USA

Trump’s Cabinet of Dangerous Fanatics and Kooks

Thursday 21 November 2024, by Dan La Botz


President-elect Donald  Trump has rapidly chosen loyalists for cabinet positions and other high offices. The Senate must vote to confirm cabinet members and his choices are controversial even among Republicans. In some cases, Trump’s capricious, unvetted picks are likely to lead to governmental chaos if they are confirmed. Comics and journalists have referred to the new cabinet as “Trump’s clown car.” The clowns, however are not funny; they’re frightening.

Perhaps most outrageously, Trump has chosen Representative Matt Gaetz, for Attorney General. In 2020 Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape for taking a 17-year-old high school student across state lines to have sex with her. Both the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee investigated the matter but he was not charged.

Trump’s choice for Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based fracking firm. He will be a supporter of the fossil fuel industry and an opponent of efforts to cut back on greenhouse gases. Last year Wright said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaxxer to be Secretary of Health and Human Service, a department with a $1.7 trillion budget and tremendous influence on health policies. His choice has been widely criticized by health scientists and physicians.

Trump ran on the immigration issue saying he would close the border and begin deportations on day one, and to deal with it he has chosen white nationalist Steven Miller as chief of policy for homeland security and a tough-talking cop named Thomas Homan to be Border Czar. Homan was responsible for Trump’s family separation policy during Trump’s first term. They will deal with immigrants brutally.

Turning to foreign policy, for Secretary of Defense Trump has picked Pete Hegseth, a veteran Iraq and Afghanistan, a major in the National Guard and a TV host for far-right Fox News in 2014. Hegseth, who never managed a large organization, will be in charge of the 3.4 million employees of the Department of Defense. His choice has outraged members of Congress and former military officers, in part because of his support for soldiers accused of war crimes. He says the military is too “woke” and opposes its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which he says have weakened military values. He opposes too putting women in combat positions. Hegeth was accused of sexual assault when at a Republican women’s event, and though he was not charged, paid off the woman. Hegseth has a tattoo, Deus Vult (God’s Will) and wears a Jerusalem cross, both symbols of the white nationalist movement.

Trump choice for Director of National Intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, has been called a “Russian agent” and a “traitor” by a U.S. Representative because of her support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine She also met with Russian-backed dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

As U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Trump picked Baptist Minister Mike Huckabee the former governor of Arkansas. Huckabee fully supports Israel’s right to control the West Bank, a name he rejects preferring the Biblical Judea and Samaria. He says there is no West Bank, no occupation, and no such thing as a Palestinian.

Finally, we have Elon Musk, the tech mogul and world’s wealthiest man, who gave a least $132 million to Trump’s campaign, has been chosen together with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head a new Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has something like a trillion dollars in government contracts.

Cabinet appointments have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, though Trump may attempt to avoid this by “recess appointment” made when the Senate is not in session. Senators do not seem to have the integrity and courage to stand up to him. Trump’s clowns could blow up the government.

17 November 2024

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• Dan La Botz

  Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Trump: Isolationist in Instinct, Unpredictable in Action

Selective engagement will replace liberal internationalism.

By Walden Bello

November 21, 2024

Source: FPIP


There are a number of certainties about the coming Trump administration. One is that it will be bad for the climate. Another is that it will be bad for American democracy. A third is that it will be largely bad for minorities and for women.

But when it comes to many other matters, like foreign policy, the key word is unpredictability, for Trump, as the world learned during his first term in office, is unpredictability personified. Observing this caveat when it comes to what to expect in terms of concrete actions and policies, one can nevertheless discern what are likely to be the fundamental thrusts of Trump 2.0. This is as much the case in the area of foreign policy as in domestic policy.
Liberal Internationalism as “Grand Strategy”

To use a common phrase these days, the coming Trump presidency will not only be an “inflection point” for U.S. domestic politics but for U.S. foreign policy as well. This should not be surprising since it is domestic priorities and domestic public opinion that, in the last instance, determine a country’s stance towards the outside world—what is called its “grand strategy.” The last time the United States experienced the kind of transformative event in foreign affairs that is coming on January 20, 2025, is 83 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II. FDR had a hell of a time overcoming isolationist sentiment and may well have failed had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor and changed public sentiment overnight from isolationism toward global engagement.

The grand strategy that Roosevelt inaugurated can best be called “liberal internationalism.” Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the competition with the Soviet Union, that strategy was consolidated as “containment liberalism” by President Harry Truman, and it has been the guiding approach of every administration ever since, with the exception of the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. The fundamental premise of liberal internationalism was best expressed by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961, when he said that Americans “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Another much quoted characterization of this outlook was provided by another Democratic Party personality, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, when she said that for the maintenance of global order, the United States was “the indispensable country.”

Liberal internationalism had its hard and not-so-hard versions, the former often termed containment liberalism or neoconservatism. But whatever their differences when it came to rhetoric or implementation, the differences between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism were matters of nuance, not substance. The rhetoric was lofty but the subtext of the rhetoric of liberal internationalism was making the world safe for the expansion of America capital by extending the political and military reach of the U.S. state.
The Unraveling of Liberal Internationalism

The grand strategy of liberal internationalism, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019. Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China.

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.
Orban on Trump’s Grand Strategy

Probably the world leader that Trump admires most is Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. Indeed, Trump and Orban form a mutual admiration society. Prior to the elections, Orban was channeling Trump to the world. On the question of America’s relations with the world under a second Trump presidency, Orban had this to say:


[M]any people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. ..And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!”… For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

Let’s parse and expand on Orban’s comments. For Trump, there is one overriding agenda, and that is to rejuvenate, repair, and reconstitute what he regards as an economy and society that has been in sharp decline owing to policies of the last few decades, policies that were broadly shared by Democrats and traditional Republicans.

For him, neoliberal policies, by encouraging American capital to go abroad, particularly to China, and free-trade policies, have greatly harmed the U.S. industrial infrastructure, resulting in loss of good paying blue-collar jobs, stagnation in wages, and rising inequality. “Making American Great Again” or MAGA is mainly an inward-looking perspective that prioritizes economic rejuvenation by bringing American capital back, walling off the American economic from cheap imports, particularly from China, and reducing immigration to a trickle—with that trickle coming mainly from what he would term “non-shithole countries” like Norway. Racism, dog-whistle politics, and anti-migrant sentiment are, not surprisingly, woven into Trump’s domestic and foreign policy rhetoric since his base is principally—though not exclusively—the white working class.

Foreign policy is, from this perspective, a distraction that must be seen as a necessary evil. The MAGA mindset, which is basically isolationism cum nationalism, sees U.S. security arrangements abroad, whether in the guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or mutual defense treaties such as those with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as obsolete commitments that may have been appropriate at a time that the United States was an expansionist power with tremendous resources but have since become bothersome relics for a power in decline, gaping holes that leak both money, manpower, and energy that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order defended by the political canopy of multilateralism and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of U.S. power. Deal-making, like the one Trump conducted with Kim Jong-Un during his first term, would, instead, be one of the main methods of defending American interests. Unilateral military and economic actions against those outside the fortress that are seen as threats, rather than allied endeavors, will be the order of the day.
Selective Engagement and Spheres of Influence

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it with the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will stick to the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington’s confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain. Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could the withdrawal or radical reduction of Washington’s military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts both states.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’s a dollar price to be paid for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. I think Trump knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of the Philippine vessel. Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold or abandoned.

In short, Trump is likely to communicate to Xi Jinping that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

In conclusion, one must restate the caveat made at the beginning of this piece: that there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

Walden Bello is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).

 

The logic of imperialism’s ‘Maritime Great Game’ in the Southeast Asian Sea

By Rasti Delizo

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published at Amandla!.

The states with a coastline adjoining the Southeast Asian Sea are all facing a sharply rising regional quagmire. They are witnessing a soaring economic-diplomatic-security confrontation between the world’s top two imperialist powers. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are destabilising Southeast Asia by forcefully projecting their respective geostrategic objectives throughout the area. And by doing so, the region’s social majority — its working-class masses — are now becoming dangerously embroiled in this escalating great power collision.

A strategic competition

This imperialist rivalry is defined by the intensifying strategic competition between the US and China. They are both aiming to secure increased regional hegemony. So, they have unleashed parallel initiatives to thwart each other’s sweeping geopolitical designs for the immense Afro-Eurasia-Indo-Pacific as a whole — the Eastern Hemisphere.

In fact, these imperialist states are in relative decline. Only through international rivalry can they negate their weakened domestic conditions. Their reactions aim to protect their bourgeois socioeconomic formations from the fallouts of the chronically ruptured global capitalist system of production.

What is SEAS?

The Southeast Asian Sea is the vast expanse of salt water that lies within the southeastern region of Asia. Given its location, using the name ‘Southeast Asian Sea’, or ‘SEAS’, is more precise than the traditional name, the ‘South China Sea’. Another reason to use the name is to counter lingering inter-state frictions, which are encouraged by the use of nationalist-oriented place names for this marine realm. This readily breeds the reactionary phenomenon of national chauvinism and its destructive behaviours.

The Southeast Asian Sea remains one of planet Earth’s most diverse biospheres. It is a colossal aquatic ecosystem, covering approximately three and a half million square kilometres. It has over two hundred coral islets, an abundance of hydrocarbon deposits, and huge amounts of marine life. This organic wealth of natural resources is enough to sustain these states’ economies.

The Southeast Asian Sea is also a historically strategic marine domain that connects the Indian and Pacific oceans. As the region’s preeminent maritime corridor, its natural sea lanes provide crucial passage daily to enormous volumes of the world’s seaborne trade. It has key chokepoints in the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, and therefore acts as a vital channel for the trade between the economies of Europe, Africa and West Asia, and those of East Asia. And as a strategic sea spanning a zone of the Eastern Hemisphere, there is also a massive amount of shipping trade originating from the Western Hemisphere (i.e., North/Central/South America and the Caribbean).

Maritime Southeast Asia has consequently become a focus area for the competing interests of the world’s imperialist powers. Its regional security environment is now a turbulent arena of contestation for the major powers. They essentially seek to carve out additional space for capital accumulation through military means. This has turned the SEAS into an acute, perilous, global flashpoint.

A struggle between two imperialisms

The imperialist competition between the US and China is a particular manifestation of a generalised systemic crisis materially rooted in the inherent contradictions of the prevailing imperialist world system. Southeast Asia is being impacted by a strategic shift underpinning the bourgeois international order.

This great power engagement is unlike the last century’s Cold War. It is clearly not an international struggle between opposing ideological poles, supporting the strategic visions of contending socioeconomic systems. The first Cold War (1946-1991) was a clash of starkly counterposed systems — the capitalist camp (led by American imperialism) versus the communist camp (led by the former Soviet Union).

In contrast, the contemporary inter-imperialist conflict is being waged through a singular ‘capitalist unipolar order’. The contesting imperialist powers belong to the same capitalist pole. Together, they principally direct the monopoly capitalist agenda of the global core — albeit in an adversarial way.

Neither of them challenges the fundamentals of the capitalist system of production and distribution. Neither of them opposes globalised finance-monopoly capitalism’s exploitative norms of extracting surplus value through unequal exchange mechanisms to guarantee incessant capital accumulation for the imperialist core. Nor do they even attempt, in any serious way, to break imperialism’s circuits of global capital that oppressively control the periphery. Both American and Chinese imperialisms openly support the capitalist logic of guaranteeing the net flow of value (wealth) from the dominated countries to the centres of world capital.

Imperialist competition is mainly driven by the slow global pace of capitalist development due to stagnant growth with falling rates of profit. These negatives are made worse by other disruptive factors of the capitalist world economy, especially its generalised crisis of overproduction, along with overaccumulation, chronic underutilisation of capacity linked to constant mass unemployment, and global conditions of uneven and combined development. Thus, the central dynamics fueling this neo-Cold War moment stem from the contradictions intrinsic to the imperialist world system itself.

This system principally functions through the logic of super profits based on the eternal accumulation of capital. Its structure is built on exploitative and oppressive systems based on a global core-periphery model. In plain terms, this comprehensive socioeconomic formation supports and reinforces the capitalist, unipolar order.

The imperialist struggle for domination

Inside the global core lies a very small group of advanced capitalist economies. They are arranged into contending blocs led by the leading imperialist powers. These imperialist blocs directly compete with each other for economic control and political dominance over most of the world’s dependent semi-colonial states, which lie at the periphery. The power struggle between the US and China represents the current phase of the international system.

The imperialist blocs continually seek to increase the scope of their power through constantly expanding their respective spheres of influence and domination. In advancing their schemes for predominance, the imperialists try to reshape the international division of labour to favour their own geostrategic goals and interests. As a result, worldwide disputes, strife and wars inevitably erupt between them as they fight for global ascendancy.

These imperialist powers are always prepared to wage relentless acts of aggression beyond their frontiers. They do so to achieve a competitive advantage for their ruling classes. They engage in harmful and destructive economic competition, political schemes, and aggressive wars worldwide, regardless of the social cost. This is a general characteristic of monopoly capital. And during crisis moments, the imperialist states readily strike at each other in attempts to attain economic-political-security superiority for their own financial-oligarchic national regimes.

Unquestionably, the world suffers from the consequences of global polycrisis, which results from this in terms of the economy, politics, security, health, and climate emergency.

Following the ‘global capitalist crisis-depression’ that flared in September 2008, the US worked to regain and stabilise its international strategic position. It pursued this by strengthening its regional spheres of influence via attempts at reshaping the global economic and political order to align with its interests.

US strategy

US imperialism’s main goal remains the rejuvenation of American capital, chiefly through a revitalised global network of ever-expanding national markets in pivotal regions of the world. Combined with this, US imperialism robustly restimulates and weaponises monopoly capitalism for higher growth. It does so by producing enormous amounts of war materiel and using it in wars overseas. After the conflicts end, American capital then rebuilds the devastated countries. Through this coercive cycle, Washington aims to continually reshape the capitalist world order to maintain its global dominance. 

In functional terms, American imperialism currently advances a redesigned, long-range, foreign-security policy framework. Driven by the Biden regime’s central mantra, “We are in a competition with China to win the 21st Century”, the US’s geostrategy is based on building strong regional economic and military alliances to counter China in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. Guided by its dual 2022 geostrategic blueprints — the ‘National Security Strategy’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ — Washington’s main goal is to secure ‘free and open’ access to the region’s air and maritime arenas while limiting China’s opportunities for expansion.

By now, US imperialism has effectively extended the ambit of NATO into the Asia-Indo-Pacific. In also promoting market access initiatives, the ‘globalised NATO’ project aligns American monopoly capital’s economic and military priorities. To implement this strategy, Washington integrates the neoliberal Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), along with alliances like the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS), Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and the Japan-Philippines-US political-military partnerships. Together, these coordinated efforts jointly form American imperialism’s battering ram to oppose Chinese imperialism in the region.

China’s strategy

To foil this, China has built up its own network. These include the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Maritime Silk Road (MSR), the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/South Africa) grouping.

China’s comprehensive national power is not just a counterbalance to that of the US; it is also aimed at maintaining the global bourgeois system along imperialist lines.

Despite this, the US is succeeding in enticing other East Asian states to join its imperialist project to deny/degrade/damage the Chinese imperialist bloc’s regional strategic agenda. Integral to this, Washington regularly affirms its diplomatic narrative of “upholding the rules-based international order” (a code phrase for globally propping up US imperialist interests). So, it enlists blatantly pro-American states — like the Philippines — to openly provoke China. This is exemplified by the deployment of American troops and weaponry inside US-controlled military bases on Philippine territory.

The Philippines as a puppet in the struggle

Washington has a clear strategic plan, but Manila’s foreign policy planners fail to consider how China’s leadership thinks. Filipino leaders assume China will see their actions as harmless, even when the Philippines cooperates with the US. However, what really matters is how China (as a great power) views its external security environment — not what Manila claims. This allows Washington to strongly take advantage of Manila’s blind loyalty to the US to provoke China.

China’s social-chauvinist militarism in the Southeast Asian Sea should be condemned. Equally, the international communist movement must also denounce the joint US-Philippines military manoeuvres. Clearly, all imperialist wars of aggression must be opposed.

At present, US imperialism is already preparing for a possible limited war with China, using the Philippines as a trigger point to reshape Southeast Asia’s geopolitical landscape. Washington aims to strengthen its influence in the region to boost American economic growth and power. This will lead to a risky and significant shift in the ongoing imperialist competition within the area. And so, today, this is now Southeast Asia’s ‘Maritime Great Game’.

Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst. He is a member of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP/Solidarity of Filipino Workers); BMP is a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino working-class movement.

 

Geopolitical conflicts, anti-imperialism and internationalism in times of ‘reactionary acceleration’

By Jaime Pastor

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published in Spanish at Viento Sur. Translation from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Within the general framework of the multidimensional crisis in which we find ourselves, now aggravated by the stimulus that Trump’s recent electoral victory represents for the rise of an extreme right on a global scale, it seems even more evident that we are witnessing a profound crisis of the international geopolitical (dis)order, as well as of the basic rules of International Law that have been established since the end of the Second World War. The most tragic manifestation of this crisis (which calls into question even the future of the UN) is found in the genocidal war against Gaza (Awad, 2024), to which are currently added around 56 wars across the planet.

In this context, the imperialist hierarchical system based on US hegemony is openly questioned and challenged by other major powers, such as China and Russia, as well as by others on a regional scale, such as Iran. This global geopolitical competition is clearly evident in certain war conflicts, the evolution of which will determine a new configuration of the balance of power within this system, as well as of the blocks present or in formation, such as the BRICS. In light of this new scenario, in this article I will focus on a summary description of the current panorama, then characterise the different positions that appear within the left in this new phase and insist on the need to build an internationalist left that is opposed to all imperialisms (main or secondary) and in solidarity with the struggles of the attacked peoples.

Polycrisis and authoritarian neoliberalisms

There is broad consensus on the left regarding the diagnosis we can make of the global crisis that the world is currently going through, with the eco-social and climate crisis as a backdrop. A polycrisis that we can define with Pierre Rousset as “multifaceted, the result of the combination of multiple specific crises. So we are not facing a simple sum of crises, but their interaction, which multiplies their dynamics, fueling a death spiral for the human species (and for a large part of living species)” (Pastor, 2024).

A situation that is closely related to the exhaustion of the neoliberal capitalist accumulation regime that began in the mid-1970s, which, after the fall of the bloc dominated by the USSR, took a leap forward towards its expansion on a global scale. A process that led to the Great Recession that began in 2008 (aggravated by austerity policies, the consequences of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine), which ended up frustrating the expectations of social advancement and political stability that the promised happy globalization had generated, mainly among significant sectors of the new middle classes.

A globalization, it must be remembered, that was expanded under the new neoliberal cycle that throughout its different phases: combative, normative and punitive (Davies, 2016), has been building a new transnational economic constitutionalism at the service of global corporate tyranny and the destruction of the structural, associative and social power of the working class. And, what is more serious, it has turned into common sense the “ market civilization” as the only possible one, although this whole process has acquired different variants and forms of political regimes, generally based on strong States immune to democratic pressure (Gill, 2022; Slobodian, 2021). A neoliberalism that, however, is today showing its inability to offer a horizon of improvement for the majority of humanity on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We are therefore in a period, both at the state and interstate level, full of uncertainties, under a financialized, digital, extractivist and rentier capitalism that makes our lives precarious and seeks at all costs to lay the foundations for a new stage of growth with an increasingly active role of the States at its service. To do so, it resorts to new forms of political domination functional to this project that, increasingly, tend to come into conflict not only with freedoms and rights won after long popular struggles, but also with liberal democracy. In this way, an increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism is spreading, not only in the South but increasingly in the North, with the threat of a “reactionary acceleration” (Castellani, 2024). A process now stimulated by a Trumpism that is becoming the master discursive framework of a rising far right, willing to constitute itself as an alternative to the crisis of global governance and the decomposition of the old political elites (Urbán, 2024; Camargo, 2024).

The imperialist hierarchical system in dispute

Within this context, succinctly explained here, we are witnessing a crisis of the imperialist hierarchical system that has predominated since the fall of the Soviet bloc, facilitated precisely by the effects generated by a process of globalization that has led to the displacement of the center of gravity of the world economy from the North Atlantic (Europe-USA) to the Pacific (USA, East and Southeast Asia).

Indeed, following the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008 and the subsequent crisis of neoliberal globalization, a new phase has begun in which a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order is taking place, tending to be multipolar but at the same time asymmetrical, in which the United States remains the great hegemonic power (monetary, military and geopolitical), but is weakened and challenged by China, the great rising power, and Russia, as well as by other sub-imperial or secondary powers in different regions of the planet. Meanwhile, in many countries of the South, faced with the plundering of their resources, the increase in sovereign debt and popular revolts and wars of different kinds, the end of development as a goal to be achieved is giving way to reactionary populisms in the name of order and security.

Thus, global and regional geopolitical competition is being accentuated by the different competing interests, not only on the economic and technological level, but also on the military and values level, with the consequent rise of state ethno-nationalisms against presumed internal and external enemies.

However, one must not forget the high degree of economic, energy and technological interdependence that has been developing across the planet in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as was clearly highlighted both during the global pandemic crisis and the lack of an effective energy blockade against Russia despite the agreed sanctions. Added to this are two new fundamental factors: on the one hand, the current possession of nuclear weapons by major powers (there are currently four nuclear hotspots: one in the Middle East (Israel) and three in Eurasia (Ukraine, India-Pakistan and the Korean peninsula); and, on the other, the climate, energy and materials crisis (we are in overtime!), which substantially differentiate this situation from that before 1914. These factors condition the geopolitical and economic transition underway, setting limits to a deglobalisation that is probably partial and which, of course, does not promise to be happy for the great majority of humanity. At the same time, these factors also warn of the increased risk of escalation in armed conflicts in which powers with nuclear weapons are directly or indirectly involved, as is the case in Ukraine or Palestine.

This specificity of the current historical stage leads us, according to Promise Li, to consider that the relationship between the main great powers (especially if we refer to that between the USA and China) is given through an unstable balance between an “antagonistic cooperation” and a growing “inter-imperialist rivalry”. A balance that could be broken in favour of the latter, but that could also be normalised within the common search for a way out of the secular stagnation of a global capitalism in which China (Rousset, 2021) and Russia (Serfati, 2022) have now been inserted, although with very different evolutions. A process, therefore, full of contradictions, which is extensible to other powers, such as India, which are part of the BRICS, in which the governments of its member countries have not so far questioned the central role of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which remain under US hegemony (Fuentes, 2023; Toussaint, 2024).

However, it is clear that the geopolitical weakening of the United States — especially after its total fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, the crisis of legitimacy that is being caused by its unconditional support for the genocidal State of Israel — is allowing a greater potential margin of manoeuvre on the part of different global or regional powers, in particular those with nuclear weapons. For this reason I agree with Pierre Rousset’s description:

The relative decline of the United States and the incomplete rise of China have opened up a space in which secondary powers can play a significant role, at least in their own region (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, etc.), although the limits of the BRICS are clear. In this situation, Russia has not failed to present China with a series of faits accomplis on Europe’s eastern borders. Acting in concert, Moscow and Beijing were largely the masters of the game on the Eurasian continent. However, there was no coordination between the invasion of Ukraine and an actual attack on Taiwan (Pastor, 2024).

This, undoubtedly facilitated by the greater or lesser weight of other factors related to the polycrisis, explains the outbreak of conflicts and wars in very different parts of the planet, but in particular those that occur in three very relevant current epicentres: Ukraine, Palestine and, although for now in terms of the cold war, Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, we have seen how the US took advantage of Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to relaunch the expansion of a NATO in crisis towards other countries in Eastern and Northern Europe. An objective closely associated with the reformulation of NATO’s “new strategic concept”, as we were able to see at the summit that this organisation held in Madrid in July 2022 (Pastor, 2022) and more recently at the one held in Washington in July of this year. At the latter, this strategy was reaffirmed, as well as the consideration of China as the main strategic competitor, while any criticism of the State of Israel was avoided. The latter is what is showing the double standards (Achcar, 2024) of the Western bloc with regard to its involvement in the war in Ukraine, on the one hand, and its complicity with the genocide that the colonial State of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people, on the other.

Again, we have also seen NATO’s growing interest in the Southern flank in order to pursue its racist necropolitics against illegal immigration while continuing to aspire to compete for control of basic resources in countries of the South, especially in Africa, where French and American imperialisms are losing weight against China and Russia.

In this way, the strategy of the Western bloc has been redefined, within which US hegemony has been strengthened on the military level (thanks, above all, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and to which a more divided European Union with its old German engine weakened is clearly subordinated. However, after Trump’s victory, the European Union seems determined to reinforce its military power in the name of the search for a false strategic autonomy, since it will continue to be linked to the framework of NATO. Meanwhile, many countries in the South are distancing themselves from this bloc, although with different interests among them, which differentiates the possible alliances that may be formed from the one that in the past characterized the Non-Aligned Movement.

In any case, it is likely that after his electoral victory, Donald Trump will make a significant shift in US foreign policy in order to implement his MAGA (Make America Great Again) project beyond the geoeconomic level (intensifying his competition with China and, although at a different level, with the EU), especially in relation to the three epicentres of conflicts mentioned above: with regard to Ukraine, by substantially reducing economic and military aid and seeking some form of agreement with Putin, at least on a ceasefire; with regard to Israel, by reinforcing his support for Netanyahu’s total war; and finally by reducing his military commitment to Taiwan.

What anti-imperialist internationalism from the left?

In this context of the rise of an authoritarian neoliberalism (in its different versions: the reactionary one of the extreme right and that of the extreme centre, mainly) and of various geopolitical conflicts, the great challenge for the left is how to reconstruct antagonistic social and political forces anchored in the working class and capable of forging an anti-imperialism and a solidarity internationalism that is not subordinated to one or another great power or regional capitalist bloc.

A task that will not be easy, because in the current phase we are witnessing deep divisions within the left in relation to the position to maintain in the face of some of the aforementioned conflicts. Trying to synthesize, with Ashley Smith (2024), we could distinguish four positions:

The first would be the one that aligns itself with the Western imperial bloc in the common defense of alleged democratic values against Russia, or with the State of Israel in its unjustifiable right to self-defense, as has been stated by a majority sector of the social-liberal left. A position that hides the true imperialist interests of that bloc, does not denounce its double standards and ignores the increasingly de-democratizing and racist drift that Western regimes are experiencing, as well as the colonial and occupying character of the Israeli State.

The second is what is often described as campism, which would align itself with states such as Russia or China, which it considers allies against US imperialism because it considers the latter to be the main enemy, ignoring the expansionist geopolitical interests of these two powers. A position that reminds us of the one that many communist parties held in the past during the Cold War in relation to the USSR, but which now becomes a caricature considering both the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime and the persistent state-bureaucratic despotism in China.

The third is that of a geopolitical reductionism , which is now reflected in the war in Ukraine, limiting itself to considering it to be only an inter-imperialist conflict. This attitude, adopted by a sector of pacifism and the left, implies denying the legitimacy of the dimension of national struggle against the occupying power that the Ukrainian resistance has, without ceasing to criticize the neoliberal and pro-Atlanticist character of the government that heads it.

Finally, there is the one that is against all imperialisms (whether major or minor) and against all double standards, showing itself ready to stand in solidarity with all attacked peoples, even if they may have the support of one or another imperial power (such as the US and the EU in relation to Ukraine) or regional power (such as Iran in relation to Hamas in Palestine). This is a position that does not accept respect for the spheres of influence that the various major powers aspire to protect or expand, and that stands in solidarity with the peoples who fight against foreign occupation and for the right to decide their future (in particular, with the leftist forces in these countries that are betting on an alternative to neoliberalism), and is not aligned with any political-military bloc.

This last position is the one that I consider to be the most coherent from an anti-capitalist left. In fact, keeping in mind the historical distance and recognizing the need to analyze the specificity of each case, it coincides with the criteria that Lenin tried to apply when analyzing the centrality that the struggle against national and colonial oppression was acquiring in the imperialist phase of the early twentieth century. This was reflected, in relation to conflicts that broke out then, in several of his articles such as, for example, in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” written in January-February 1916, where he maintained that:

The fact that the struggle for national freedom against an imperialist power can be exploited, under certain conditions, by another ’great’ power to achieve equally imperialist ends cannot force social democracy to renounce recognizing the right of nations to self-determination, just as the repeated cases of the use of republican slogans by the bourgeoisie for the purposes of political fraud and financial plunder (for example, in Latin countries) cannot force social democrats to renounce their republicanism (Lenin, 1976).

An internationalist position that must be accompanied by mobilisation against the remilitarisation process underway by NATO and the EU, but also against that of other powers such as Russia or China. And which must commit to putting the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military blocs back at the centre of the agenda, taking up the baton of the powerful peace movement that developed in Europe during the 1980s, with the feminist activists of Greenham Common and intellectuals such as Edward P. Thompson at the forefront. An orientation that must obviously be inserted within a global eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.

References

Achcar, Gilbert (2024) “Anti-fascism and the Fall of Atlantic Liberalism”, Viento Sur, 19/08/24.

Awad, Nada (2024) “International Law and Israeli Exceptionalism”, Viento Sur, 193, pp. 19-27.

Camargo, Laura (2024) Discursive Trumpism . Madrid: Verbum (in press).

Castellani, Lorenzo (2024) “With Trump, the Age of Reactionary Acceleration”, Le Grand Continent, 11/08/24.

Davies, William (2016) “Neoliberalism 3.0”, New Left Review , 101, pp. 129-143.

Fuentes, Federico (2023) “Interview with Promise Li: US-China Rivalry, ’Antagonistic Cooperation’ and Anti-Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 191, 5-18. Available in English at https://links.org.au/us-china-rivalry-antagonistic-cooperation-and-anti-imperialism-21st-century-interview-promise-li

Gill, Stephen (2002) “Globalization, Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”. In Hovden, E. and Keene, E. (Eds.) The Globalization of Liberalism. London: Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lenin, Vladimir (1976) “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, Selected Works, Volume V, pp. 349-363. Moscow: Progreso.

Pastor, Jaime (2022) “NATO’s New Strategic Concept. Towards a New Permanent Global War?”, Viento Sur, 07/02/22. Available in English at https://links.org.au/towards-new-permanent-global-war-natos-new-strategic-concept

— (2024) “Interview with Pierre Rousset: World Crisis and Wars: What Internationalism for the 21st Century?”, Viento Sur, 04/16/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/global-crisis-conflict-and-war-what-internationalism-21st-century

Rousset, Pierre (2021) “China, the New Emerging Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 10/16/21. 

Serfati, Claude (2022) “The Age of Imperialism Continues: Putin Proves It”, Viento Sur, 04/21/22. 

Slobodian, Quinn (2021) Globalists. Madrid: Capitán Swing. 

Smith, Ashley (2024) “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today”, Viento Sur, 06/04/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism-today

Toussaint, Eric (2024) “The BRICS Summit in Russia Offered No Alternative”, Viento Sur, 10/30/24. 

Urbán, Miguel (2024) Trumpisms. Neoliberals and Authoritarians . Barcelona: Verso.