Showing all posts tagged: US

Egypt Plays The China Card

Hohammed Morsi will be visiting China next week, in an effort to disentangle his country from US influence:

Egypt’s outreach to China and Iran is troubling for U.S. policy - David Schenker and Christina Lin via LATimes.com

Concerned about the effect of Egypt’s new policy of intentionally downgrading — and potentially even severing — ties with its peace partner Israel, Morsi appears to be engaged in hedging. Much like post-revolution Iran, China could be a willing partner for an Islamist Egypt.

China has not fared particularly well in the so-called Arab Spring. In addition to losing billions of dollars in energy sector investments in Libya, Beijing’s ongoing support for the Bashar Assad regime’s ruthless repression of the popular uprising has engendered the animosity of millions of Syrians. Beijing’s vetoes of United Nations Security Council resolutions against Syria has made burning Chinese flags a popular pastime among the anti-Assad opposition, and when the regime is finally dispatched, the Middle Kingdom’s economic and political interests in Syria will suffer.

Although an Islamist Egypt beset by insecurity and a failing economy might seem of little value to the Chinese, upgraded ties with the troubled nation would provide China with a foothold on the Mediterranean, and include, hypothetically, a port. Morsi’s Egypt might also be amenable to offering Chinese warships priority access to the Suez Canal, as the U.S. has traditionally been afforded. This privilege would be particularly appealing to China, which increasingly sees a need to protect its investments in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

[…]

The benefits for China of improved ties with Egypt are clear. But Morsi also sees advantages in diversifying Egypt’s sources of assistance. At the most basic level, China’s foreign policy is based solely on perceived national interest alone, and as such, unlike the United States, Beijing will have no qualms about Morsi’s increasing limitations on press freedoms, restrictions on freedom of speech, constraints on women’s rights or the ill treatment of minorities. At the same time, China is flush with cash, and Egypt will again be ripe for foreign investment when and if security is reestablished.

Egypt needs money, and China will provide more of it in serious investments than the US has, and without the need to play nice with Israel. However, this is a seriously destabilizing move from the perspective of the US, especially given China’s increasingly bellicose moves in Asia, and their land grab in Africa.

Boy Meets Girl, In Different Countries

Mary Ann O’Donnell has been living in China a long time, and she relates various versions of the Boy-Meets-Girl trope by country:

mini-series plot recap (by country and episode length) « Shenzhen Noted

US American = boy meets girl, boy and girl have sex, a murder brings them closer together (or one of them may be the victim) in one made for television movie;

Japanese = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, a suicide brings them closer together (or one or both commit suicide) in 12 episodes;

Korean = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, inherited and usually unsuspected history between their parents brings them closer together (or results in them being separated for years that each stoically endures) in 16 or 20 episodes;

Taiwanese = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, their mothers begin a battle that brings them closer together (or forces one or both of them to choose between their lover and their mother) in 30 to 40 episodes;

Mainland = boy meets girl, boy and girl are attracted to each other, they soon realize that together they can rule the country more justly (or together they can’t seize power because corruption is just too endemic) in 80 episodes.

Britain = boy meets girl, boy and girl are attracted to each other, but war tears them apart, until the boy is a gauze-covered manikin and dies (or social class differences keep them apart until they independently emigrate to Australia and re-encounter each other there) in 3 episodes

Shadowboxing With China

More suspicion and distrust between China and the US, sparked by the Chen Guangcheng affair, leading to more discussion about military tensions. The US and China are increasingly looking like the two toughest kids in school, who will inevitably square off.

Unease Mounting, China and U.S. to Open Military Talks - Jane Perlez via NYTimes.com

The Chinese have acquired or are developing a variety of weapons and technologies that would enable them to put into practice the doctrine of “anti-access, area denial,” Mr. Harold said. The basic idea is to block American access to strategic waterways, particularly the seas off China’s coast.

Among the weapons to advance the doctrine are ultraquiet submarines and advanced surface vessels equipped with antiship cruise missiles, Mr. Harold said. China is also testing ballistic missiles that can strike an aircraft carrier, he said.

In addition, China has built an advanced cyberprogram designed to disable a potential enemy’s command-and-control capabilities, Mr. Harold said.

In response to the Chinese doctrine, Pentagon planners are devising a military fighting concept called the “air-sea battle strategy” that would ensure that the American military could deploy over great distances to defend United States allies and interests.

“I wouldn’t characterize the situation as an arms race, but competitive military modernization through hardware and, more important, in doctrine,” Mr. Harold said.

We seem to be hewing closely to the realpolitik of the Clausewitz maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Both the US and China appear committed to a military standoff, and a escalation of force and tactics that may be a dress rehearsal for a not-too-distant war. Clausewitz define war as ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, and that is what both countries are contemplating in the China Sea.

Every regime labeled a “rogue state” or “state of concern” by the United States—Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and North Korea—receives active Chinese military, economic and diplomatic support.

Surge of the ‘Second World’ - Parag Khanna via The National Interest

As U.S. power wanes over the next decade or so, the United States will find itself increasingly challenged in discharging these hegemonic tasks. This could have profound implications for international politics. The erosion of Pax Britannica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an important cause of World War I. During the interwar years, no great power exercised geopolitical or economic leadership, and this proved to be a major cause of the Great Depression and its consequences, including the fragmentation of the international economy into regional trade blocs and the beggar-thy-neighbor economic nationalism that spilled over into the geopolitical rivalries of the 1930s. This, in turn, contributed greatly to World War II. The unwinding of Pax Americana could have similar consequences. Since no great power, including China, is likely to supplant the United States as a true global hegemon, the world could see a serious fragmentation of power. This could spawn pockets of instability around the world and even general global instability.

The United States has a legacy commitment to global stability, and that poses a particular challenge to the waning hegemon as it seeks to fulfill its commitment with dwindling resources. The fundamental challenge for the United States as it faces the future is closing the “Lippmann gap,” named for journalist Walter Lippmann. This means bringing America’s commitments into balance with the resources available to support them while creating a surplus of power in reserve. To do this, the country will need to establish new strategic priorities and accept the inevitability that some commitments will need to be reduced because it no longer can afford them.

These national imperatives will force the United States to craft some kind of foreign-policy approach that falls under the rubric of “offshore balancing”—directing American power and influence toward maintaining a balance of power in key strategic regions of the world. This concept—first articulated by this writer in a 1997 article in the journal International Security—has gained increasing attention over the past decade or so as other prominent geopolitical scholars, including John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Robert Pape, Barry Posen and Andrew Bacevich, have embraced this approach.

Although there are shades of difference among proponents of offshore balancing in terms of how they define the strategy, all of their formulations share core concepts in common. First, it assumes the United States will have to reduce its presence in some regions and develop commitment priorities. Europe and the Middle East are viewed as less important than they once were, with East Asia rising in strategic concern. Second, as the United States scales back its military presence abroad, other states need to step up to the challenge of maintaining stability in key regions. Offshore balancing, thus, is a strategy of devolving security responsibilities to others. Its goal is burden shifting, not burden sharing. Only when the United States makes clear that it will do less—in Europe, for example—will others do more to foster stability in their own regions.

Third, the concept relies on naval and air power while eschewing land power as much as possible. This is designed to maximize America’s comparative strategic advantages—standoff, precision-strike weapons; command-and-control capabilities; and superiority in intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance. After all, fighting land wars in Eurasia is not what the United States does best. Fourth, the concept avoids Wilsonian crusades in foreign policy, “nation-building” initiatives and imperial impulses. Not only does Washington have a long record of failure in such adventures, but they are also expensive. In an age of domestic austerity, the United States cannot afford the luxury of participating in overseas engagements that contribute little to its security and can actually pose added security problems. Finally, offshore balancing would reduce the heavy American geopolitical footprint caused by U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle East—the backlash effect of which is to fuel Islamic extremism. An over-the-horizon U.S. military posture in the region thus would reduce the terrorist threat while still safeguarding the flow of Persian Gulf oil.

The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inevitable - Christopher Layne via The Atlantic

Beyond the U.S. financial challenge, the world is percolating with emerging nations bent on exploiting the power shift away from the West and toward states that long have been confined to subordinate status in the global power game. (Parag Khanna explores this phenomenon at length further in this issue.) By far the biggest test for the United States will be its relationship with China, which views itself as effecting a restoration of its former glory, before the First Opium War of 1839-1842 and its subsequent “century of humiliation.” After all, China and India were the world’s two largest economies in 1700, and as late as 1820 China’s economy was larger than the combined economies of all of Europe. The question of why the West emerged as the world’s most powerful civilization beginning in the sixteenth century, and thus was able to impose its will on China and India, has been widely debated. Essentially, the answer is firepower. As the late Samuel P. Huntington put it, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Certainly, the Chinese have not forgotten. Now Beijing aims to dominate its own East and Southeast Asian backyard, just as a rising America sought to dominate the Western Hemisphere a century and a half ago. The United States and China now are competing for supremacy in East and Southeast Asia. Washington has been the incumbent hegemon there since World War II, and many in the American foreign-policy establishment view China’s quest for regional hegemony as a threat that must be resisted. This contest for regional dominance is fueling escalating tensions and possibly could lead to war. In geopolitics, two great powers cannot simultaneously be hegemonic in the same region. Unless one of them abandons its aspirations, there is a high probability of hostilities. Flashpoints that could spark a Sino-American conflict include the unstable Korean Peninsula; the disputed status of Taiwan; competition for control of oil and other natural resources; and the burgeoning naval rivalry between the two powers.

These rising tensions were underscored by a recent Brookings study by Peking University’s Wang Jisi and Kenneth Lieberthal, national-security director for Asia during the Clinton administration, based on their conversations with high-level officials in the American and Chinese governments. Wang found that underneath the visage of “mutual cooperation” that both countries project, the Chinese believe they are likely to replace the United States as the world’s leading power but Washington is working to prevent such a rise. Similarly, Lieberthal related that many American officials believe their Chinese counterparts see the U.S.-Chinese relationship in terms of a zero-sum game in the struggle for global hegemony.

An instructive historical antecedent is the Anglo-German rivalry of the early twentieth century. The key lesson of that rivalry is that such great-power competition can end in one of three ways: accommodation of the rising challenger by the dominant power; retreat of the challenger; or war. The famous 1907 memo exchange between two key British Foreign Office officials—Sir Eyre Crowe and Lord Thomas Sanderson—outlined these stark choices. Crowe argued that London must uphold the Pax Britannica status quo at all costs. Either Germany would accept its place in a British-dominated world order, he averred, or Britain would have to contain Germany’s rising power, even at the risk of war. Sanderson replied that London’s refusal to accommodate the reality of Germany’s rising power was both unwise and dangerous. He suggested Germany’s leaders must view Britain “in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.” In Beijing’s eyes today, the United States must appear as the unapproachable, globally sprawling giant.

The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inevitable - Christopher Layne via The Atlantic

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie - Slavoj Žižek via London Review of Books

Slavoj Žižek — in a review of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude — analyzes the instability inherent in today’s capitalism arising from pushing more of the middle class into the working class as we have become more ‘productive’: as business needs less workers. By taking away their ‘surplus wage’ — the amount they make that is greater than the working class — they become open to civil unrest:

Slavoj Žižek via London Review of Books

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of the four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure that demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merits and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will thereby be free of all resentment: on the contrary, it is precisely in such a society that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since they would be the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought about by the existence of a bourgeoisie) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? The former Communists, meanwhile, are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are comfortably provided with a surplus wage as a means to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the ongoing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse, if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum wage). These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers. This remuneration is economically irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success. Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find any level of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

This ‘beggar-my-neighbor’ aspect of late stage industrial capitalism is perhaps its oddest feature. Shouldn’t the managerial elite see that they are accelerating instability by crushing the middle class into dust? They are hastening the day when the people will be willing to risk the little they have left to change the system from top to bottom.

But these are the same people who couldn’t see the impossible feedback loops in the global financial systems that led to our recent crash and the now ‘new normal’ depression.

William H. Frey, America Reaches Its Demographic Tipping Point

The new Census results show 49.8 percent of infants under age one are members of a race-ethnic minority – up from 42.4 percent in 2000. Given this trajectory, and the fact that the Census was taken well over a year ago, it is almost certain we have now “tipped” racially, and more than half of all national births are minorities. More than a quarter of infants are Hispanic, Blacks and Asians comprise 13.6 and 4.2 percent, respectively. Nearly one in twenty births were reported to be two or more races.

The geography of this change is important. Our larger, most urbanized states – magnets for immigrants and “new minorities” as well as major settlements for Blacks – are leading the way toward this transformation. Minority infants now represent the majority of births in 14 states, up from 7 in 2000; the newest ones include New York, New Jersey and Florida (Table 1). California and Texas had already reached this status, and Illinois just missed out.

Yet the new census shows a spread well beyond these areas (see Map 1 below). Minorities now comprise at least 40 percent of infants in more than half of all states, with the white share of infants declining in all of them, with the exception of the District of Columbia. Especially large minority gains occurred in New England states, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, as well as rapidly growing states like Florida, Nevada and Georgia.

(via Brookings)

Pakistan Threatens US With China

Pakistan and China have mutual interests, but Pakistani official tried to use their growing involvement to smack the US in the face:

Michael Wines, Pakistan and China - Two Friends Hit a Bump

[…] it raised eyebrows when this week the two nations politely disagreed over whether Mr. [Yousaf Raza] Gilani [Pakistan’s Prime Minister] had given the Chinese a gift that would be hard to mislay: an entire naval base, right at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, who accompanied Mr. Gilani on the state visit [to China last week], announced the deal after Mr. Gilani returned home on Saturday.

“We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar,” a deepwater port on Pakistan’s southwest coast, he told journalists.

Moreover, he said, Pakistan had invited China to assume management of the port’s commercial operations, now run by a Singapore firm under a multidecade contract.

On Tuesday, however, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, disagreed, saying the port had neither been offered nor accepted.

“China and Pakistan are friendly neighbors,” she said at the ministry’s twice-weekly news conference. “Regarding the specific China-Pakistan cooperative project that you raised, I have not heard of it. It’s my understanding that during the visit last week this issue was not touched upon.”

Some analysts were at a loss to explain the discrepancy.

“Maybe there were some discussions between the two sides when Gilani was up in China last week, bearing on some kind of future Chinese stewardship of the port,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, in a telephone interview. “Maybe there was some speculative discussion. Perhaps the Defense Ministry simply got its signals wrong.”

“We’re seeing a lot of incompetence in the Pakistani government these days,” he added.

Others, however, saw Mr. Mukhtar’s announcement as a pointed, if graceless, effort to send a message to the United States that Pakistan had other options should its foundering relationship with Washington prove beyond repair. Ties between the two nations, never very warm, have been icy since American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in a raid inside Pakistan that went undetected by the nation’s military and intelligence establishments.

The increasingly chilly relations between the US and Pakistan is only one element of this posturing. The elephant in the room is India, Pakistan’s bugaboo, and a country that will soon exceed China in population.

It’s unclear that China wants such a base, but I am sure the India wouldn’t like it much.

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