the form of its Aukus submarine pact to extend the speed and stealth of Australia's submarine fleet so that it can in a few years' time range over to the Manila Trench next to Taiwan island.
Thereby exposing definitively that in the US lexicon of international relations, the words 'allies' and 'alliances' and 'network of fellow bedmates' in reality carry little to no weight of consequence unless ultimately serving its own personal interests in the end. In this case, it just makes the Australians a bigger military target of interest to be counteracted asymmetrically for all that its new umbilical cord dependence on US technology entails.
Besides Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, New Delhi and Seoul, the EC's Brussels, for that matter its Hague and the rest of Europe including little Lithuania, must now be wondering what they have been getting from their bromance with the American hegemon except increased global military tensions and decreased economic recoveries, the two causes of international disorders.
Meanwhile, China shows sterling and consistent intention to support the CPTPP, expanding from the RCEP. The Asean nations including emerging Indonesia would be inspired as much by the progressive, pro-business, capacity-building approach by China to support multilateralism against regional blocs and increased conflicts, neither of which possible for cooperation to grow markets, increase supply, foster peace and prosperity.
The US? Only malign intention to disrupt peacefully resolved SChinaSea accommodations already in place until it came in with its suitcase of threats and missiles brochures to seed doubts and warmongering.
As for the Taipei regime, whoever in Tokyo should give its nefarious intention a rest if it doesn't want to go the same way as Canberra and London, for that matter Manila. The anglo-saxons have been farting on the world for too long. They take and eat the best from the world, then process shit out from their colons.
Maybe that's how the word 'colonization' came about.
ren
The world is mistakenly preached to be owned by the west by some smart thinkers ahead of their times. Unfortunately, their grounds were not only unfound but baseless to lay upon. They have themselves to blame for not able to cope with drastic change. The future dictates its heritance bequeathes upon those who are prepared and can cope with sudden drastic changes. For those who are not ready, then they lost without trace.
The Anglo/Jew gangsters started both World Wars to parasite off the rest of the World with "jew-confetti". It was also to weaken Germany, Italy and Japan, which are, today, producers of some of the World's finest cars. In other words, the Anglo/Jew gangsters couldn't compete and were losing their poodle empire of plundering. This played out again in the 1980s, so the Great Satan imposed the Plaza/Louvre Accords in an attempt to sabotage Germany and Japan's economies by making their currencies too strong.
So-called "nation-building" is where they re-fashion nations or overthrow democratically elected leaders, in order to keep those nations weak and often making them dependent on miltary support by installing a minority leader, such as Saddam Hussein, as their puppet, as well as in Syria and with the Shah of Iran. Nations that resist, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Free Korea etc. are placed under sanctions.
Having cheated China, Russia and France out of oil contracts in Iraq, leading to the Great Satan re-naming "french fries" as "freedom fries" when France protested and extorted tens of billions out of BNP Paribas, France has just been cheated again with the "nukilar" sub deal, which France says is both a violation of the spirit and the letter of the contract: "France recalls ambassadors to US, Australia over sub deal".
China is now the largest trading partner of most of the World and provides an alternative to the extortionate policies of the Great Satan gangsters.
With $4trillion in loans from China to other nations denominated in "worthless paper" USD, the Great Satan can no longer impoverish nations as Thomas Jefferson warned the amerikan sheeple: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered". If the money-changers try to raise the exchange rate of the "worthless paper" USD, China's debtors will demand a re-denomination in other currencies. If they try to crash the "worthless paper" USD, China is indemnified by the same technique.
The Great Satan has already lost. Why else would it wage only a "cold" war against Russia and now China, unless it was check-mated? And this is as all their cheating just means they breed themselves ever krappier. The propagandists at the Guardian MI6 mouthpiece are so stooooopid they think Poodleville is in Sweden: That’s one conclusion to take from new research comparing the results of tests by conscripts at the point of entering Sweden’s national service (which, as we’ve noted in this column before, wasn’t the panacea that nostalgic British politicians think) with earnings over their lifetimes.
- IQs are on the rise, but we don’t need hard facts any more
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