Did They Drop the Ball?
Meet Antony Blinken, the Secretary State that President Joe Biden appointed when he took office in January of this year. Blinken had a unique opportunity to shine on the world stage at the Anchorage (Alaska) meetings between China and the US.
CNN reported on the welcome accorded the Chinese: “In his opening remarks, Blinken initially said the US intends to defend the “rules-based order” without which there would be a “much more violent world” and said that Chinese activities in places like Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as its cyber attacks on the US and economic coercion of US allies, “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.”
In keeping with President Donald Trump’s benchmark diplomatic style, Antony Blinken opened the US-China meetings, with an aggresive litany of China’s supposed abuses in their region. Some observers at the event likened these remarks to China condemning US actions in Florida, Texas and Mississippi, insofar as all of the places mentioned by Blinken are, under international law and mutual agreement, subject to Chinese sovereignty. What about Taiwan? In a 1979 Joint Communique issued with the People’s Republic of China, the State Department of the United States “recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, acknowledging the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” (Source: US Department of State)
China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi did not hold back in his rebuttal to Blinken: “We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image, and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world… Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”
As I see it, any normal person reading this account of the American welcome to a high-level foreign representation whom they invited to travel thousands of miles to a vitally important meeting, would conclude that the American greeting was awkward, illogical and ultimately counterproductive. It doesn’t seem to make sense on any level: intellectual, social, strategic, and, least of all, diplomatic. What were the American representatives thinking? Have they so little intelligence, such a lack of sensibility, and a deficient sense of decency, that they are incapable of offering a simple welcome for openers?
I doubt that Blinken is unintelligent nor that his mother didn’t inculcate in him notions of sensibility, decency and simple good manners. But those niceties are shelved when it comes time to sit down face to face with someone the ruling magnates in his country consider an enemy. Because militarized America doesn’t have adversaries, it has enemies. And its officials don’t respond to logic, decency or common sense when they sit down at a meeting, only to the script incorporated into their country’s belligerent agenda. And that agenda includes military solutions almost exclusively. The business of America is war, and Secretary Blinken is not about to change that fact.
(See full transcript of US-China opening remarks in Anchorage. (Source: Nikkei Asia)
China Making Astonishing Progress
The Americans and the British never had much regard for China. Granted it was a huge country with rich resources, but it was half a world away as well as impoverished, disperse and its people were vexed for being exploited by foreigners. When we first hear the term “opium wars” most of us conjure up visions of the Imperial British authorities waging war to prevent those degenerate Chinamen from downgrading the country through widespread drug use. Later we learn that the truth was all the contrary. The British fought the opium wars in order to guarantee themselves the “right” to peddle opium to the Chinese, who were fighting to protect their countrymen from the degenerate British drug businessmen. Nothing ever changes. Colonialism is still about business.
Then came the Japanese imperialists with their hideous rape of Nanking in 1937-38. Curiously, neither the British nor the Japanese seemed aware that, during the previous twenty centuries of human history, China had dominated eighteen. That is not an insignificant historical anecdote. It is a telling clue to the future. And the future is now.
Over the past half century the Chinese have made massive advances with a minimum of military interventions. China is again in motion and, despite having the world’s largest army, the Chinese follow a non-violent game plan, advancing without truculence or bombast. Their emphasis is on hard work, bargaining and sharing. Their Belt and Road initiative is about trade, not war, about mutual benefits, not destruction. Instead of mounting a vast network of military bases across the world, they invested in China and the Chinese, elevating a sector of 800 million people out of deep poverty.
They knew it was going to be a long march but they are accustomed to that. Mao Zedong’s year-long, 5,600-mile retreat in the face of Chaing Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang Army in 1934-35 set the benchmark for Long Marches. Of the 100-200,000 men who set off from Jaangxi Province with Mao, only 8,000 reached the destination in Yan’an in Shaanxi Province in northern China a year later. From there the Chinese communists came back after 22 years to send the Chinese nationalist army fleeing to the Chinese island of Formosa (today Taiwan) and take over the ruling of the country. This heroic feat both inspired China’s communists and elevated Mao to the party’s leadership. The great Chinese comeback was under way.
They still have a ways to go, but they’re working on it, propelled by a real annual GDP growth rate between six and 10 percent since the mid-70s. The following figures help to explain why China makes the Americans nervous. They’re the comparative yearly figures for economic growth China-US for 2013-2018 (Data from IMF WEO Database, April 2020):
| Country | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018[4] | Avg |
|---|
 China | 7.76 | 7.30 | 6.90 | 6.70 | 6.90 | 6.50 | 7.01 |
 US | 1.68 | 2.57 | 2.86 | 1.49 | 2.27 | 2.80 | 2.28 |
These numbers sing a powerful song. At this rate China can be expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy sometime between 2028 and 2032. China is America’s most important source of imports and the US is indebted to them (as of 2021) $1.1 trillion. (Source: US Treasury Report)
The United States is China’s most important trading partner and China is the US’s third most important, after Mexico and Canada. Seen by an impartial observer China and the United States can be conceived as virtual Siamese twins, linked at their spines and with shared interests in virtually all fields, though they can never see eye to eye. Both are living in the critical era of the Covid 19 pandemic, each in their own way, the US with the highest Covid statistics in the world and China the lowest. Aren’t there things the US can learn from China in this field and others? Shouldn’t they be cooperating? The American agenda seems to preclude that possibility.
The Pentagon and the big American weapons providers don’t see the benefits of cooperation with China. They see just another opportunity to provoke a war and reap the usual harvest of profit and disaster. Never mind that this might be the Big One. They prefer to insult and threaten the Chinese, not only verbally but by converting the South China Sea into a playpool for American gunboats, and whipping up contrived “defense” alliances like the recent AUKUS initiative. This frankenstinian spawn unites the United States; their loyal Sancho Panza, Great Britain; and Australia in a palpably anti-China conglomerate. What do the Australians think they have to gain by offending their principal trading partner. Here are recent figures for Australia’s exports.
China: US$90.6 billion (43% of total Australian exports)
https://wits.worldbank.org › countrysnapshot › AUS
Japan: $19 billion (9%)
United States: $13.1 billion (6.2%)
The AUKUS agreement also includes the purchase of up to six nuclear-powered submarines from the US, the better to provoke the Chinese dragon. The aims of this trilateral defense initiative seem to be muddled from the outset. Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is quoted in The Guardian on September 16, 2021: “But let me be clear. Australia is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability,” as if an atomic submarine were not a nuclear weapon. Will the AUKUS “defense” partnership, which at bottom is a massive American arms deal, lead to a cold-war-style arms race? It would be remarkable if it didn’t.
At this point in the game the same question always arises: how do the Americans manage to dupe their allies into leaping carelessly into the ugliest stewpots? The Aussies also took part in the disastrous Vietnam debacle in the 60s and 70s. And in 2014, in a highly dubious decision, they committed US$11.5 billion to the purchase of 58 American-made, problem plagued F-35A Lightning II fighters. Since 2001, Australian forces suffered 38 combat deaths in the Americans’ Afghanistan clownshow. Do the Aussies never learn? Observed from afar this American penchant for implicating their friends in their military adventures seems utterly gratuitous. “But Australia is obliged to collaborate with the United States under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” the Aussie collaborators will say. “North Atlantic?” Yes, of course.
The Forever War Scam
Not all of the treasure lavished on America’s perpetual war project is lost. Part of it returns to American coffers in the form of payment for their ever-more-sophisticated and deadly armaments. Unfortunately, the American people at large never see nor benefit from the wealth generated by the arms trade. In fact, the arms trafficking merry go round amounts to an elaborate procedure to funnel America’s wealth from the wallets of taxpayers who finance the research and pay for the country’s formidable stockpile of arms and their delivery systems, into the exclusive pockets of the armament magnates.
Who are they? According to a new report from the Center for Responsive Politics, five of the nation’s biggest defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and General Dynamics — generated enough profit in 2020 to spend a combined $60 million to influence American foreign policy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. OpenSecrets.org (Feb. 25, 2021), reveals that America’s armament industry skims a bit of the cream off the top of their earnings to keep the political pussycat lubricated. Over the last two decades they have given $285 million in campaign contributions and spent $2.5 billion on lobbying.
No Wonder Uncle Sam’s Alarmed
Part of the secret of China’s meteoric rise in the world is the money they didn’t have to spend on waging wars near and far, nor establishing hundreds of military bases around the world or sponsoring endless false-flag regime change operations. Add to the money not misspent the vast number of enemies not made by not invading anybody. Do the Americans think their regime-change penchant hasn’t created expensive enemies?
The Chinese won their civil war (1927-1949) and have spent their time since then building a prosperous peacetime. During the same period that the US was squandering tens of trillions (with a T) on bellicose follies, China was investing in its country and its people. Today they are extending their prosperity projects to the Middle East and Africa, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. Their strategy is to share, not invade, and it’s working, much to the chagrin of the American oligarchs.
China’s biggest international trade project was announced in 2013 and pursued enthusiastically since then. It is their Belt and Road Initiative and it is already achieving significant advances. According to its website, BRI is a transcontinental long-term policy and investment program which aims at infrastructure development and acceleration of the economic integration of countries along the route of the historic Silk Road. That silk road now crosses the Atlantic to bring economic development to countries such as Chile and Cuba, among others. According to the Belt and Road site, 71 countries are currently taking part in the Initiative, together representing more than a third of the world`s GDP and two thirds of the world`s population.
For a revealing insider’s overview of the Belt and Road railway project, see this article on Frédéric de Kemmeter’s website.
Is There Any Hope?
Is there any hope for a great country that has painted itself into a dark corner where the rich have been permitted to buy the democracy and tailor it to their own dubious purposes, relegating the onetime government to a merely decorative role? What happens when a society weaned on competition foresees a future in which it can no longer compete? Can it still learn valuable lessons from gentler, more humane and egalitarian countries? Or will it resort to even more desperate measures? These are the operative questions. Will the Americans find the answers in time?
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Trump and All the Rest 