- Introduction
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After suffering major military and political defeats in bloody ground wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, failing to buttress long-standing clients in Yemen,
Egypt and Tunisia and witnessing the disintegration of puppet regimes in
Somalia and South Sudan, the Obama regime has learned nothing: Instead
he has turned toward greater military confrontation with global powers,
namely Russia and China. Obama has adopted a provocative offensive military
strategy right on the frontiers of both China and Russia.
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- After going from defeat to defeat on the
periphery of world power and not satisfied with running treasury-busting
deficits in pursuit of empire building against economically weak countries,
Obama has embraced a policy of encirclement and provocations against China,
the world's second largest economy and the US's most important creditor,
and Russia, the European Union's principle oil and gas provider and the
world's second most powerful nuclear weapons power.
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- This paper addresses the Obama regime's highly
irrational and world-threatening escalation of imperial militarism. We
examine the global military, economic and domestic political context that
gives rise to these policies. We then examine the multiple points of conflict
and intervention in which Washington is engaged, from Pakistan, Iran, Libya,
Venezuela, Cuba and beyond. We will then analyze the rationale for military
escalation against Russia and China as part of a new offensive moving beyond
the Arab world (Syria, Libya) and in the face of the declining economic
position of the EU and the US in the global economy. We will then outline
the strategies of a declining empire, nurtured on perpetual wars, facing
global economic decline, domestic discredit and a working population reeling
from the long-term, large-scale dismantling of its basic social programs.
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- The Turn from Militarism in the Periphery to Global Military
Confrontation
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- November 2011 is a moment of great historical
import: Obama declared two major policy positions, both having tremendous
strategic consequences affecting competing world powers.
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- Obama pronounced a policy of military encirclement
of China based on stationing a maritime and aerial armada facing the Chinese
coast an overt policy designed to weaken and disrupt China's access
to raw materials and commercial and financial ties in Asia. Obama's declaration
that Asia is the priority region for US military expansion, base-building
and economic alliances was directed against China, challenging Beijing
in its own backyard. Obama's iron fist policy statement, addressed to
the Australian Parliament, was crystal clear in defining US imperial goals.
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- "Our enduring interests in the region
[Asia Pacific] demands our enduring presence in this region The United
States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay As we end today's wars
[i.e. the defeats and retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan]... I have directed
my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia
Pacific a top priority As a result, reduction in US defense spending will
not come at the expense of the Asia Pacific" (CNN.com, Nov. 16, 2011).
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- The precise nature of what Obama called our "presence
and mission" was underlined by the new military agreement with Australia
to dispatch warships, warplanes and 2500 marines to the northern most city
of Australia (Darwin) directed at China. Secretary of State Clinton has
spent the better part of 2011 making highly provocative overtures to Asian
countries that have maritime border conflicts with China. Clinton has
forcibly injected the US into these disputes, encouraging and exacerbating
the demands of Vietnam, Philippines, and Brunei in the South China Sea.
Even more seriously, Washington is bolstering its military ties and sales
with Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, as well as increasing the
presence of battleships, nuclear submarines and over flights of war planes
along China's coastal waters. In line with the policy of military encirclement
and provocation, the Obama-Clinton regime is promoting Asian multi-lateral
trade agreements that exclude China and privilege US multi-national corporations,
bankers and exporters, dubbed the "Trans-Pacific Partnership".
It currently includes mostly smaller countries, but Obama has hopes of
enticing Japan and Canada to join
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- Obama's presence at the APEC meeting of East Asian leader
and his visit to Indonesia in November 2011 all revolve around efforts
to secure US hegemony. Obama-Clinton hope to counter the relative decline
of US economic links in the face of the geometrical growth of trade and
investment ties between East Asia and China.
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- A most recent example of Obama-Clinton's
delusional, but destructive, efforts to deliberately disrupt China's economic
ties in Asia, is taking place in Myanmar (Burma). Clinton's December 2011
visit to Myanmar was preceded by a decision by the Thein Sein regime to
suspend a China Power Investment-funded dam project in the north of the
country. According to official confidential documents released by WilkiLeaks
the "Burmese NGO's, which organized and led the campaign against the
dam, were heavily funded by the US government"(Financial Times, Dec.
2, 2011, p. 2). This and other provocative activity and Clinton's speeches
condemning Chinese "tied aid" pale in comparison with the long-term,
large-scale interests which link Myanmar with China. China is Myanmar's
biggest trading partner and investor, including six other dam projects.
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- Chinese companies are building new highways
and rail lines across the country, opening southwestern China up for Burmese
products and China is constructing oil pipelines and ports. There is a
powerful dynamic of mutual economic interests that will not be disturbed
by one dispute (FT, December 2, 2011, p.2). Clinton's critique of China's
billion-dollar investments in Myanmar's infrastructure is one of the most
bizarre in world history, coming in the aftermath of Washington's brutal
eight-year military presence in Iraq which destroyed $500 billion dollars
of Iraqi infrastructure, according to Baghdad official estimates. Only
a delusional administration could imagine that rhetorical flourishes, a
three day visit and the bankrolling of an NGO is an adequate counter-weight
to deep economic ties linking Myanmar to China. The same delusional posture
underlies the entire repertoire of policies informing the Obama regime's
efforts to displace China's predominant role in Asia.
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- While any one policy adopted by the Obama
regime does not, in itself, present an immediate threat to peace,
the cumulative impact of all these policy pronouncements and the projections
of military power add up to an all out comprehensive effort to isolate,
intimidate and degrade China's rise as a regional and global power. Military
encirclement and alliances, exclusion of China in proposed regional economic
associations, partisan intervention in regional maritime disputes and positioning
technologically advanced warplanes, are all aimed to undermine China's
competitiveness and to compensate for US economic inferiority via closed
political and economic networks.
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- Clearly White House military and economic
moves and US Congressional anti-China demagogy are aimed at weakening China's
trading position and forcing its business-minded leaders into privileging
US banking and business interests over and above their own enterprises.
Pushed to its limits, Obama's prioritizing a big military push could lead
to a catastrophic rupture in US-Chinese economic relations. This would
result in dire consequences, especially but not exclusively, on the US
economy and particularly its financial system. China holds over $1.5 trillion
dollars in US debt, mainly Treasury Notes, and each year purchases from
$200 to $300 billion in new issues, a vital source in financing the US
deficit.
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- If Obama provokes a serious threat to China's
security interests and Beijing is forced to respond, it will not be military
but economic retaliation: the sell-off of a few hundred billion dollars
in T-notes and the curtailment of new purchases of US debt. The US deficit
will skyrocket, its credit ratings will descend to 'junk', and the financial
system will 'tremble onto collapse'. Interest rates to attract new buyers
of US debt will approach double digits. Chinese exports to the US will
suffer and losses will incur due to the devaluation of the T-notes in Chinese
hands. China has been diversifying its markets around the world and
its huge domestic market could probably absorb most of what China loses
abroad in the course of a pull-back from the US market.
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- While Obama strays across the Pacific to
announce his military threats to China and strives to economically isolate
China from the rest of Asia, the US economic presence is fast fading in
what used to be its "backyard": Quoting one Financial Times
journalist, "China is the only show [in town] for Latin America"
(Financial Times, Nov. 23, 2011, p.6). China has displaced the US and
the EU as Latin America's principle trading partner; Beijing has poured
billions in new investments and provides low interest loans.
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- China's trade with India, Indonesia,
Japan, Pakistan and Vietnam is increasing at a far faster rate than that
of the US. The US effort to build an imperial-centered security alliance
in Asia is based on fragile economic foundations. Even Australia, the
anchor and linchpin of the US military thrust in Asia, is heavily dependent
on mineral exports to China. Any military interruption would send the
Australian economy into a tailspin.
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- The US economy is in no condition to replace
China as a market for Asian or Australian commodity and manufacturing exports.
The Asian countries must be acutely aware that there is no future advantage
in tying themselves to a declining, highly militarized, empire. Obama
and Clinton deceive themselves if they think they can entice Asia into
a long-term alliance. The Asian's are simply using the Obama regime's
friendly overtures as a 'tactical device', a negotiating ploy, to leverage
better terms in securing maritime and territorial boundaries with China.
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- Washington is delusional if it believes
that it can convince Asia to break long-term large-scale lucrative economic
ties to China in order to join an exclusive economic association with such
dubious prospects. Any 'reorientation' of Asia, from China to the US,
would require more than the presence of an American naval and airborne
armada pointed at China. It would require the total restructuring of the
Asian countries' economies, class structure and political and military
elite. The most powerful economic entrepreneurial groups in Asia have
deep and growing ties with China/Hong Kong, especially among the dynamic
transnational Chinese business elites in the region. A turn toward Washington
entails a massive counter-revolution, which substitutes colonial 'traders'
(compradors) for established entrepreneurs. A turn to the US would require
a dictatorial elite willing to cut strategic trading and investment linkages,
displacing millions of workers and professionals. As much as some US-trained
Asian military officers , economists and former Wall Street financiers
and billionaires might seek to 'balance' a US military presence with Chinese
economic power, they must realize that ultimately advantage resides in
working out an Asian solution.
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- The age of Asian "comprador capitalists",
willing to sell out national industry and sovereignty in exchange for privileged
access to US markets, is ancient history. Whatever the boundless enthusiasm
for conspicuous consumerism and Western lifestyles, which Asia and China's
new rich mindlessly celebrate, whatever the embrace of inequalities and
savage capitalist exploitation of labor, there is recognition that the
past history of US and European dominance precluded the growth and enrichment
of an indigenous bourgeoisie and middle class. The speeches and pronouncements
of Obama and Clinton reek of nostalgia for a past of neo-colonial overseers
and comprador collaborators a mindless delusion. Their attempts
at political realism, in finally recognizing Asia as the economic pivot
of the present world order, takes a bizarre turn in imagining that military
posturing and projections of armed force will reduce China to a marginal
player in the region.
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- Obama's Escalation of Confrontation with Russia
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- The Obama regime has launched a major frontal
military thrust on Russia's borders. The US has moved forward missile
sites and Air Force bases in Poland, Rumania, Turkey, Spain, Czech Republic
and Bulgaria: Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft missile complexes in Poland;
advanced radar AN/TPY-2 in Turkey; and several missile (SM-3 IA) loaded
warships in Spain are among the prominent weapons encircling Russia, most
only minutes away from it strategic heartland. Secondly, the Obama regime
has mounted an all-out effort to secure and expand US military bases in
Central Asia among former Soviet republics. Thirdly, Washington, via NATO,
has launched major economic and military operations against Russia's major
trading partners in North Africa and the Middle East. The NATO war against
Libya, which ousted the Gadhafi regime, has paralyzed or nullified multi-billion
dollar Russian oil and gas investments, arms sales and substituted a NATO
puppet for the former Russia-friendly regime.
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- The UN-NATO economic sanctions and US-Israeli
clandestine terrorist activity aimed at Iran has undermined Russia's lucrative
billion-dollar nuclear trade and joint oil ventures. NATO, including Turkey,
backed by the Gulf monarchical dictatorships, has implemented harsh sanctions
and funded terrorist assaults on Syria, Russia's last remaining ally in
the region and where it has a sole naval facility (Tartus) on the Mediterranean
Sea. Russia's previous collaboration with NATO in weakening its own economic
and security position is a product of the monumental misreading of NATO
and especially Obama's imperial policies. Russian President Medvedev and
his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mistakenly assumed (like Gorbachev and
Yeltsin before them) that backing US-NATO policies against Russia's trading
partners would result in some sort of "reciprocity": US dismantling
its offensive "missile shield" on its frontiers and support for
Russia's admission into the World Trade Organization.
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- Medvedev, following his liberal pro-western
illusions, fell into line and backed US-Israeli sanctions against Iran,
believing the tales of a "nuclear weapons programs". Then Lavrov
fell for the NATO line of "no fly zones to protect Libyan civilian
lives" and voted in favor, only to feebly "protest", much
too late, that NATO was "exceeding its mandate" by bombing Libya
into the Middle Ages and installing a pro-NATO puppet regime of rogues
and fundamentalists. Finally when the US aimed a cleaver at Russia's heartland
by pushing ahead with an all-out effort to install missile launch sites
5 minutes by air from Moscow while organizing mass and armed assaults on
Syria, did the Medvedev-Lavrov duet awake from its stupor and oppose UN
sanctions. Medvedev threatened to abandon the nuclear missile reduction
treaty (START) and to place medium-range missiles with 5 minute launch-time
from Berlin, Paris and London.
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- Medvedev-Lavrov's policy of consolidation
and co-operation based on Obama's rhetoric of "resetting relations"
invited aggressive empire building: Each capitulation led to a further
aggression. As a result, Russia is surrounded by missiles on its western
frontier; it has suffered losses among its major trading partners in the
Middle East and faces US bases in southwest and Central Asia.
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- Belatedly Russian officials have moved to
replace the delusional Medvedev for the realist Putin, as next President.
This shift to a political realist has predictably evoked a wave of hostility
toward Putin in all the Western media. Obama's aggressive policy to isolate
Russia by undermining independent regimes has, however, not affected Russia's
status as a nuclear weapons power. It has only heightened tensions in
Europe and perhaps ended any future chance of peaceful nuclear weapons
reduction or efforts to secure a UN Security Council consensus on issues
of peaceful conflict resolution. Washington, under Obama-Clinton, has
turned Russia from a pliant client to a major adversary.
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- Putin looks to deepening and expanding ties
with the East, namely China, in the face of threats from the West. The
combination of Russian advanced weapons technology and energy resources
and Chinese dynamic manufacturing and industrial growth are more than a
match for crisis-ridden EU-USA economies wallowing in stagnation.
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- Obama's military confrontation toward Russia
will greatly prejudice access to Russian raw materials and definitively
foreclose any long-term strategic security agreement, which would be useful
in lowering the deficit and reviving the US economy.
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- Between Realism and Delusion: Obama's Strategic Realignment
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- Obama's recognition that the present and
future center of political and economic power is moving inexorably to Asia,
was a flash of political realism. After a lost decade of pouring hundreds
of billions of dollars in military adventures on the margins and periphery
of world politics, Washington has finally discovered that is not where
the fate of nations, especially Great Powers, will be decided, except in
a negative sense of bleeding resources over lost causes. Obama's
new realism and priorities apparently are now focused on Southeast and
Northeast Asia, where dynamic economies flourish, markets are growing at
a double digit rate, investors are ploughing tens of billions in productive
activity and trade is expanding at three times the rate of the US and the
EU.
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- But Obama's 'New Realism' is blighted by
entirely delusional assumptions, which undermine any serious effort to
realign US policy.
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- In the first place Obama's effort to 'enter'
into Asia is via a military build-up and not through a sharpening and upgrading
of US economic competitiveness. What does the US produce for the Asian
countries that will enhance its market share? Apart from arms, airplanes
and agriculture, the US has few competitive industries. The US would have
to comprehensively re-orient its economy, upgrade skilled labor, and transfer
billions from "security" and militarism to applied innovations.
But Obama works within the current military-Zionist-financial complex:
He knows no other and is incapable of breaking with it.
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- Secondly, Obama-Clinton operate under the
delusion that the US can exclude China or minimize its role in Asia, a
policy that is undercut by the huge and growing investment and presence
of all the major US multi-national corporations in China , who use it as
an export platform to Asia and the rest of the world.
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- The US military build-up and policy of intimidation
will only force China to downgrade its role as creditor financing the US
debt, a policy China can pursue because the US market, while still important,
is declining, as China expands its presence in its domestic, Asian, Latin
American and European markets.
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- What once appeared to be New Realism is now
revealed to be the recycling of Old Delusions: The notion that the US
can return to being the supreme Pacific Power it was after World War Two.
The US attempts to return to Pacific dominance under Obama-Clinton with
a crippled economy, with the overhang of an over-militarized economy, and
with major strategic handicaps: Over the past decade the United States
foreign policy has been at the beck and call of Israel's fifth column (the
Israel "lobby"). The entire US political class is devoid of common,
practical sense and national purpose. They are immersed in troglodyte
debates over "indefinite detentions" and "mass immigrant
expulsions". Worse, all are on the payrolls of private corporations
who sell in the US and invest in China.
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- Why would Obama abjure costly wars in the
unprofitable periphery and then promote the same military metaphysics at
the dynamic center of the world economic universe? Does Barack Obama and
his advisers believe he is the Second Coming of Admiral Commodore Perry,
whose 19th century warships and blockades forced Asia open to Western trade?
Does he believe that military alliances will be the first stage to a subsequent
period of privileged economic entry?
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- Does Obama believe that his regime can blockade
China, as Washington did to Japan in the lead up to World War Two? It's
too late. China is much more central to the world economy, too vital even
to the financing of the US debt, too bonded up with the Forbes Five Hundred
multi-national corporations. To provoke China, to even fantasize about
economic "exclusion" to bring down China, is to pursue policies
that will totally disrupt the world economy, first and foremost the US
economy!
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- Conclusion
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- Obama's 'crackpot realism', his shift from
wars in the Muslim world to military confrontation in Asia, has no intrinsic
worth and poses extraordinary extrinsic costs. The military methods and
economic goals are totally incompatible and beyond the capacity of the
US, as it is currently constituted. Washington's policies will not 'weaken'
Russia or China, even less intimidate them. Instead it will encourage
both to adopt more adversarial positions, making it less likely that they
lend a hand to Obama's sequential wars on behalf of Israel. Already Russia
has sent warships to its Syrian port, refused to support an arms embargo
against Syria and Iran and (in retrospect) criticized the NATO war against
Libya. China and Russia have far too many strategic ties with the world
economy to suffer any great losses from a series of US military outposts
and "exclusive" alliances. Russia can aim just as many deadly
nuclear missiles at the West as the US can mount from its bases in Eastern
Europe.
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- In other words, Obama's military escalation will not
change the nuclear balance of power, but will bring Russia and China into
a closer and deeper alliance. Gone are the days of Kissinger-Nixon's "divide
and conquer" strategy pitting US-Chinese trade agreements against
Russian arms. Washington has a totally exaggerated significance of the
current maritime spats between China and its neighbors. What unites them
in economic terms is far more important in the medium and long-run. China's
Asian economic ties will erode any tenuous military links to the US.
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- Obama's "crackpot realism", views
the world market through military lenses. Military arrogance toward Asia
has led to a rupture with Pakistan, its most compliant client regime in
South Asia. NATO deliberately slaughtered 24 Pakistani soldiers and thumbed
their nose at the Pakistani generals, while China and Russia condemned
the attack and gained influence.
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- In the end, the military and exclusionary
posture to China will fail. Washington will overplay its hand and frighten
its business-oriented erstwhile Asian partners, who only want to play-off
a US military presence to gain tactical economic advantage. They certainly
do not want a new US instigated 'Cold War' dividing and weakening the dynamic
intra-Asian trade and investment. Obama and his minions will quickly learn
that Asia's current leaders do not have permanent allies - only permanent
interests. In the final analysis, China figures prominently in configuring
a new Asia-centric world economy. Washington may claim to have a 'permanent
Pacific presence' but until it demonstrates it can take care of its "basic
business at home", like arranging its own finances and balancing its
current account deficits, the US Naval command may end up renting its naval
facilities to Asian exporters and shippers, transporting goods for them,
and protecting them by pursuing pirates, contrabandists and narco-traffickers.
Come to think about it, Obama might reduce the US trade deficit with Asia
by renting out the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits, instead of wasting
US taxpayer money bullying successful Asian economic powers.
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- James Petras latest book is: "The Arab Revolt and
the Imperialist Counterattack"
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- (Atlanta: Clarity Press 2011)
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- can be found on Amazon
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