Centred on a highly spurious and somewhat paranoid concern with
security, Washington is 'playing' its allies. Whether European or East Asian, they are now being drawn into co-dependence on Washington within an increasingly closed bloc instead of being free as independent nations to compete and trade as part of a one world system. That might be fine if each of these nations had a proportionate 'vote' in their own destiny within this bloc but they do not. American nuclear and economic superiority creates an intrinsic subordination to its strategy. As the US prepares to plunder the Ukraine through 'investment' in recompense for the expenditures on its regime, it arranges with local elites that allied populations be terrified with fears of a Russian bear which cannot do much more than hold the territory it has gained to date and the admittedly more formidable Chinese dragon. The eagle can sit back comfortably and watch the profits roll in from the coming age of increased and unnecessary arms sales and demand for its surplus LNG. No wonder the American financial markets are shrugging off inflation and interest rates.
A form of shock treatment (not the invasion but the sanctions) has detached Europe from its cheap and reliable supply of energy and commodities as well as access to a near if not particularly important export market and has made it dependent on more expensive US 'spot' energy. The next stage is to weaken European ability to export to China and Chinese ability to invest in Europe, impoverishing the latter more than the former. Russophobia must now be replaced with Sinophobia. In East Asia, where some concern about China is reasonable but still over-excitable, a slower moving cold war approach is designed to detach these vibrant economies from what will be the largest and nearest consumer and industrial market, certainly at its high tech end. Instead they are to bind their industries into an American-centred industrial strategy and weaken their access to cheap and probably reliable energy and commodities from the Russian Far East.
The con trick is working. Based on narratives of fear and loathing, both wings of the so-called West are now seeing their economies battered by inflation and high interest rates - most notably the basket case that is now the United Kingdom after the depradations of the Member for Kiev Central and the idiot economics of his successor. The prospect of fiscal destabilisation and deindustrialisation now emerges for some key countries as vast sums have to go on more expensive energy and food supplies and on military expenditures at the expense of social cohesion.
This new
division of the world into blocs does not do China or Russia too
much harm in practice. Both lose some market access only to create new synergies with each other. Both are now circumventing the West to go straight to the emerging world for influence, deals and natural resources. Russia
merely pivots East to China as the latter's junior economic partner - a commodity
supplier
playing a role similar to Australia and Canada within the Western system. Indeed, we now hear that any Chinese restrictions on taking Russian crude oil died in February in frustration at the confrontational approach of Washington. Germany, on the other hand, is threatened with deindustrialisation under its inept left-liberal coalition yet Chinese industry gets cheaper inputs for its industry in a reversal of the traditional cost of energy relationship between it and Europe. Those caught up in 'Western' (aka Washington's) strategy are seeing declining (Russia) and rising (China) nuclear superpowers brought into closer alignment, able to
dominate the land mass of Eurasia, This new and strenghened Eurasian bloc can also co-operate in
developing a shared approach to the emerging world, notably in the
Middle East and Africa, as the 'West'
retreats behind its cultural 'limes'. Europe and 'Western' East Asia are now just continental North America's 'front lines' rather than nodal points in a flourishing global economy. The developed world has circled its waggons and abandoned the emerging world to its rivals.
This new Cold War
2.0 does not do the US much harm at all - only its allies. The US may be a political basket case with gun violence and dreadful mortality figures amongst its young males but it is still
the most significant economic and military power on the globe. Its
constitutional arrangements ensure that systemic internal chaos has no
real effect on its structures of military and economic power. We are
looking at Rome revisited. The US will probably stay quasi-hegemonic
for some time to come because it is largely self-sufficient in a crisis
(as is the
Sino-Russian bloc). It may be challenging its rivals on at least equal terms but at greater cost
to its allies, as it drives those allies to blow huge sums of cash on feeding the maw of
its arms
sector because of exaggerated security threats. Those allies (notably those in Europe) are losing the chance to become an independent global player to match at least China and India - and it is quite probable that Washington likes things that way. The US has all the comforts of the old Cold War in the new one. It and the SCO carve up the world between them just like the good old days with the old Soviet bloc. Of course, the first Cold War resulted in the collapse of one side from internal strains - the second one may see a similar outcome in another seventy years. It may not be the Eurasian bloc that crumbles this time. It may be the European Union and UK that need liberating when it happens.
The
cover for all this imperial posturing is, of course, a rather spurious 'defence of democracy' argument. Yet, to be
frank, democracy has never been at threat within the West from any of
its
authoritarian rivals. It is threatened from within by the manipulative and authoritarian instincts of its own elites and the countervailing forces of an angry populism. If there is a threat to democracy it almost
certainly comes from the greed, lack of strategic thinking and
ineptitude of the political classes within the West. Ukraine and Taiwan
are merely 'imperial border' issues which have no necessary implications for the security
of
either NATO or Japan or South Korea any more than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan proved to have for the West. However, American strategy does
have the unfortunate possible consequence of creating the conditions for security threats that did not exist before. Washington
might eventually say 'I told you so' to its allies but only because it
had prodded its rivals into action. It is now more likely than it was in February 2022 that China will assert its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. It is more likely than it was in April 2022 that Russia will switch off the gas for Europe and plant tactical nuclear weaponry on the borders of an EU that remains fragmented and weak.
The major threat to Japan and South Korea has actually been North Korea. The new Cold War mentality has increased that threat because Beijing and Moscow have no incentive to collaborate with Washington on containing the country. The North Koreans have proportionately raised the local stakes in the last year. The Russian Pacific Fleet has lodged itself alongside the Kuriles while China mounts ever more provocative exercises around Taiwan. In other words, the break-down in relations between the West and the SCO has created the SCO as general threat out of a very particular and containable situation in Ukraine. Similarly, not only has Russia not had any material interest (quite the contrary) in challenging NATO until now (after all, the flow of energy to the EU and East-West trade argued to the contrary) but everyone's real interest should have been in the de-nuclearisation of Europe. This is what Russia always wanted. The skill for Europe would have been to ensure that price for denuclearisation West of the Urals would actually mean demilitarisation but the military-industrial complexes of the West and Mr. Stoltenberg cannot have that, can they?
It
gets worse by the month - two Baltic nations have now been bamboozled into joining
NATO quite unnecessarily (adding to their risks if there is a confrontation between blocs) while Europe in general is being bounced into
an economic confrontation with China when it has no essential
geo-political interest in getting involved in conflict with a superpower on the
other side of the world just to buttress the defensive concerns of
Washington. It all comes down to the fact that 'democratic' leaders in
Europe and East Asia are almost certainly not strategically very bright. They are trapped in ideological formulations derived from experiences
seventy years old (three decades in the case of Eastern Europe). They
have been 'spun' into policies that work directly against their first
duty which is to the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples. Europe and Pacific Rim East Asia have been played by Washington. Their peoples have been played by their elites.
